Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy

Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy PDF Author: Anna Gasperini
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 303010916X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This book investigates the relationship between the fascinating and misunderstood penny blood, early Victorian popular fiction for the working class, and Victorian anatomy. In 1832, the controversial Anatomy Act sanctioned the use of the body of the pauper for teaching dissection to medical students, deeply affecting the Victorian poor. The ensuing decade, such famous penny bloods as Manuscripts from the Diary of a Physician, Varney the Vampyre, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London addressed issues of medical ethics, social power, and bodily agency. Challenging traditional views of penny bloods as a lowlier, un-readable genre, this book rereads these four narratives in the light of the 1832 Anatomy Act, putting them in dialogue with different popular artistic forms and literary genres, as well as with the spaces of death and dissection in Victorian London, exploring their role as channels for circulating discourses about anatomy and ethics among the Victorian poor.

Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy

Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy PDF Author: Anna Gasperini
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 303010916X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book investigates the relationship between the fascinating and misunderstood penny blood, early Victorian popular fiction for the working class, and Victorian anatomy. In 1832, the controversial Anatomy Act sanctioned the use of the body of the pauper for teaching dissection to medical students, deeply affecting the Victorian poor. The ensuing decade, such famous penny bloods as Manuscripts from the Diary of a Physician, Varney the Vampyre, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London addressed issues of medical ethics, social power, and bodily agency. Challenging traditional views of penny bloods as a lowlier, un-readable genre, this book rereads these four narratives in the light of the 1832 Anatomy Act, putting them in dialogue with different popular artistic forms and literary genres, as well as with the spaces of death and dissection in Victorian London, exploring their role as channels for circulating discourses about anatomy and ethics among the Victorian poor.

A Traffic of Dead Bodies

A Traffic of Dead Bodies PDF Author: Michael Sappol
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691059259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
A Traffic of Dead Bodies enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers who resisted and exploited anatomy to articulate their own social identities and visions. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the American medical profession: a proliferation of practitioners, journals, organizations, sects, and schools. Anatomy lay at the heart of the medical curriculum, allowing American medicine to invest itself with the authority of European science. Anatomists crossed the boundary between life and death, cut into the body, reduced it to its parts, framed it with moral commentary, and represented it theatrically, visually, and textually. Only initiates of the dissecting room could claim the privileged healing status that came with direct knowledge of the body. But anatomy depended on confiscation of the dead--mainly the plundered bodies of African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, and the poor. As black markets in cadavers flourished, so did a cultural obsession with anatomy, an obsession that gave rise to clashes over the legal, social, and moral status of the dead. Ministers praised or denounced anatomy from the pulpit; rioters sacked medical schools; and legislatures passed or repealed laws permitting medical schools to take the bodies of the destitute. Dissection narratives and representations of the anatomical body circulated in new places: schools, dime museums, popular lectures, minstrel shows, and sensationalist novels. Michael Sappol resurrects this world of graverobbers and anatomical healers, discerning new ligatures among race and gender relations, funerary practices, the formation of the middle-class, and medical professionalization. In the process, he offers an engrossing and surprisingly rich cultural history of nineteenth-century America.

Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain PDF Author: Janis McLarren Caldwell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139456644
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Although we have come to regard 'clinical' and 'romantic' as oppositional terms, romantic literature and clinical medicine were fed by the same cultural configurations. In the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, writers and doctors developed an interpretive method that negotiated between literary and scientific knowledge of the natural world. Literary writers produced potent myths that juxtaposed the natural and the supernatural, often disturbing the conventional dualist hierarchy of spirit over flesh. Clinicians developed the two-part history and physical examination, weighing the patient's narrative against the evidence of the body. Examining fiction by Mary Shelley, Carlyle, the Brontës and George Eliot, alongside biomedical lectures, textbooks and articles, Janis McLarren Caldwell demonstrates the similar ways of reading employed by nineteenth-century doctors and imaginative writers and reveals the complexities and creative exchanges of the relationship between literature and medicine.

G. W. M. Reynolds and His Fiction

G. W. M. Reynolds and His Fiction PDF Author: Stephen Knight
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429018231
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
George Reynolds is arguably the most prolific of all nineteenth-century English novelists, reaching an enormous audience through his thirty-six novels. Often selling in very large numbers in weekly one-penny installments, his works were known as by the most popular English novelist ever. Yet today, he remains almost unknown in the canon of English Literature. A serious radical, strongly pro-woman, and a leading Chartist seeking the vote for all men, Reynolds’ vigorous heroines differ notably from the Victorian novelists’ timid norm. He was strongly pro-Jewish and pro-Gypsy, very interested in French and Italian society, but wrote for ordinary English working people. Dickens thought him a dangerous leftist: for all these reasons, he was excluded from the elite literary world. G. W. M. Reynolds: The Man Who Outsold Dickens reestablishes Reynolds as a major figure of mid-nineteenth-century fiction and an author of European range and status. This book examines his massive popularity and notable concern with the problems of ordinary people, especially women, in the complex and often dangerous new world of the modern city. With the support of his wife Susannah, Reynolds’ enormous influence would also make a contribution to the cause of mass political education through his role in the development of popular fiction and journalism. This book is a major innovation in the field of Victorian literary studies, with relevance to popular cultural studies, the politics of literature, and publishing history, presenting properly a much overlooked major English novelist.

