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31 views

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Uploaded by

YLNZ
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Kept from All Contagion

Kari Nixon

Published by State University of New York Press

Nixon, Kari.
Kept from All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century
Literature.
State University of New York Press, 2020.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/76827.

For additional information about this book


https://muse.jhu.edu/book/76827

[ Access provided at 26 Dec 2021 14:14 GMT from University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign Library ]
Acknowledgments

A version of chapter 1 was published in Journal for Early Modern Cultural


Studies in Spring 2014. Likewise, a version of chapter 2 was published in
Journal for Medical Humanities online in 2014 and in print in 2017.
Thank you to the Wellcome Library’s online and physical holdings,
and for their permission to use several images included in this book. I thank
also Scholastic, for their generous permission to reprint a page from their
magazine in this book.
I would like to acknowledge the support of SUNY Press as I went
through the publication process, as well as Pamela Gilbert, the series editor. I
am also grateful to the Sons of Norway for funding my research trips to Oslo
to work on parts of this project, as well as the later funding of Whitworth
University, which allowed my final trip to England in finishing this project.
I am forever grateful to the intellectual inspiration and guidance of my
mentors, Ross Murfin, Beth Newman, and Rajani Sudan, who undertook
the cultivation of a confused psych-school dropout and taught her the
wonders of literary analysis and the medical humanities. I don’t know that
there will ever be words to fully express the impact you’ve had on my life
in its deepest, intellectual understandings of the world—and because you
all know me, you know that this speechlessness itself is rare. My loss for
words of expression here is in fact the best indicator I can give of your
profound influence on “this heart which beats / so wild, so deep in us—to
know / whence our lives come and where they go.”
No (hu)man is an island, as I will argue for the next several hundred
pages, and I am no exception. The near-decade spent in penning this book
also covered a decade of marriage, in which my unfailingly loving partner
Daniel brainstormed ideas with me, read books alongside me, read over my
chapters, waited outside of London museums while I conducted research,

ix
x Acknowledgments

and stayed at home with an infant and a toddler while I went off to work
to contemplate the past. Our late-night chats about my ideas, in which he
traveled with me conceptually, have always been integral to my work. This
book wouldn’t exist without him.
To Betty and Mike: your support has always been more integral than
you’ll know. You never questioned my journey, and you’ve always been my
cheerleaders.
For teaching me that we’re all better off if we care about those around
us—even when we might not be obligated to—I thank my parents, Anne
and Kevin. The lessons about life and responsibility you taught me were
undoubtedly foundational to the way I look at the world, history, and
Victorian culture. Thank you also to my sister, Gracie, for teaching me the
beauty of fearless love.
To Florence-Estelle (Flora) and Zelda-Elizabeth (Libby), I have only
to quote Dickens:

You have been in every line I have ever read. . . . You have been
in every prospect I have ever seen since—on the river, on the
sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light,
in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the
streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy
that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones
of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not
more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands,
than your presence and influence have been to me, there and
everywhere, and will be.

Your wondrous verve has taught me the revivifying value of human


connection more than anything, at any price.

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