Literature and Medicine: Volume 1

Offers an authoritative account of literature and medicine at a vital point in their emergence during the eighteenth century.

The first in a two-part volume offering an authoritative account of the relationship between literature and medicine during the eighteenth century. Leading scholars in the field provide a valuable overview of how these two diverse disciplines influenced and shaped each other throughout a period of radical change.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.