Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture

by Louise Penner (Editor), Tabitha Sparks (Editor)

Overview

This collection of essays explores the rise of scientific medicine and its impact on Victorian popular culture. Chapters include an examination of Charles Dickens’s involvement with hospital funding, concerns over milk purity and the theatrical portrayal of drug addiction, plus a whole section devoted to the representation of medicine in crime fiction. This is an interdisciplinary study involving public health, cultural studies, the history of medicine, literature and the theatre, providing new insights into Victorian culture and society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822966432
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	12/01/2020
Series:	Sci & Culture in the Nineteenth Century Series , #87
Edition description:	1
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Louise Penner is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of Victorian Medicine and Social Reform: Florence Nightingale among the Novelists.
Tabitha Sparks is associate professor of English at McGill University. She is the author of The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices.

Table of Contents

Introduction Louise Penner and Tabitha Sparks 1. 'Dr. Locock and his Quack': Professionalizing Medicine, Textualizing Identity in the 1840s Kevin A. Morrison 2. Dickens, Metropolitan Philanthropy and the London Hospitals Louise Penner 3. Cleanliness and Medicinal Cheer: Harriet Martineau, the 'People of Bleaburn' and the Sanitary Work of Household Words Meegan Kennedy 4. Lacteal Crises: Debates over Milk Purity in Victorian Britain Jacob Steere-Williams 5. 'The Chemistry and Botany of the Kitchen': Scientific and Domestic Attempts to Prevent Food Adulteration Julie Kraft 6. Medical Bluebeards: The Domestic Threat of the Poisoning Doctor in the Popular Fiction of Ellen Wood Cheryl Blake 7. Male Hysteria, Sexual Inversion and the Sensational Hero in Wilkie Collins's Armadale Marc Milton Ducusin 8. Ungentlemanly Habits: The Dramaturgy of Drug Addiction in Fin-de-Siècle Theatrical Adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes Stories and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Meredith Conti 9. From Vivisection to Gender Reassignment: Imagining the Feminine in The Island of Doctor Moreau Ellen J. Stockstill 10. Illness as Metaphor in the Victorian Novel: Reading Popular Fiction against Medical History Tabitha Sparks

Editorial Reviews

This is an outstanding collection: deeply researched, clearly written essays that talk to each other on such diverse aspects of Victorian public response to medicine as Thomas Wakley’s battle against fraudulent patent medicine ads, Dickens’s campaigns for hospitals, periodical articles on food adulteration, sanitation and home health management, poisoning doctors in novels, the new ‘science’ of sexology, drug addiction, degeneration, and a culminating essay on the importance of reading illness as metaphor in Victorian literature.”
—Mary Wilson Carpenter, Queen’s University, Canada


“Advertisements for Dr. Locock's Pulmonic Wafers, investigations of adulterated milk, doctor-poisoners, male hysterics: these are just some of the little-known but fascinating topics broached in Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture. Particularly strong in contributions showing the connections between medical controversies, figures, or topoi and popular fiction (Martineau, Collins, Conan Doyle, Ellen Wood, H. G. Wells), this volume of essays should be of interest to Victorianists and historians of medicine alike.”
—Lawrence Rothfield, University of Chicago

From the Publisher