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)'.