Literature & Medicine During the Eighteenth Century

Marie Mulvey Roberts, Roy Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032350394
• eBook ISBN: 9781000713190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

First published in 1993, Literature & Medicine During the Eighteenth Century analyses the close interplay of medicine and literature by paying special attention to questions of body language and the representation of inner life. Although today, medicine and literature are widely seen as falling on different sides of the 'two cultures' divide, this was not so in the eighteenth century when doctors, scientists, writers, and artists formed a well-integrated educated elite. Locke, Smollett and Goldsmith were doctors, and physicians such as Erasmus Darwin doubled as poets.

Written by leading historians of medicine and eighteenth-century literary critics, this book uncovers the interconnections between medical and psychological theory and ideas of taste, beauty, and genius. Its contributors explore the rich cultural milieu of the period and investigate the ways in which medicine itself contributed to informing a gendered discourse of the world. This book will be of interest to historians, literary scholars and medical historians.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Medicine and the Muses: an approach to literature and medicine
• 2. William Harvey’s De motu cordis and ‘The Republick of Literature’
• 3. The anatomy of Tristram Shandy
• 4. Of logic and lycanthropy: Gulliver and the faculties of the mind
• 5. ‘Mere productions of the brain’: interpreting dreams in Swift
• 6. John Wilson’s satire of hermetic medicine
• 7. ‘A physic against death’: eternal life and the Enlightenment—gender and gerontology
• 8. Fat is fictional issue: the novel and the rise of weight-watching
• 9. Flights into illness: some characters in Jane Austen
• 10. The satire on doctors in Hogarth’s graphic works
• 11. ‘A club of little villains’: rhetoric, professional identity and medical pamphlet wars
• 12. Fanny Burney’s face, Madame D’Arblay’s veil
• 13. Generation and regeneration: reflections on the biological and ideological role of women in France (1786–96)
• Name index
• Subject index