Vital Signs

Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Lawrence Rothfield

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 1994
• Print ISBN: 9780691029542, 9780691068961
• eBook ISBN: 9781400820689
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Vital Signs offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. Rejecting theories that equate realism with representation, Lawrence Rothfield argues that literary history forms a subset of the history of discourses and their attendant practices. He shows how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, and models of professional authority. He also traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter One: Medicine and Mimesis: The Contours of a Configuration
• Chapter Two: Disarticulating Madame Bovary: Flaubert and the Medicalization of the Real
• Chapter Three: Paradigms and Professionalism: Balzacian Realism in Discursive Context
• Chapter Four: “A New Organ of Knowledge”: Medical Organicism and the Limits of Realism in Middlemarch
• Chapter Five: On the Realism/Naturalism Distinction: Some Archaeological Considerations
• Chapter Six: From Diagnosis to Deduction: Sherlock Holmes and the Perversion of Realism
• Chapter Seven The Pathological Perspective: Clinical Realism’s Decline and the Emergence of Modernist Counter-Discourse
• Epilogue: Toward a New Historicist Methodology
• Notes
• Index