Literature and Medicine

This article challenges the view that Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) exploited or augmented the plague's horrors. It demonstrates that Defoe denounced writers who sensationalized plague and explores his use of A Journal to debunk terrifying accounts of the disease published during the Plague of Marseille (1720-22). Section one explores how Defoe's opposition to inciting fear was shaped by medical beliefs that fear increased susceptibility to disease and his observations about fear's socioeconomic repercussions...

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In the Consolation of Philosophy, the philosopher Boethius represents his literary self as imprisoned literally and metaphorically. Even while he is literally incarcerated, the text argues that his psychological dependency on the benefits of wealth, power, and fame represents a graver threat to his wellbeing. The allegorical Lady Philosophy acts as Boethius's interlocutor and medical practitioner as she guides him through a therapeutic inquiry designed to make him more consciously aware of ways that his dependency undermines his autonomous selfhood...

This essay examines two short stories by David Foster Wallace from his final collection, Oblivion. Both are narratives of violent events (a suicide in "Good Old Neon" and a school shooting in "The Soul is Not a Smithy"), and in each case the narrator comes into conflict with the medical authorities diagnosing them. Wallace's writing of this period has been identified by critic Thomas Tracey as "representations of trauma," a reading borne out by the stories' temporal fragmentation and narrative lacunae. I argue that these tropes of trauma writing are deployed ironically, and highlight instances in each story wherein trauma is undermined as an explanatory narrative of the protagonists' suffering...

Under the psychoanalytic gaze, interspecies affect is cast as a temporal distortion that renders people neurotic, belated, and even inhuman. In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner turns this clinical reasoning on its head as the hyper-vigilance of anxious characters constitutes an epistemic privilege that reorganizes the human sensorium and enables interspecies affiliation. Combining affect theory and equine behavior literature, I look at the influence of the novel's animal protagonist, Jewel's horse. Through him, Faulkner at once apprizes minority sensory experience and revises expectations of what being affected by animals can feel like...

Histories of bibliotherapy often emphasize the importance of the First World War in stimulating the development of bibliotherapeutic theory and practice. The word itself was used in a 1916 article by the American author Samuel McChord Crothers, while histories of bibliotherapy in the United Kingdom often foreground H. F. Brett-Smith's so-called "fever chart" of therapeutic books for treating shell-shocked soldiers. Despite this, however, we argue that a full account of wartime bibliotherapy (particularly the importance of British hospital libraries in its development) has yet to be told...

With careful attention to nineteenth-century race science's psychiatric discourses about slavery and insanity that led to the management and containment of African Americans in or on plantations, asylums, and society writ large, this article examines various themes, narrative sketches and intertextualities in Incidents that illustrate Harriet Jacobs's theoretical conceptions about the devastating mental harm caused by forms of violence that were integral to the practice of slavery vis-à-vis black women-sexualized violence, forced and controlled reproduction, separation from children between and within plantations, runaway attempts, witnessing violence, and hazardous labor conditions...

This essay explores Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith (1925) through the medical-ethical and ecological contingencies of U.S. tropical medicine during the early twentieth century. With an eye kept on the novel's well-known "St. Hubert " chapters, the essay queries the dangerous compromises that even the most well-intentioned medical professionals have made and can make in the name of scientific progress. The novel, I argue, organizes around and yet moves beyond the traditional outbreak narrative to unravel the various political, economic, and cultural strands of U...

Recent studies of fictionality within narrative theory have emphasized the permeability between global fictions and nonfictions. That is, global nonfictions often deploy elements of local fictionality without compromising their global commitments. This paper seeks to contribute to this ongoing exploration by arguing that nonfictional illness narratives deploy fictionality to enrich their referential content. I examine Brian Fies' graphic memoir Mom's Cancer, emphasizing how the text utilizes fictionality to address the complicated question of how to narrate the illness experience of others...

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Vegetarian restaurants were part of the city landscape of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. Most meat-free eateries were located in London, numbering around thirty by 1890, but similar establishments could also be found in Birmingham, Glasgow and Manchester. Drawing on fictional representations, newspaper articles, advertisements and health reform literature, this article explores the cultural meanings attached to vegetarian dining in this period. Following the establishment of the first Vegetarian Society in 1847, the meat-free cause was embraced as part of a broader progressive scene that encompassed temperance and labor rights, pacifism and socialism...

"The student who dives deep into the mysteries that enshrine Truth . . . will tell of her beauties, and proclaim to those who have ears to hear the words of healing." So wrote English cleric and spiritualist W. Stainton Moses in his Spirit Teachings (1883)-or, if Moses is to be believed, so wrote the spirit "Imperator," who, promising spiritual and bodily edification, enlisted Moses as his earthly amanuensis. Treating purportedly real spirit writings like those transcribed by Moses and the discourses of their reception in occultism, psychical research, and literature, this paper examines the phenomenon of automatic writing, also called spirit writing, passive writing, or psychography, as an evolving means of wellness and, later, a source of medical prescription from the 1850s through the 1890s...

In both the U.S. and Britain, Dr. Lydia Fowler was a leader in women's political and health reform organizations and temperance associations. Her publications, which targeted a popular audience of women and children, included self-help medical lectures and guides, a book of poetry, and the temperance novel Nora: The Lost and Redeemed (1853). Nora represents the broader political fight surrounding temperance, but also the medical arguments about alcohol abuse itself. Fowler's phrenological writings, including Nora, served as a bridge between the nineteenth-century construction of "intemperance" as a moral failing and the disease model of "alcoholism" that came to dominate medicine in the early twentieth century...

Britain's Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) mandated the use of medical detention and speculum exams to manage the bodies of "common prostitutes" and thereby reduce sexually transmitted diseases among enlisted men. Repeal advocates challenged the gendered power structure of the Acts but also used melodramatic frameworks to produce a broader critique of nineteenth-century Britain's centralizing medical orthodoxy and to argue for unregulated traditional approaches to medicine. Across a variety of repeal speeches and documents, advocates idealized alternative health practices in order to challenge institutionalized modern medicine and the governmental interests that extended its authority...

This essay examines a neglected archive of hydropathic memoirs to reconstruct the lay experience of seeking medical agency in the full-fledged alternative medical market in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Two main texts under examination are Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Confessions of a Water Patient (1845) and J. Leech's Three Weeks between Wet Sheets; the Diary and Doings of a Moist Visitor to Malvern (1851). While Bulwer-Lytton's encomium for hydropathy features an invalid subject's journey toward a holistic sense of self-command, Leech's satire undermines this empowerment by exposing the anxieties of navigating the market as a medical consumer...

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