This title provides an analysis of how literary fiction borrowed narratorial devices from medical texts and vice-versa.

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

This volume provides a comprehensive description of the main developments in medicine in 1700-1800, based on the corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT). Its main focus is on language use in context, with stylistic variation according to genres, authors and audiences. The book is accompanied by a CD-rom containing the corpus.

It has become a truism that we all think in the narrative mode, both in everyday life and in science. But what does this mean precisely? Scholars tend to use the term ‘narrative’ in a broad sense, implying not only event-sequencing but also the representation of emotions, basic perceptual processes or complex analyses of data sets. The volume addresses this blind spot by using clear selection criteria: only non-fictional texts by experts are analysed through the lens of both classical and postclassical narratology – from Aristotle to quantum physics and from nineteenth-century psychiatry to early childhood psychology; they fall under various genres such as philosophical treatises, case histories, textbooks, medical reports, video clips, and public lectures. The articles of this volume examine the central but continuously shifting role that event-sequencing plays within scholarly and scientific communication at various points in history – and the diverse functions it serves such as eye witnessing, making an argument, inferencing or reasoning. Thus, they provide a new methodological framework for both literary scholars and historians of science and medicine.