Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle
If nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the rise of medical professionalism, it also witnessed rampant quackery. It is tempting to categorize historical practices as either orthodox or quack, but what did these terms really signify in medical and public circles at the time? How did they develop and evolve? What do they tell us about actual medical practices?

Doctoring the Novel explores the ways in which language constructs and stabilizes these slippery terms by examining medical quackery and orthodoxy in works such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Charlotte Brontë's Villette, Wilkie Collins's Armadale, and Arthur Conan Doyle's Stark Munro Letters. Contextualized in both medical and popular publishing, literary analysis reveals that even supposedly medico-scientific concepts such as orthodoxy and quackery evolve not in elite laboratories and bourgeois medical societies but in the rough-and-tumble of the public sphere, a view that acknowledges the considerable, and often underrated, influence of language on medical practices.
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Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle
If nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the rise of medical professionalism, it also witnessed rampant quackery. It is tempting to categorize historical practices as either orthodox or quack, but what did these terms really signify in medical and public circles at the time? How did they develop and evolve? What do they tell us about actual medical practices?

Doctoring the Novel explores the ways in which language constructs and stabilizes these slippery terms by examining medical quackery and orthodoxy in works such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Charlotte Brontë's Villette, Wilkie Collins's Armadale, and Arthur Conan Doyle's Stark Munro Letters. Contextualized in both medical and popular publishing, literary analysis reveals that even supposedly medico-scientific concepts such as orthodoxy and quackery evolve not in elite laboratories and bourgeois medical societies but in the rough-and-tumble of the public sphere, a view that acknowledges the considerable, and often underrated, influence of language on medical practices.
49.95 In Stock
Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle

Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle

by Sylvia A. Pamboukian Ph.D
Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle

Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle

by Sylvia A. Pamboukian Ph.D

Hardcover(1)

$49.95 
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Overview

If nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the rise of medical professionalism, it also witnessed rampant quackery. It is tempting to categorize historical practices as either orthodox or quack, but what did these terms really signify in medical and public circles at the time? How did they develop and evolve? What do they tell us about actual medical practices?

Doctoring the Novel explores the ways in which language constructs and stabilizes these slippery terms by examining medical quackery and orthodoxy in works such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Charlotte Brontë's Villette, Wilkie Collins's Armadale, and Arthur Conan Doyle's Stark Munro Letters. Contextualized in both medical and popular publishing, literary analysis reveals that even supposedly medico-scientific concepts such as orthodoxy and quackery evolve not in elite laboratories and bourgeois medical societies but in the rough-and-tumble of the public sphere, a view that acknowledges the considerable, and often underrated, influence of language on medical practices.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780821419908
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Publication date: 04/17/2012
Edition description: 1
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Trained in Victorian studies and pharmacy, Sylvia A. Pamboukian is an associate professor in the department of English at Robert Morris University in Pennsylvania. She has published on topics as diverse as Victorian x-rays, Rudyard Kipling’s supernatural stories, and taboo in the Harry Potter series.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: False Professions: Defining Orthodoxy and Quackery 1

1 Orthodoxy or Quackery? Anatomy in Frankenstein 17

2 Doctoring in Little Dorrit and Bleak House 49

3 Legerdemain and the Physician in Charlotte Brontë's Villette 74

4 Poisons and the Poisonous in Wilkie Collins's Armadale 98

5 The Quackery of Arthur Conan Doyle 122

Conclusion: The In-Laws: Orthodoxy and Quackery in Vernon Galbray 147

Notes 157

Bibliography 189

Index 201

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