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

Author(s): Janis McLarren Caldwell

Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

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 accounts of the relationship between literature and medicine.