Body Language
Medicine and the Eighteenth-Century Comic Novel

Kathleen Tamayo Alves (Author)

9781684485710

Hardback, published 11 November 2025

200 pages
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.5 cm, 0.454 kg

Body Language examines the complex intersections of British eighteenth-century comic fiction and medical discourse. By engaging medical writings of renowned and widely-read physicians of the Enlightenment such as John Freind, Thomas Sydenham, Albrecht von Haller, John Whytt, and William Cullen, with novels of humor by Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, and Charlotte Lennox, Alves explains how medicine shaped comic language by dramatizing female-specific phenomena like menstruation, hysteria, nervous disorders, and pregnancy. In these novels, the medical belief that women are incapable of bodily self-regulation becomes an imperative for policing women’s bodies and highlights the enduring shortcomings of patriarchal systems. Ultimately, these comic representations offer a counternarrative of women’s bodies, agency, and selfhood, exposing masculine anxieties about the effectiveness of marriage to regulate women’s sexuality.

Introduction: Eighteenth-Century Medicine and Comic Representations of Women
1. Leaky Writings and Leaky Bodies in Henry Fielding’
s Shamela (1741) and Tobias Smollett’
s Humphry Clinker (1771)
2. Hysterical Language and Desiring Women in Henry Fielding’
s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749)
3. The Maternal Body and Obstetric Authority in Laurence Sterne’
s Tristram Shandy (1759) and Tobias Smollett’
s Peregrine Pickle (1751)
4. Romantic (Mis)Readings and Nervous Sympathy in Charlotte Lennox’
s The Female Quixote (1752)
Coda: Surgical Violence as a Tool of Masculine Dominance in Poor Things (2023)
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index