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Medicine & Religion in America: a seminar exploring interrelations of medicine and religion in American culture.
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Analyses the historical & commercial origins of American culture of disposability as a product of hygienic individualism.
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Ruralution, Inc. advises rural individuals, communities, & companies expanding operations into urban areas, worldwide.
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Hygienic individualism explains American consumers' bacteriological rationalization of personal space in the 20th century.
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Landscapes of American Medicine: a seminar investigating medicine through categories of space, place, & geography.
MattGunterman.com
Matt Gunterman is a biomedical theorist and medical historian, specializing in the biosemiotics of clinical microbiology and medical bacteriology. His current work centers on the historical and commercial origins in the United States of a social theory that he designates as ‘hygienic individualism.’ Whereas scholars of American culture have conventionally analyzed individualism within its political, economic, or moral contexts, Gunterman’s research examines hygienic individualism as an ideological reaction to the bacteriological rationalization of individualized space.
His present project, The Uncommon Cup: A Treatise on God, Germs, and the Bacteriological Enlightenment of America, examines how the development of hygienic individualism at the turn of the twentieth century provoked the emergence of a culture of disposability among Americans. Hygienic individualism, Gunterman argues, changed Americans’ perception of space, and the culture of disposability was one technological response to those new perceptions.
