Myth and (mis)information

Constructing the medical professions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature and culture

Allan Ingram, Helen Williams, Clark Lawlor

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781526166821
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526166838
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism

This collection draws together original scholarship from international contributors on a range of aspects of professional and semi-professional medical work and its relations to British culture. It combines a diverse spectrum of scholarly approaches, from medical history to book history, exploring literary and scientific texts, such as satiric poetry, essays, anatomies, advertisements, and the novel, to shed light on the mythologisation and transmission of medical (mis)information through literature and popular culture. It analyses the persuasive and sometimes deceptive means by which myths, as well as information and beliefs, about medicine and the medical professions proliferated in English literary culture of this period, from early eighteenth-century household remedies to the late nineteenth-century concerns with vaccination that are still relevant today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 ‘To level those monstrous Blotches or Pustules’: skincare in Daniel Turner’s De Morbis Cutaneis (1714)
• 2 Dr John Arbuthnot’s literary treatment for false learning, pedantry and excess: from physic to metaphysics
• 3 ‘The very women read it’: medical self-fashioning, mythologies and (mis)information in George Cheyne MD’s medical writings
• 4 Studying in solitude: demythologising the masculine medical monopoly with Jane Barker’s Galesia and Tobias Smollett’s Sagely
• 5 ‘Take physic, Pomp’: imagining dog doctors in eighteenth-century Britain
• 6 ‘A man of common understanding’: venereal disease, myth and reading as a protective practice in eighteenth-century Britain
• 7 Sir Anthony Carlisle’s gothic (medical) intervention: carving the criminal body in The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey
• 8 Mislabelling and the medical printer-publisher: demystifying the ephemera of Elizabeth Rane Cox (1765–1841)
• 9 The uneasy relationship between traditional and orthodox medicine in the works of Elizabeth Gaskell
• 10 Medical men recommend them: branded medicines and the myth of the medical moral economy c.1876–80
• 11 Dissecting Venus: popular consumption of flap anatomies, 1890–1910
• 12 ‘You taught us that which you knew not to be the truth’: the anti-vaccination medical doctor in Henry Rider Haggard’s Doctor Therne (1898)
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index