Liberating Medicine, 1720–1835

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Editors: Tristanne Connolly and Steve Clark

The Enlightenment World

During the eighteenth century medicine became an autonomous discipline and practice. Surgeons justified themselves as skilled practitioners and set themselves apart from the unspecialized, hack 'barber-surgeons' of early modernity. Medical artists proved themselves not merely mechanical reproducers but skilled masters of an identifiable and valuable genre. Occurring alongside these medical developments was the professionalization of the role of the writer, and the accompanying explosion in print culture and popular readership. The essays in this collection focus on a range of medical narratives: Daniel Defoe and Richard Mead on plague; John Brown's medicine as social paradigm; public perceptions of the King's mental illness. Private narratives cross over into the public sphere, blurring the line between doctor and patient as they share language and experience, as in Frances Burney's account of the mastectomy she underwent without anaesthetic, while Ignatius Sancho's letters suggest how the borders between enslavement and liberation, illness and health, can be contested.

Sample pages

• Liberating Medicine: Introduction
• Liberating Medicine: Index

Readership

Literature, History of Medicine, Romanticism

Contents

Introduction

Part I: Spiritual Sickness and Hypochondria
1 Liberation and Consumption: Disease, imperialism, and the conversion of the heathen in Felicia Hemans, Sigourney and Stowe – Clark Lawlor
2 Freedom, Health and Hypochondria in Ignatius Sancho's Letters – George C Grinnell
3 Uncle-Tommery’: Slavery and Romantic Medicine in Thomas Carlyle and Harriet Beecher Stowe – Gavin Budge

Part II: Health and Emancipation
4 Due Preparations: Defoe, Dr Mead, and the Threat of Plague – Wayne Wild
5 An Organic Body Politic: Wollstonecraft's Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and John Brown's Idea of Health – Kimiyo Ogawa
6 Blake, Liberation and Medicine – Richard C Sha
7 Untying the Web of Urizen: William Blake, Nervous Medicine, and the Culture of Feeling – Hisao Ishizuka

Part III: Madness
8 ”In sickness, despair, and in agony”: Imagining the King's Illness, 1788-89 – David Chandler
9 Disembodied Souls and Exemplary Narratives: James Hogg and Popular Medical Literature – Megan Coyer
10 Idiotic Associations: Wordsworth and Nineteenth-Century Discourses on Idiocy – Molly Desjardins

Part IV: Anatomized and Aestheticized Bodies
11 Authority and Imposture: William Godwin and the Animal Magnetists – Sharon Ruston
12 George Stubbs' Dissection of the Horse and the Expressiveness of "Facsimiles" – Aris Sarafianos
13 In Submission: Frances Burney's Patient Narrative – James Robert Allard
14 The Surprising Success of Dr Armstrong: Love and Economy in the Eighteenth Century – Susan Matthews

Part V: Birth
15 Anna Barbauld's "To a Little Invisible Being...": Maternity in Poetry and Medicine – Tristanne Connolly
16 "Some Heart Once Pregnant with Celestial Fire": Maternal Elegy in Gray and Barbauld – Steve Clark

Related titles

• Blake, Gender and Culture
• Depression and Melancholy, 1660–1800
• Old Age and Disease in Early Modern Medicine
• A Political Biography of Frances Burney
• Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists

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