Narrating Medicine In Middle English Poetry

Exploring medical writing in England in the 100+ years after the advent of the “Great Mortality”, this book examines the storytelling practices of poets, patients, and physicians in the midst of a medieval public health crisis and demonstrates how literary narratives enable us to see a kinship between poetry and the healing arts. Looking at how we can learn to diagnose a text as if we were diagnosing a body, Salisbury provides new insights into how we can recuperate the voices of those afflicted by illness in medieval texts when we have no direct testimony. She considers how we interpret stories told by patients in narratives mediated by others, ways that women factor into the shaping of a medical canon, how medical writing intersects with religious belief and memorial practices governed by the Church, and ways that regimens of health benefit a population in the throes of an epidemic.

This book explores previously unexamined overlaps between the poetic imagination and the medical mind. It shows how appreciation of poetry can help us to engage with medicine in more intense ways based on ‘de-familiarising’ old habits and bringing poetic forms of ‘close reading’ to the clinic. Bleakley and Neilson carry out an extensive critical examination of the well-established practices of narrative medicine to show that non-narrative, lyrical poetry does different kind of work, previously unexamined, such as place eclipsing time. They articulate a groundbreaking ‘lyrical medicine’ that promotes aesthetic, ethical and political practices as well as noting the often-concealed metaphor cache of biomedicine. Demonstrating that ambiguity is a key resource in both poetry and medicine, the authors anatomise poetic and medical practices as forms of extended and situated cognition, grounded in close readings of singular contexts. They illustrate structural correspondences between poetic diction and clinical thinking, such as use of sound and metaphor. This provocative examination of the meaningful overlap between poetic and clinical work is an essential read for researchers and practitioners interested in extending the reach of medical and health humanities, narrative medicine, medical education and English literature.

Structured in three parts, this book focuses on immediate contexts, key texts, and wider contexts enabling development from background issues through the actual literary texts to criticism and afterlives.

G. K. Chesterton, London and Modernity is the first book to explore the persistent theme of the city in Chesterton's writing. Situating him in relation to both Victorian and Modernist literary paradigms, the book explores a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to address the way his imaginative investments and political interventions conceive urban modernity and the central figure of London. While Chesterton's work has often been valued for its wit and whimsy, this book argues that he is also a distinctive urban commentator, whose sophistication has been underappreciated in comparison to more canonical contemporaries. With chapters written by leading scholars in the field of 20th-century literature, the book also provides fresh readings and suggests new contexts for central texts such as The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill and the Father Brown stories. It also discusses lesser-known works, such as Manalive and The Club of Queer Trades, drawing out their significance for scholars interested in urban representation and practice in the first three decades of the 20th century.

In the period just prior to medicine's modernity—before the rise of Renaissance anatomy, the centralized regulation of medical practice, and the valorization of scientific empiricism—England was the scene of a remarkable upsurge in medical writing. Between the arrival of the Black Death in 1348 and the emergence of printed English books a century and a quarter later, thousands of discrete medical texts were copied, translated, and composed, largely for readers outside universities. These widely varied texts shared a model of a universe crisscrossed with physical forces and a picture of the human body as a changeable, composite thing, tuned materially to the world's vicissitudes. According to Julie Orlemanski, when writers like Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Henryson, Thomas Hoccleve, and Margery Kempe drew on the discourse of phisik—the language of humors and complexions, leprous pustules and love sickness, regimen and pharmacopeia—they did so to chart new circuits of legibility between physiology and personhood. Orlemanski explores the texts of her vernacular writers to show how they deployed the rich terminology of embodiment and its ailments to portray symptomatic figures who struggled to control both their bodies and the interpretations that gave their bodies meaning. As medical paradigms mingled with penitential, miraculous, and socially symbolic systems, these texts demanded that a growing number of readers negotiate the conflicting claims of material causation, intentional action, and divine power. Examining both the medical writings of late medieval England and the narrative and poetic works that responded to them, Symptomatic Subjects illuminates the period's conflicts over who had the authority to construe bodily signs and what embodiment could be made to mean.

How did doctors argue in eighteenth-century medical pamphlet wars? How literary, or clinical, is Diderot’s depiction of mad nuns? What is at stake in the account of a cataract operation at the beginning of Jean-Paul’s novel Hesperus? In this pioneering volume, contributors extend current research at the intersection of medicine and literature by examining the overlapping narrative strategies in the writings of both novelists and doctors.Focusing on a wide variety of sources, an interdisciplinary team of researchers explores the nature and function of narration as an underlying principle of such writing. From a reading of correspondence between doctors as a means of continuing professional education, to the use of inoculation as a plotting device, or an examination of Diderot’s physiological approach to mental illness inLa Religieuse, contributors highlight:how doctors exploited rhetorical techniques in both clinical writing and correspondence with patients.how novelists incorporated medical knowledge into their narratives.how models such as case-histories or narrative poetry were adopted and transformed in both fictional and actual medical writing.how these narrative strategies shaped the way in which doctors, patients and illnesses were represented and perceived in the eighteenth century. ‘[...] the essays improve our knowledge of how the history of science and medicine converge with the literature of the eighteenth century. This book must be commended for each piece’s lively and accessible writing, making it an enjoyable read for both historians and literary scholars.’- Eighteenth-Century Fiction

The King of Tars, an early Middle English romance (ca. 1330 or earlier), emphasizes ideas about race, gender, and religion. A short poem, its purpose is to celebrate the power of Christianity, and yet it defies classification.