Literature & medicine during the eighteenth century

"Nowadays medicine and literature are widely seen as falling on different sides of the 'two cultures' divide. This was not so in the eighteenth century when doctors, scientists, writers and artists formed a well-integrated educated elite and often collaborated with each other. Physicians like Erasmus Darwin doubled as poets; novelists such as Tobias Smollett were medically qualified. This close interplay of medicine and literature in the Enlightenment showed in literary ideas and expression - debates raged as to whether writing was itself therapeutic, or possibly a disease. And poets and novelists for their part drew heavily on medical language and learning for their models of human nature, of the action of the emotions and the dialectic of body and psyche." "Written by leading historians of medicine and eighteenth-century literary critics, Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century takes up these themes, paying special attention to questions of body language and the representation of the inner life. The chapters include an analysis of dreams and the unconscious; a discussion of the medical theories concerning the prolongation of life, and the way in which novelists picked up on this theme; and the cults of invalidism and hypochondria." "In addition, broader-ranging social historical discussions investigate the relations between the medical colleges and Grub Street, between the emergent professional doctor and the new breed of writers, and the way medicine contributed towards informing a gendered view of the world. A major new exploration of the unity of Enlightenment culture, Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century will be of interest to intellectual historians, literary scholars and medical historians alike."--BOOK JACKET.