Literature and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Nowadays medicine and literature are widely seen as falling on different sides of the two cultures divide. This was not so in the 18th 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 Age of Enlightenment was evident 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 dialetic of body and psyche. Written by both medical historians and literary critics, this book takes up these themes, with particular attention to questions of body language and the representation of the inner life. The essays include an analysis of dreams and the unconscious, and a discussion of the medical theories concerning the prolongation of life.

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