Subjects
Liberating Medicine, 1720–1835
Editors: Tristanne Connolly and Steve Clark
The Enlightenment World
978 1 85196 632 5: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 692 9
This edited collection presents seventeen new essays by established and up-and-coming international authors on the relationship between medicine and literature during the Enlightenment. The edition represents the breadth of scholarship in the field since the millennium, providing orientation for scholars new to the area, and for specialists, showcasing current inquiry.
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.
Readership
Literature, History of Medicine, Romanticism
Contents
Tristanne Connolly and Steve Clark, 'Introduction'
Clark Lawlor, ‘Liberation and Consumption: Disease, imperialism, and the conversion of the heathen in Felicia Hemans' 'Edith. A Tale of the Woods', Lydia Sigourney's 'Indian Girl's Burial', and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin’
George Grinnell, ‘Freedom, Health and Hypochondria in Ignatius Sancho's Letters’
Gavin Budge, ‘Uncle-Tommery’: Slavery and Romantic Medicine in Thomas Carlyle and Harriet Beecher Stowe’
Wayne Wild, ‘Due Preparations: Defoe, Dr. Mead, and the Threat of Plague’
Kimiyo Ogawa, ‘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’
Richard Sha, ‘Blake, Liberation and Medicine’
Hisao Ishizuka, ‘Untying the Web of Urizen: William Blake, Nervous Medicine, and the Culture of Feeling’
David Chandler, '”In sickness, despair, and in agony”: Imagining the King's Illness, 1788-89’
Megan Coyer, ‘Disembodied Souls and Exemplary Narratives: James Hogg and Popular Medical Literature’
Molly Desjardins, ‘Idiotic Associations: Wordsworth and Nineteenth-Century Discourses on Idiocy’
Sharon Ruston, ‘Authority and Imposture: William Godwin and the Animal Magnetists’
Aris Sarafianos, ‘The Expressiveness of 'Facsimiles': George Stubbs' Dissection of the Horse and the Sublime Genealogies of Romanticism’
Susan Matthews, ‘The Surprising Success of Dr Armstrong: Love and Economy in the Eighteenth Century’
James Allard, ‘In Submission: Frances Burney's Patient Narrative’
Tristanne Connolly, ‘Anna Barbauld's 'To a Little Invisible Being...': Maternity in Poetry and Medicine’
Steve Clark, '”Some Heart once pregnant with celestial Fire”: Maternal Elegy in Gray and Barbauld’