Accessibility navigation


Medical research

Mangham, A. (2017) Medical research. In: Rushton, S. and Holmes, J. (eds.) The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science. Routledge, London, UK. ISBN 9781315613338

Full text not archived in this repository.

It is advisable to refer to the publisher's version if you intend to cite from this work. See Guidance on citing.

To link to this item DOI: 10.4324/9781315613338

Abstract/Summary

The links between medical research and literature have been discussed by a range of scholars in recent times, some arguing that the clinical precision of medicine influenced the novel's new-found preoccupation with detail and the trivialities of 'everyday life' and others that medicine's languages of wonder and discovery inspired counter-realist genres such as the Gothic and the sensation novel. Medicine, like the novel, was a self-scrutinizing area of knowledge; it frequently assessed itself as to where it was going, what the implications of its research were and how best it might go about its practices. The intersections between literature and experimental medicine in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are a tale of three cities. In Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Lawrence Rothfield clarifies 'the displacement of one genre (realism) by another (naturalism) by correlating it with the displacement of one form of scientific thought (that of clinical medicine) by another (that of experimental medicine)'.

Item Type:Book or Report Section
Refereed:Yes
Divisions:Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Literature
ID Code:52263
Publisher:Routledge

University Staff: Request a correction | Centaur Editors: Update this record

Page navigation