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Offers an authoritative account of literature and medicine at a vital point in their emergence during the nineteenth-century.
Although we have come to regard 'clinical' and 'romantic' as oppositional terms, romantic literature and clinical medicine were fed by the same cultural configurations. In the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, writers and doctors developed an interpretive method that negotiated between literary and scientific knowledge of the natural world. Literary writers produced potent myths that juxtaposed the natural and the supernatural, often disturbing the conventional dualist hierarchy of spirit over flesh. Clinicians developed the two-part history and physical examination, weighing the patient's narrative against the evidence of the body. Examining fiction by Mary Shelley, Carlyle, the Brontës and George Eliot, alongside biomedical lectures, textbooks and articles, Janis McLarren Caldwell demonstrates the similar ways of reading employed by nineteenth-century doctors and imaginative writers and reveals the complexities and creative exchanges of the relationship between literature and medicine.
First published in 1993, Literature & Medicine During the Eighteenth Century analyses the close interplay of medicine and literature by paying special attention to questions of body language and the representation of inner life. Although today, medicine and literature are widely seen as falling on different sides of the ‘two cultures’ divide, this was not so in the eighteenth century when doctors, scientists, writers, and artists formed a well-integrated educated elite. Locke, Smollett and Goldsmith were doctors, and physicians such as Erasmus Darwin doubled as poets. Written by leading historians of medicine and eighteenth-century literary critics, this book uncovers the interconnections between medical and psychological theory and ideas of taste, beauty, and genius. Its contributors explore the rich cultural milieu of the period and investigate the ways in which medicine itself contributed to informing a gendered discourse of the world. This book will be of interest to historians, literary scholars and medical historians.
The experiences of health and illness, death and dying, the normal and the pathological have always been an integral part of literary texts. This volume considers how the two dynamic fields of medicine and literature have crossed over, and how they have developed alongside one another. It asks how medicine, as both science and practice, shapes the representation of illness and transforms literary form. It considers how literary texts across genres and languages of disease have put forward specific conceptions of medicine and impacted its practice. Taking into account the global, multilingual and multicultural contexts, this volume systematically outlines and addresses this double-sidedness of the literature-medicine connection. Literature and Medicine covers a broad spectrum of conceptual, thematic, theoretical, and methodological approaches that provide a solid foundation for understanding a vibrant interdisciplinary field.
Offers an authoritative account of literature and medicine at a vital point in their emergence during the eighteenth century.
Offering an authoritative and timely account of the relationship between literature and medicine in the eighteenth century and Romantic period, a time when most diseases had no cure, this collection provides a valuable overview of how two dynamic fields influenced and shaped one another. Covering a period in which both medicine and literature underwent frequent and sometimes radical change, the volume examines the complex mutual construction of these two fields via various perspectives: disability, gender, race, rank, sexuality, the global and colonial, politics, ethics, and the visual. Diseases, fashionable and otherwise, such as Defoe's representation of the plague, feature strongly, as authors argue for the role literary genres play in affecting people's experience of physical and mental illness (and health) across the volume. Along with its sister publication, Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century, this volume offers a major critical overview of the study of literature and medicine.
Medicine and literary studies are often thematically aligned, since the former can be understood as an interpretive science. Literary texts across all genres and time periods deal with medical issues portraying illness, patients suffering and recovering, or doctors at work, thus pointing towards a deep-seated interest in the human condition. Enveloping the growing interdisciplinary field of medical humanities this book examines the connections between medicine and fictional and non-fictional literature from the Early Modern period to the most recent present from literary, medical and cultural studies perspectives. Alexandra Lembert-Heidenreich is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Leipzig. Jarmila Mildorf teaches English language, literature and culture at the University of Paderborn.
In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press investigates how Romantic periodicals cultivated innovative literary forms, ideologies and discourses that reflected and shaped medical culture in the nineteenth century. It examines several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential literary periodical of the time, and draws upon extensive archival and bibliographical research to reclaim these previously neglected medico-literary figures. Situating their work in relation to developments in medical and periodical culture, Megan Coyer's book advances our understanding of how the nineteenth-century periodical press cross-fertilised medical and literary ideas.
The first major study of the relationship between Scottish Romanticism and medical culture In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press investigates how Romantic periodicals cultivated innovative literary forms, ideologies and discourses that reflected and shaped medical culture in the nineteenth century. It examines several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine , the most influential literary periodical of the time, and draws upon extensive archival and bibliographical research to...
If moods are as contagious as colds, and wickedness as debilitating as a bad diet, inquiries into assorted discourses in 18th-century France still have much to tell. Author Anne Vila shows that multiple junctures between the body and the mind promoted a steady commerce of speculation and discussion between science and the social salons of the time. 9 illustrations.