Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660-1820

Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660-1820

Author: David Shuttleton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-05-17

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 052187209X

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Smallpox was a much feared disease until modern times, responsible for many deaths worldwide and reaching epidemic proportions amongst the British population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is the first substantial critical study of the literary representation of the disease and its victims between the Restoration and the development of inoculation against smallpox around 1800. David Shuttleton draws upon a wide range of canonical texts including works by Dryden, Johnson, Steele, Goldsmith and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the latter having experimented with vaccination against smallpox. He reads these texts alongside medical treatises and the rare, but moving writings of smallpox survivors, showing how medical and imaginative writers developed a shared tradition of figurative tropes, myths and metaphors. This fascinating study uncovers the cultural impact of smallpox, and the different ways writers found to come to terms with the terror of disease and death.


Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture

Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture

Author: Sandra Dinter

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-03-15

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 3031170202

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Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture analyses the cultural and literary histories of medicine and mobility as entangled processes whose discourses and practices constituted, influenced, and transformed each other. Presenting case studies of novels, poetry, travel narratives, diaries, ship magazines, skin care manuals, asylum records, press reports, and various other sources, its chapters identify and discuss diverse literary, historical, and cultural texts, contexts, and modes in which medicine and mobility intersected in nineteenth-century Britain, its empire, and beyond, whereby they illustrate how the paradigms of mobility studies and the medical humanities can complement each other.


Get Well Soon

Get Well Soon

Author: Jennifer Wright

Publisher: Henry Holt

Published: 2017-02-07

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1627797467

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Examines "the gruesome, morbid details of some of the worst plagues in human history, as well as stories of the heroic figures who fought to ease their suffering. With her signature mix of ... research and ... storytelling, and not a little dark humor, Jennifer Wright explores history's most gripping and deadly outbreaks"--


John Donne’s Language of Disease

John Donne’s Language of Disease

Author: Alison Bumke

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-29

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 1000870669

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John Donne’s Language of Disease reveals the influence of medical knowledge – a rapidly changing field in early modern England – on the poetry and prose of John Donne (1572–1631). This knowledge played a crucial role in shaping how Donne understood his everyday experiences, and how he conveyed those experiences in his work. Examining a wide range of his texts through the lens of medical history, this study contends that Donne was both a product of his period and a remarkable exception to it. He used medical language in unexpected and striking ways that made his ideas resonate with his original audience and that still illuminate his ideas for readers today.


Before Blackwood's

Before Blackwood's

Author: Alex Benchimol

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1317316959

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This collection of essays is the result of a major conference focusing specifically on the role of Scotland’s print culture in shaping the literature and politics of the long eighteenth century. In contrast to previous studies, this work treats Blackwood’s Magazine as the culmination of a long tradition rather than a starting point.


Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire

Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire

Author: Jessica Howell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1108484689

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Study of malaria in literature and culture illuminates the legacies of nineteenth-century colonial medicine within narratives of illness.


The Course of God’s Providence

The Course of God’s Providence

Author: Philippa Koch

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1479806722

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Shows that a religious understanding of illness and health persisted well into post-Enlightenment early America The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the power of narrative during times of sickness and disease. As Americans strive to find meaning amid upheaval and loss, some consider the nature of God’s will. Early American Protestants experienced similar struggles as they attempted to interpret the diseases of their time. In this groundbreaking work, Philippa Koch explores the doctrine of providence—a belief in a divine plan for the world—and its manifestations in eighteenth-century America, from its origins as a consoling response to sickness to how it informed the practices of Protestant activity in the Atlantic world. Drawing on pastoral manuals, manuscript memoirs, journals, and letters, as well as medical treatises, epidemic narratives, and midwifery manuals, Koch shows how Protestant teachings around providence shaped the lives of believers even as the Enlightenment seemed to portend a more secular approach to the world and the human body. Their commitment to providence prompted, in fact, early Americans’ active engagement with the medical developments of their time, encouraging them to see modern science and medicine as divinely bestowed missionary tools for helping others. Indeed, the book shows that the ways in which the colonial world thought about questions of God’s will in sickness and health help to illuminate the continuing power of Protestant ideas and practices in American society today.


Transfusion

Transfusion

Author: Ann Louise Kibbie

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2019-09-26

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 0813943140

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"England may with justice claim to be the native land of transfusion," wrote one European physician in 1877, acknowledging Great Britain’s crucial role in developing and promoting human-to-human transfusion as treatment for life-threatening blood loss. As news of this revolutionary medical technique spread from professional publications to popular journals and newspapers, the operation invaded the Victorian imagination. Transfusion is the first extended study of this intersection between medical and literary history. It examines the medical discourse that surrounded the real nineteenth-century practice of transfusion, which focused on women suffering from uterine hemorrhage, alongside literary works that exploited the operation’s sentimental, satirical, sensational, and gothic potentials. In the eighteenth century, the term "transfusion" was used to figure aesthetic and religious inspiration as well as erotic and romantic commingling—associations that persisted into the nineteenth century and informed attitudes toward the medical practice of blood transfer and the cultural conception of sympathetic exchange. Exploring transfusion’s role in canonical works such as Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau and Stoker’s Dracula, as well as a surprising array of lesser-known short stories and novels, Kibbie demonstrates the tangled, mutually informing relationship between science and culture. This innovative study traces the creation of a new fluid economy between persons, one that could be seen to forge new forms of intimacy between donors and recipients or to threaten the very idea of personal identity.


Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England

Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England

Author: Mary Wilson Carpenter

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2009-11-19

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 031306542X

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This work offers a social and cultural history of Victorian medicine "from below," as experienced by ordinary practitioners and patients, often described in their own words. Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England is a human story of medicine in 19th-century England. It's a story of how a diverse and competitive assortment of apothecary apprentices, surgeons who learned their trade by doing, and physicians schooled in ancient Greek medicine but lacking in any actual experience with patients, was gradually formed into a medical profession with uniform standards of education and qualification. It's a story of how medical men struggled with "new" diseases such as cholera and "old" ones known for centuries, such as tuberculosis, syphilis, and smallpox, largely in the absence of effective drugs or treatments, and so were often reduced to standing helplessly by as their patients died. It's a story of how surgeons, empowered first by anesthesia and later by antiseptic technique, vastly expanded the field of surgery—sometimes with major benefits for patients, but sometimes with disastrous results. Above all, it's a story of how gender and class ideology dominated both practitioners and patients. Women were stridently excluded from medical education and practice of any kind until the end of the century, but were hailed into the new field of nursing, which was felt to be "natural" to the gentler sex. Only the poor were admitted to hospitals until the last decades of the century, and while they often received compassionate care, they were also treated as "cases" of disease and experimented upon with freedom. Yet because medical knowledge was growing by leaps and bounds, Victorians were fascinated with this new field and wrote novels, poetry, essays, letters, and diaries, which illuminate their experience of health and disease for us. Newly developed techniques of photography, as well as improved print illustrations, help us to picture this fascinating world. This vivid history of Victorian medicine is enriched with many literary examples and visual images drawn from the period.