Edited by Clark Lawlor and Andrew Mangham, Literature and Medicine: The Eighteenth Century, the first of a two-volume project surveying the co-constitution of literature and medicine during the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focuses specifically on the transitional historical period between 1660 and 1832 that witnessed the decline of humoral theory and radical transformations in the medical profession as an institution and as a set of practices. The collection joins other recent scholarship in the fields of global eighteenth-century studies, literature and science, and critical health humanities in emphasizing the “fertile interchange of the literary and scientific” (1) during a cultural moment that not only refuses traditional literary periodization but also frequently blurs the boundaries between what gets to be called literature and medicine. As an accessible snapshot of state of the field that also showcases new, cutting-edge work, Literature and Medicine: The Eighteenth Century takes stock of how both the literary and the medical have expanded as conceptual categories throughout eighteenth-century studies in ways that have productively defamiliarized these terms. The literary is no longer reducible to novels or even case histories but instead indexes a much larger “spectrum of ‘literariness’” (2) with a broad archive encompassing life writing, letters, recipe books, and marginalia, while the medical has come to exceed just the work of physicians who also happened to be men of letters. The collection's contributors urgently confront the field's limited engagements with issues of minoritized identity, particularly along the lines of disability, gender, race, and class toward a more intersectional vision of the eighteenth century that is more historically messy and rich.
The collection is organized into three parts, interrelated areas of inquiry: “Literary Modes,” “Psyche and Soma,” and “Professional Identity and Culture.” To be read as individual essays or as a set of thematic narratives, these sections offer methodological and evidential models for how to do literature and medicine in the period. The first section responds to the field's historical tendency to elide formal concerns in efforts to deploy literature as “‘evidence’ of ‘real’ medical phenomena” rather than examine it on its own terms (4). Contributors in this section take up more recent claims in literature and medicine regarding literature as medical experimentation, where the form of literature is crucial to understanding how it participates in knowledge production. For example, Lawlor examines “minor” medical poets who composed “Regimen” poetry to make complex theories of the body accessible to general readers (5). By taking seriously poetic form and its capacity to transmit and transform medical thinking, Lawlor emphasizes how literature revolutionized medicine and definitions of the human more broadly by making imaginable what would later become theories of sensibility and nervousness. Like Lawlor, Roberta Barker recovers another deeply understudied genre: medical satire on the stage and its parody of humoral types. The theater, Barker contends, sensationalized the very tensions regarding authenticity and medical symptoms, and gave rise to what has become a mainstay of contemporary medical and health humanities: literature has therapeutic effects when used properly. The authors of essays in this first section insist on the interpretive value of literary formalism to make sense of how literature was itself “a form of intervention in the progress of science, and helped both expand and limit the possibilities of scientific endeavour because it could imagine new modes of experiment and reality, and imagine—even warn against—the consequences of scientific developments” (4).
The contributors to the second section revisit the intimate relationship between mind and body in eighteenth-century literature and medical theory. Hardly dualistic, the connections between mind and body became increasingly reinforced via literature, especially in the case of madness. Both Allan Ingram and Hisao Ishizuka take madness as a case study for considering how “literature could subvert medical and popular representations of madness as well as reinforce them” (8). Ingram's reading of Anne Finch's “A Pindaric Ode on the Spleen” (1701) in relation to Thomas Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) and Ishizuka's examination of John Abernethy's “My Book” underscore just how literary works shaped the identities of sick and disabled people by making invisible diseases fashionable and even desirable as cultural commodities. Such a trend would culminate in later Romantic notions of sex and pleasure, which Richard Sha argues, via the case of dermatologist Thomas Bateman's commonplace books, centers pleasure and its relationship “to melancholy and wider pathologies” (11). The embodied consequences of figurative language, namely metaphor as a kind of pleasure—as exemplified by Noelle Gallagher's take on representations of plague in Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1721)—are not so reductively negative but in fact full of contradiction and potential for unexpected readerly identifications with language that helps make sense of their shifting embodied experiences.
The final essays of the collection interrogate the construction of the medical practitioner and medical culture at a “predisciplinary” moment prior to the development of the hard sciences and highly specialized fields of medical practice (11). D. Christopher Gabbard's contribution importantly recovers the centrality of disability in studies of eighteenth-century literature and medicine by unpacking how discourses of physiognomy gave rise to ableist frameworks of the “compleat, common form” (226) that would be both reinforced and subverted by literatures of the period. As do the other contributors discussing madness, Gabbard considers how canonical literary figures like Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and Alexander Pope each attempted to undermine ableist objectification and stereotyping by playing with the developing discourses of sensibility and sentimentality. The Enlightenment naturalization of disability and deformity as human lack or bodily weakness would be, as Corinna Wagner traces, reinforced by later eighteenth-century anatomy, which essentialized bodies in terms race and class to deeply political effect. Medicine's implication within these longer histories of discrimination and stigma remains a vital area of future inquiry.
Literature and Medicine: The Eighteenth Century is a deeply dialogic volume of essays that not only speaks back to a field with an extensive critical tradition but enables new conversations with new works both primary and secondary and new fields. The collection exemplifies a long-standing self-reflexivity in the field of literature and medicine whose practitioners consistently interrogate the field's critical terms and assumptions. Rather than claiming to be comprehensive or complete, authors of the essays that comprise this collection model a scholarly humility and openness that distinguishes literature and medicine as a field willing to grapple with its own limitations.
