Full Description
Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726-1832 examines the ramifications of Scottish medicine for literary culture within Scotland, throughout Britain, and across the transatlantic world. The contributors take an informed historicist approach in examining the cultural, geographical, political, and other circumstances enabling the dissemination of distinctively Scottish medico-literary discourses. In tracing the international influence of Scottish medical ideas upon literary practice they ask critical questions concerning medical ethics, the limits of sympathy and the role of belles lettres in professional self-fashioning, and the development of medico-literary genres such as the medical short story, physician autobiography and medical biography. Some consider the role of medical ideas and culture in the careers, creative practice and reception of such canonical writers as Mark Akenside, Robert Burns, Robert Fergusson, Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth. By providing an important range of current scholarship, these essays represent an expansion and greater penetration of critical vision.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
1. "Introduction: Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726-1832"
Megan J. Coyer & David E. Shuttleton
2. "'Nothing is so soon forgot as pain': Reading Agony in The Theory of Moral Sentiments"
Craig Franson
3. "The Origins of a Modern Medical Ethics in Enlightenment Scotland: Cheyne, Gregory and Cullen as Practitioners of Sensibility"
Wayne Wild
4. "The Demise of the Preformed Embryo: Edinburgh, Leiden, and the Physician-Poet Mark Akenside's Contribution to the Re-Establishing of Epigenetic Embryology"
Robin Dix
5. "Benjamin Rush, Edinburgh Medicine and the Rise of Physician Autobiography"
Catherine Jones
6. "The Construction of Robert Fergusson's Illness and Death"
Rhona Brown
7. "'Groaning under the miseries of a diseased nervous System': Robert Burns and Melancholy"
Allan Beveridge
8. "Phrenological Controversy and the Medical Imagination: 'A Modern Pythagorean' in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine"
Megan J. Coyer
9. "Blood and the Revenant in Walter Scott's The Fair Maid of Perth"
Katherine Inglis
10. "Magic, Mind Control, and the Body Electric: "Materia Medica" in Sir Walter Scott's Library at Abbotsford"
Lindsay Levy
11. "An Account of... William Cullen: John Thomson and the Making of a Medical Biography"
David E. Shuttleton
12. "Transatlantic Irritability: Brunonian Sociology, America and Mass Culture in the Nineteenth Century"
Gavin Budge
Index
