Liberating medicine, 1720-1835
By: edited by Tristanne Connolly and Steve Clark
Series: Enlightenment world : political and intellectual history of the long eighteenth century -- no. 10; Enlightenment world -- no. 10.
Publisher: Pickering & Chatto
Published: 2009
Place of publication: London; Brookfield, Vt
Language: eng
Number of pages: 317
ISBN-13: 9781851966325; 9781851966929
Subjects: Medicine in Literature; English literature; Enlightenment; History, 18th Century; History and criticism; Literatur; Medicine in literature; History, 19th Century; Literature and medicine; Social Conditions; Medizin (Motiv); History
Description: "During the eighteenth century medicine became an autonomous discipline and practice. Surgeons justified themselves as skilled practitioners and set themselves apart from the unspecialized, hack 'barber-surgeons' of early modernity. Medical artists proved themselves not merely mechanical reproducers but skilled masters of an identifiable and valuable genre. Occurring alongside these medical developments was the professionalization of the role of the writer, and the accompanying explosion in print culture and popular readership. The essays in this collection focus on a range of medical narratives: Daniel Defoe and Richard Mead on plague; John Brown's medicine as social paradigm; public perceptions of the King's mental illness. Private narratives cross over into the public sphere, blurring the line between doctor and patient as they share language and experience, as in Frances Burney's account of the mastectomy she underwent without anaesthetic, while Ignatius Sancho's letters suggest how the borders between enslavement and liberation, illness and health, can be contested."--Publisher's website.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 289-312) and index.