Literature and Medicine: Volume 1
The Eighteenth Century

Offers an authoritative account of literature and medicine at a vital point in their emergence during the eighteenth century.

Clark Lawlor (Edited by), Andrew Mangham (Edited by)

9781108420860, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 June 2021

280 pages
23.5 x 15.6 x 2.1 cm, 0.56 kg

'… a major critical overview of the interaction of literature and medicine across an extended period of time in which new challenges to public health received their most widespread coverage and interpretation in popular literature … Recommended.' D. Pesta, Choice Connect

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.

Introduction: Literature and medicine in the long eighteenth century Clark Lawlor
Part I. Literary Modes: 1. 'Mere Flesh and Blood': Poetry, Genre and Disease Clark Lawlor
2. Jane Barker, medical discourse, and the origins of the novel Heather Meek
3. Imaginary invalids: The symptom and the stage from the restoration to the romantics Roberta Barker
Part II. Psyche and Soma: 4. Mental illness: Locking and unlocking the stereotypes Allan Ingram
5. From Hypo to Bile: The rise and progress of biliousness in the long eighteenth century Hisao Ishizuka
6. Metaphors of infectious disease in eighteenth-century literature: Complex comparatives in Daniel Defoe's 'A Journal of the Plague Year' (1722) Noelle Dückmann-Gallagher
7. Only connect: Romantic nerves, pleasure, aesthetics and sexuality Richard C. Sha
Part III. Professional Identity and Culture: 8. Physician-authors, predisciplinarity and predatory writing: John Polidori Michelle Faubert
9. 'The Compleat, Common Form': Disability and the literature of the British enlightenment Chris Gabbard
10. Anatomy and interiority: Medicine, politics and identity in the long eighteenth century Corinna Wagner.

Subject Areas: Educational: English literature [YQE], Medicine: general issues [MB], History of ideas [JFCX]