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Description of  Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain (McGill-Queen's/AMS Healthcare Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society)

0228019060 rar 0228019060 rar In eighteenth-century Britain the worlds of literature and medicine were closely intertwined, and a diverse group of people participated in the circulation of medical knowledge. In this pre-professionalized milieu, several women writers made important contributions by describing a range of common yet often devastating illnesses. In Reimagining Illness Heather Meek reads works by six major eighteenth-century women writers Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frances Burney alongside contemporaneous medical texts to explore conditions such as hysteria, melancholy, smallpox, maternity, consumption, and breast cancer. In novels, poems, letters, and journals, these writers drew on their learning and literary skill as they engaged with and revised male-dominated medical discourse. Their works provide insight into the experience of suffering and interrogate accepted theories of womens bodies and minds. In ways relevant both then and now, these women demonstrate how illness might be at once a bodily condition and a malleable construct full of ideological meaning and imaginative possibility. Read more