Literature & Medicine During the Eighteenth Century

First published in 1993, Literature & Medicine During the Eighteenth Century analyses the close interplay of medicine and literature by paying special attention to questions of body language and the representation of inner life. Although today, medicine and literature are widely seen as falling on different sides of the ‘two cultures’ divide, this was not so in the eighteenth century when doctors, scientists, writers, and artists formed a well-integrated educated elite. Locke, Smollett and Goldsmith were doctors, and physicians such as Erasmus Darwin doubled as poets. Written by leading historians of medicine and eighteenth-century literary critics, this book uncovers the interconnections between medical and psychological theory and ideas of taste, beauty, and genius. Its contributors explore the rich cultural milieu of the period and investigate the ways in which medicine itself contributed to informing a gendered discourse of the world. This book will be of interest to historians, literary scholars and medical historians.

List of Figures List of Contributors Introduction 1. Medicine and the Muses: an approach to literature and medicine G.S. Rousseau 2. William Harvey’s De motu cordis and the ‘Republick of Literature’ Robert A. Erickson 3. The Anatomy of Tristram Shandy Judith Hawley 4. Of logic and lycanthropy: Gulliver and the faculties of the mind Christopher Fox 5. ‘Mere productions of the brain’: interpreting dreams in Swift Michael DePorte 6. John Wilson’s satire of hermetic medicine Thomas Spaulding Willard 7. ‘A physic against death’: eternal life and the Enlightenment – gender and gerontology Marie Mulvey Roberts 8. Fat is fictional issue: the novel and the rise of weight-watching Pat Rogers 9. Flights into illness: some characters in Jane Austen Gloria Sybil Gross 10. The Satire on doctors in Hogarth’s graphic works Peter Wagner 11. ‘A club of little villains’: rhetoric, professional identity and medical pamphlet wars Anita Guerrini 12. Fanny Burney’s face, Madame D’ Arblay’s veil John Wiltshire 13. Generation and regeneration: reflections on the biological and ideological role of women in France (1786-96) Lynn Salkin Sbiroli Name index Subject index

Edited by Marie Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter