Sylvia A. Pamboukian
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.
Buy on Amazon.
