Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)
Cambridge University Press, 11/18/2004
EAN 9780521843348, ISBN10: 0521843340
Hardcover, 220 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm
Language: English
Although we have come to regard 'clinical' and 'romantic' as oppositional terms, romantic literature and clinical medicine were fed by the same cultural configurations. In the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, writers and doctors developed an interpretive method that negotiated between literary and scientific knowledge of the natural world. Literary writers produced potent myths that juxtaposed the natural and the supernatural, often disturbing the conventional dualist hierarchy of spirit over flesh. Clinicians developed the two-part history and physical examination, weighing the patient's narrative against the evidence of the body. Examining fiction by Mary Shelley, Carlyle, the Brontës and George Eliot, alongside biomedical lectures, textbooks and articles, Janis McLarren Caldwell demonstrates the similar ways of reading employed by nineteenth-century doctors and imaginative writers and reveals the complexities and creative exchanges of the relationship between literature and medicine.
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
Romantic materialism
2. Science and sympathy in Frankenstein
3. Natural supernaturalism in Thomas Carlyle and Richard Owen
4. Wuthering Heights and domestic medicine
the child's body and the book
5. Literalization in the novels of Charlotte Brontë
6. Charles Darwin and Romantic medicine
7. Middlemarch and the medical case report
the patient's narrative and the physical exam
Notes
Bibliography
Index.