This book debates a crossover between the Gothic and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. It explores the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, and expands the possibilities of medical theories in a speculative space by a focus on Gothic novels, short stories, poetry, drama and chapbooks. By comparing the Gothic's collection of unsavoury tropes to morbid anatomy's collection of diseased organs, the author argues that the Gothic's prioritisation of fear and gore gives it access to nonnormative bodies, reallocating medical and narrative agency to bodies considered otherwise powerless. Each chapter pairs a trope with a critical medical debate, granting silenced bodies power over their own narratives: the reanimated corpse confronts fears about vitalism; the skeleton exposes fears about pain; the unreliable corpse feeds on fears of dissection; the devil redirects fears about disability; the dangerous narrative manipulates fears of contagion and vaccination.
Muu info
Combines the fields of Gothic Studies, History of Medicine, and British Romanticism. * Makes a case for the value of studying the Gothic and medicine in the Romantic period in particular, rather than prioritizing the Victorian period as similar studies do. * Prioritizes archival and rare literary texts not easily available in modern reprints, such as Charlotte Dacre's Hours of Solitude, Joshua Pickersgill Jr.'s The Three Brothers, Sophia King's The Fatal Secret, Gothic chapbooks, and Matthew Lewis's more obscure poetry. Many of these texts have either never been written about before or been written about very infrequently because they are difficult to access. * Includes primary medical source material alongside literary studies. * Adds to a growing cultural interest in history of medicine by expanding on the impact of Matthew Baillie's The Morbid Anatomy and its influences. * Adds to growing historical reconceptions of disability within the Romantic period. * Adds to interest in the growing subfield, Medical Gothic. * Gestures to the social justice impacts of medical debates.
Laura R. Kremmel is Assistant Professor of English in the Humanities Department at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology.
