Reading The Nineteenth Century Medical Journal

This book explores medical and health periodicals of the nineteenth century: their contemporary significance, their readership, and how historians have approached them as objects of study. From debates about women doctors in lesser-known titles such as the Medical Mirror, to the formation of professional medical communities within French and Portuguese periodicals, the contributors to this volume highlight the multi-faceted nature of these publications as well as their uses to the historian. Medical periodicals – far from being the preserve of doctors and nurses – were also read by the general public. Thus, the contributions collected here will be of interest not only to the historian of medicine, but also to those interested in nineteenth-century periodical culture more broadly. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Media History.

This book explores medical and health periodicals of the nineteenth century: their contemporary significance, their readership, and how historians have approached them as objects of study. From debates about women doctors in lesser-known titles such as the Medical Mirror, to the formation of professional medical communities within French and Portuguese periodicals, the contributors to this volume highlight the multi-faceted nature of these publications as well as their uses to the historian. Medical periodicals - far from being the preserve of doctors and nurses - were also read by the general public. Thus, the contributions collected here will be of interest not only to the historian of medicine, but also to those interested in nineteenth-century periodical culture more broadly. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Media History.

In Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Erika Wright argues that the emphasis in Victorian Studies on disease as the primary source of narrative conflict that must be resolved has obscured the complex reading practices that emerge around the concept of health. By shifting attention to the ways that prevention of illness and the preservation of well-being operate in fiction, both thematically and structurally, Wright offers a new approach to reading character and voice, order and temporality, setting and metaphor. As Wright reveals, while canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Martineau, and Gaskell register the pervasiveness of a conventional “therapeutic” form of action and mode of reading, they demonstrate as well an equally powerful investment in the achievement and maintenance of “health”—what Wright refers to as a “hygienic” narrative—both in personal and domestic conduct and in social interaction of the individual within the community.

In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture, which served as a significant medium for the dissemination and exchange of medical and literary ideas throughout Britain, the colonies, and beyond. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press explores the relationship between the medical culture of Romantic-era Scotland and the periodical press by examining several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood?s Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential and innovative literary periodical of the era.

Medicine and Maladies explores the socio-political and medical contexts that inform depictions of affliction in nineteenth-century France. It asks how cultural representations appropriate, critique, or develop medical discourse, and how medical writings incorporate literary examples to illustrate scientific hypotheses.

Students of the history of medicine and of American history in general will welcome this collection of thirty papers originally published in nineteenth-century medical journals and lay publications. Each highlights a specific problem or medical attitude of the period, and together they present an illuminating panorama of the medical profession and of public health in nineteenth-century America. Many of the problems faced by students, practitioners, and patients of the last century are surprisingly similar to those still being encountered today. Dr. Brieger has selected papers that illustrate the issues and developments in medical education, medical practice, surgery, hospitals, hygiene, and psychiatry. They range from Benjamin Rush's "On the Cause of Death in Diseases That Are Not Incurable," to a paper by Robert F. Weir "On the Antiseptic Treatment of Wounds, and Its Results" and an article by Stephen Smith, "New York the Unclean." The final selection, the Announcement of The Johns Hopkins Medical School, stands as a landmark that foretells the beginning of a new era.

Offering a new perspective on medical progress in the nineteenth century, Steven M. Stowe provides an in-depth study of the midcentury culture of everyday medicine in the South. Reading deeply in the personal letters, daybooks, diaries, bedside notes, and published writings of doctors, Stowe illuminates an entire world of sickness and remedy, suffering and hope, and the deep ties between medicine and regional culture. In a distinct American region where climate, race and slavery, and assumptions about "southernness" profoundly shaped illness and healing in the lives of ordinary people, Stowe argues that southern doctors inhabited a world of skills, medicines, and ideas about sickness that allowed them to play moral, as well as practical, roles in their communities. Looking closely at medical education, bedside encounters, and medicine's larger social aims, he describes a "country orthodoxy" of local, social medical practice that highly valued the "art" of medicine. While not modern in the sense of laboratory science a century later, this country orthodoxy was in its own way modern, Stowe argues, providing a style of caregiving deeply rooted in individual experience, moral values, and a consciousness of place and time.

This collection is the first of its kind to interrogate both literal and metaphorical transatlantic exchanges of culture and ideas in nineteenth-century girls’ fiction. As such, it initiates conversations about how the motif of travel in literature taught nineteenth-century girl audiences to reexamine their own cultural biases by offering a fresh perspective on literature that is often studied primarily within a national context. Women and children in nineteenth-century America are often described as being tied to the home and the domestic sphere, but this collection challenges this categorization and shows that girls in particular were often expected to go abroad and to learn new cultural frames in order to enter the realm of adulthood; those who could not afford to go abroad literally could do so through the stories that traveled to them from other lands or the stories they read of others’ travels. Via transatlantic exchange, then, authors, readers, and the characters in the texts covered in this collection confront the idea of what constitutes the self. Books examined in this volume include Adeline Trafton’s An American Girl Abroad (1872), Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1881), and Elizabeth W. Champney’s eleven-book Vassar Girl Series (1883-92), among others.