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.

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

About the Author
Clark Lawlor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at Northumbria University. He is Principle Investigator for the Leverhulme Trust Major Projects Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, ca. 1660-1832, and Writing Doctors: Representation and Medical Personality ca. 1660-1832. His monographs include Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (2006) and From Melancholia to Prozac: a History of Depression (2012). Andrew Mangham is Professor of Victorian Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Reading. He is the author of Violent Women and Sensation Fiction (2007), Dickens's Forensic Realism (2016) and The Science of Starving (2020). He has edited the Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction (2013), The Female Body in Medicine and Literature (2011) and The Male Body in Medicine and Literature (2018).

Reviews
'... a major critical overview of the interaction of literature and medicine across an extended period of time in which new challenges to public health received their most widespread coverage and interpretation in popular literature ... Recommended.' D. Pesta, Choice Connect



Book Information
ISBN 9781108420860
Author Clark Lawlor
Format Hardback
Page Count 280
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 560g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 156mm * 21mm