Dying for Victorian Medicine

Dying for Victorian Medicine PDF Author: E. Hurren
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023035565X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
The first book to provide a detailed analysis of the body-trafficking networks of the dead poor that underpinned the expansion of medical education from Victorian times. With an even-handed approach to the business of anatomy, Hurren uses remarkable case histories which still echo a vibrant body-business on the internet today in a biomedical age.

Reading for Health

Reading for Health PDF Author: Erika Wright
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821445634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
In Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Erika Wright argues that the emphasis in Victorian Studies on disease as the primary source of narrative conflict that must be resolved has obscured the complex reading practices that emerge around the concept of health. By shifting attention to the ways that prevention of illness and the preservation of well-being operate in fiction, both thematically and structurally, Wright offers a new approach to reading character and voice, order and temporality, setting and metaphor. As Wright reveals, while canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Martineau, and Gaskell register the pervasiveness of a conventional “therapeutic” form of action and mode of reading, they demonstrate as well an equally powerful investment in the achievement and maintenance of “health”—what Wright refers to as a “hygienic” narrative—both in personal and domestic conduct and in social interaction of the individual within the community.

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

Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture PDF Author: Sandra Dinter
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031170202
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
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.

Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction

Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction PDF Author: Abigail Boucher
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031411412
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Science, Medicine, and Lineage in Popular Fiction of the Long Nineteenth Century explores the dialogue between popular literature and medical and scientific discourse in terms of how they represent the highly visible an pathologized British aristocratic body. This books explores and complicates the two major portrayals of aristocrats in nineteenth-century literature: that of the medicalised, frail, debauched, and diseased aristocrat, and that of the heroic, active, beautiful ‘noble’, both of which are frequent and resonant in popular fiction of the long nineteenth century. Abigail Boucher argues that the concept of class in the long nineteenth century implicitly includes notions of blood, lineage, and bodily ‘correctness’, and that ‘class’ was therefore frequently portrayed as an empirical, scientific, and medical certainty. Due to their elevated and highly visual social positions, both historical and fictional aristocrats were frequently pathologized in the public mind and watched for signs of physical excellence or deviance. Using popular fiction, Boucher establishes patterns across decades, genres, and demographics and considers how these patterns react to, normalise, or feed into the advent of new scientific and medical understandings.

Unmaking Sex

Unmaking Sex PDF Author: Anne E. Linton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009062816
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
During the nineteenth century, words like 'intersex' and 'trans' had not yet been invented to describe individuals whose bodies, or senses of self, conflicted with binary sex. But that does not mean that such people did not exist. In nineteenth-century France, case studies filled medical journals, high-profile trials captured headlines, and doctors staked their reputations on sex determinations only to have them later reversed by colleagues. While medical experts fought over what separated a man from a woman, novelists began to explore debates about binary sex and describe the experiences of gender-ambiguous characters. Anne Linton discusses over 200 newly-uncovered case studies while offering fresh readings of literature by several famous writers of the period, as well as long-overlooked popular fiction. This landmark contribution to the history of sexuality is the first book to examine intersex in both medicine and literature, sensitively relating historical 'hermaphrodism' to contemporary intersex activism and scholarship.

The Anatomy of Deception

The Anatomy of Deception PDF Author: Lawrence Goldstone
Publisher: Anchor Canada
ISBN: 0385673809
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
In the tradition of Caleb Carr’s The Alienist and Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club, this mesmerizing forensic thriller thrusts the reader into the operating rooms, drawing rooms, and back alleys of 1889 Philadelphia, as a doctor grapples with the principles of scientific process to track a daring killer. In the morgue of a Philadelphia hospital, physicians uncover the corpse of a beautiful young woman. What they see takes their breath away. Within days, one doctor, Ephraim Carroll, strongly suspects that he knows the woman’s identity. . .and the horrifying events that led to her death. But in this richly atmospheric debut novel – an ingenious blend of history, suspense, and early forensic science – the most compelling chapter is yet to come, as the young doctor is plunged into a maze of murder, secrets, and unimaginable crimes. Peopled with vibrant real-life characters such as Canadian William Osler, hailed as the Father of Modern Medicine; famed surgeon William Stewart Halsted, who performed the first emergency blood transfusion and invented surgical gloves; and the controversial painter Thomas Eakins, The Anatomy of Deception brings to life a little-known and exciting turning-point in American medical history, when ignorant butchery gave way to intelligent surgery–and a young doctor is forced to confront an agonizing moral choice between exposing a killer, undoing a wrong, and, quite possibly, protecting the future of medicine itself.