Description
Book SynopsisScottish 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.
Trade Review"Coyer and Shuttleton, by bringing together psychiatrists, literary scholars, historians, librarians and doctors, illuminate a neglected corner of medical humanities. [...] The virtue of this book is its ability to show how perspectives interwove and advanced as - and because - they were articulated together through contemporary rhetoric. [...] The mark of a succesful text lies within its pages, and in the vistas it opens for research. Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726-1832 achieves such a success." - Caroline McCracken-Flesher (University of Wyoming), in: Scottish Literary Review, vol. 7 no. 2 (Dec. 2015). "Like many such collections, some of the transitions between sections can feel a little bumpy, but the standard of individual essays is generally high. Inevitably there is much more work to do in this field, and many questions are raised as well as resolved here [...] overall this book provides a valuable and unique resource for anyone interested in the Scottish Enlightenment’s literary and medical history." - Clark Lawlor (Northumbria University, UK), in: Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Volume 89, Number 3, Fall 2015, pp. 603-605.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements 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
