Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain
From Mary Shelley to George Eliot

Janis McLarren Caldwell investigates the impact of medical science and the Romantic interest in material culture on nineteenth-century literature.

Janis McLarren Caldwell (Author)

9780521843348, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 November 2004

220 pages
23.5 x 16.1 x 1.8 cm, 0.48 kg

Review of the hardback: '… it contains some useful work on an impressive array of primary sources. The influence of medicine and medical theory on Romantic and Victorian writers remains insufficiently acknowledged. Janis McLarren Caldwell restores that influence to its rightful place.' The Times Literary Supplement

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.

Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Romantic materialism
2. Science and sympathy in Frankenstein
3. Natural supernaturalism in Thomas Carlyle and Richard Owen
4. Wuthering Heights and domestic medicine: the child's body and the book
5. Literalization in the novels of Charlotte Brontë
6. Charles Darwin and Romantic medicine
7. Middlemarch and the medical case report: the patient's narrative and the physical exam
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History of medicine [MBX], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]