Reimagining Illness by Heather Meek - 9780228019060

Reimagining IllnessWomen Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain\nAuthor(s): Heather Meek\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, Canada\nImprint: McGill-Queen's University Press\nISBN-13: 9780228019060, 978-0228019060\nSynopsis\nIn eighteenth-century Britain the worlds of literature and medicine were closely intertwined, and a diverse group of people participated in the circulation of medical knowledge. In this pre-professionalized milieu, several women writers made important contributions by describing a range of common yet often devastating illnesses.\n\nIn Reimagining Illness Heather Meek reads works by six major eighteenth-century women writers Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frances Burney alongside contemporaneous medical texts to explore conditions such as hysteria, melancholy, smallpox, maternity, consumption, and breast cancer. In novels, poems, letters, and journals.