Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot

Janis Caldwell investigates the links between the growing scientific materialism of the nineteenth century and the persistence of the Romantic literary imagination. Through closely analyzing literary texts from Frankenstein to Middlemarch, and examining fiction alongside biomedical lectures, textbooks and articles, Caldwell argues that the way "Romantic materialism" influenced these disciplines compels us to revise conventional ***s of the relationship between literature and medicine. ...

"broad-ranging and inventive engagement ... very interesting and valuable contribution to the field of literature and medicine."
Victorian Studies

"Caldwell's book presents a well-articulated argument that traces the roots of Romantic materialism from the eighteenth century definitions of sympathy to Eliot's idealistic vision of the clinic. Her research is well documented" Journal of the History of Medicine, Marcia K. Farrell, University of Tulsa

"With this monograph, Janis McLarren Caldwell makes an important contribution to literature and medicine studies...Her insights are astute, generous, and never overly clever or self-aggrandizing."
Stephanie P. Browner, Berea College, Studies in the Novel