Literature and Medicine: Volume 1

The Eighteenth Century

Clark Lawlor, Andrew Mangham

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781108420860
• eBook ISBN: 9781108372763
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Literature and Medicine in the Long Eighteenth Century
• Part I Literary Modes
• Part II Psyche and Soma
• Part III Professional Identity and Culture
• Index