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28 results

Page 1 of 2

  • Chapter 1 - ‘Mere Flesh and Blood’

  • from Part I - Literary Modes
  • Edited by Clark Lawlor, Northumbria University, Newcastle, Andrew Mangham, University of Reading
  • Book:
    Literature and Medicine
    Published online:
    03 June 2021
    Print publication:
    24 June 2021, pp 23-50

  • Summary

    This essay aims to show that medicine had a deep and dynamic relationship with poetry in the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. It uses Dr John Arbuthnot’s poetry to demonstrate how profoundly medical theories affected the idea of the human, and goes on analyse Alexander Pope’s ‘Cave of Spleen’ in The Rape of the Lock to demonstrate the complex effects medical theories and other discourses, including folklore and religion, create in a canonical, and highly gendered, poem of the early period. The essay describes the main medical theories of this ‘long’ century (humouralism, mechanism and (al)chemistry, the nerves and sensibility, vitalism and Brunonianism) and their uneven evolution, and analyses their effects on a variety of poets, including Anne Finch, Mark Akenside, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, and Percy Shelley. It also focuses on the ‘regimen’ poetry of physician-poets Edward Baynard and John Armstrong, arguing that all kinds of discourses are bound up with both poetry and medicine, and that poetry, even of the didactic kind, is not reducible to medical discourse, and is capable of intervening in and shaping medical debates and medical knowledge.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Clark Lawlor, Northumbria University, Newcastle, Andrew Mangham, University of Reading
  • Book:
    Literature and Medicine
    Published online:
    03 June 2021
    Print publication:
    24 June 2021, pp 1-20

  • Summary

    Literature and medicine is a very broad church indeed, even within the narrower confines of the long eighteenth century, that imperialistic concept covering the period 1660–1832, or thereabouts. Even imperialistic concepts have their uses, however, and this span of time allows us to think outside traditional literary history and incorporate the interaction of matters medical with literary genres and texts. Our volume begins with the slow demise of humoural theory and the foundation of the Royal Society, and takes us to the end of a period in which the profession of medicine was not compartmentalised and hived off into one of the ‘two cultures’ posited by C. P. Snow.

Literature and Medicine
  • The Nineteenth Century
  • Volume 2
  • Edited by Clark Lawlor
  • Andrew Mangham
  • Published online:
    04 June 2021
    Print publication:
    24 June 2021
  • Offering an authoritative account of the relationship between literature and medicine between approximately 1800 and 1900, this volume brings together leading scholars in the field to provide a valuable overview of how two dynamic fields influenced and shaped each during a period of revolutionary change. During the nineteenth century, medicine was being redefined as a subject in which experimental methodologies could transform the healing art, and was simultaneously branching off into new specialisms and subdivisions. Questions addressed in this volume include the influence of physics on poetry, the role of medical professionalism in fiction, the cultural and literary representation of sanitation, and the interdisciplinary nature of controversy and negligence. Along with its sister publication, Literature and Medicine in the Eighteenth Century, this volume offers a major critical overview of the study of literature and medicine.

Page 1 of 2