Myth and (Mis)Information - by Allan Ingram & Helen Williams & Clark Lawlor (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book discusses the various cultural forms and literary works by which information, myth and misinformation on medical practices and personages were spread during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and some of the reasons for this, from authorial self-interest to scientific ignorance.

Book Synopsis

This collection draws together original scholarship from international contributors on a range of aspects of professional and semi-professional medical work and its relations to British culture. It combines a diverse spectrum of scholarly approaches, from medical history to book history, exploring literary and scientific texts, such as satiric poetry, essays, anatomies, advertisements, and the novel, to shed light on the mythologisation and transmission of medical (mis)information through literature and popular culture. It analyses the persuasive and sometimes deceptive means by which myths, as well as information and beliefs, about medicine and the medical professions proliferated in English literary culture of this period, from early eighteenth-century household remedies to the late nineteenth-century concerns with vaccination that are still relevant today.

From the Back Cover

This volume of essays analyses the persuasive and sometimes deceptive means by which myths, information, and beliefs about medicine and the medical professions proliferated in English literary culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It explores how English vernacular medical texts of this period invite cross-comparisons with literary representations of health and medical practitioners, to enrich the picture of medicine in the popular imagination and to provide important perspectives on questions surrounding authenticity, agency, representation, and accessibility.

Drawing from a diverse spectrum of scholarly approaches, from medical history to book history, the essays engage with a wide range of primary source material. This ranges from canonical to little known literary and book historical sources, including the poetry of John Arbuthnot and Jane Barker, the life writing of James Boswell, and the novels of Tobias Smollett, Elizabeth Gaskell and Henry Rider Haggard, as well as medical works by George Cheyne and Daniel Turner and medical material aimed at public audiences, including skincare remedies, anatomical flap-books and the various (self)representations and advertisements of dog-doctors.

Together, this rich array of material demonstrates how popular understanding of medical work and medical figures was informed and misinformed, whether by dishonesty, false marketing, preconceived prejudice, or through being made subordinate to non-medical ends such as comic or satiric productions or political, religious, or socio-cultural priorities. What emerges is a centuries-long 'infodemic' which invites comparisons with our present moment.

About the Author

Allan Ingram is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Northumbria
Clark Lawlor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Northumbria
Helen Williams is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Northumbria