Myth and (Mis)Information
Constructing the Medical Professions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century English Literature and Culture
Helen Williams editor Allan Ingram editor Clark Lawlor editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Manchester University Press
Published:16th Apr '24
Should be back in stock very soon
This collection draws together original scholarship from international contributors on a range of aspects of professional and semi-professional medical work and its relations to British culture. It combines a diverse spectrum of scholarly approaches, from medical history to book history, exploring literary and scientific texts, such as satiric poetry, essays, anatomies, advertisements, and the novel, to shed light on the mythologisation and transmission of medical (mis)information through literature and popular culture. It analyses the persuasive and sometimes deceptive means by which myths, as well as information and beliefs, about medicine and the medical professions proliferated in English literary culture of this period, from early eighteenth-century household remedies to the late nineteenth-century concerns with vaccination that are still relevant today.
‘Studies of the connections between literature and medicine of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have increased in number over the past few years but rarely do we see such in-depth studies of the lexical and textual mechanics of this intersection. The stimulating essays of Myth and (mis)information remind us that important debates about truth, meaning, and representation go to the heart of the social and global history of medicine and that if we are to understand the present, we must first take an interdisciplinary, collaborative approach to the languages of the past.’
—Professor Andrew Mangham, University of Reading
‘Myth and (mis)information is a must read for anyone in search of new insights into the modern medical marketplace, the circulation of knowledge, reader-reception of medical texts, and the shaping of medical culture. In a post-COVID era, it skilfully historicises the current anxieties we have about health misinformation. The book encompasses multiple aspects of medical writings within a cultural and historical perspective: women publishers, herbalists and healers, overlooked texts by medical celebrities, dog doctors, illness narratives of poxed men, medical branding and advertising, medical controversies on epidemics, vaccination or anatomy. A rattling good read!’
—Sophie Vasset, Institut de Recherches sur la Renaissance, l'Âge Classique et les Lumières (IRCL), Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry
ISBN: 9781526166821
Dimensions: 234mm x 156mm x 19mm
Weight: 610g
312 pages