Abstract This article examines the figure of the criminal consumptive in British and American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While there is a substantial body of criticism dealing with the connections between criminal and pathological discourses in the fin-de-siècle and the first decades of the twentieth century, this piece argues for a more direct imaginative connection between tuberculosis and criminality in medical literature and fiction of this time. Beginning in the mid-century, but intensifying after Robert Koch’s identification of the tuberculosis bacillus in 1882, consumption was often tied to particular forms of emotional incoherence and ‘insanity’: the tubercular individual was supposedly inclined to frantic action, unaccountable ‘sensitivities’, and a potentially violent selfishness. In this rendering, the consumptive was thought to be inherently predisposed to become a killer. This article takes L. T. Meade’s story ‘The Horror of Studley Grange’ (1894) as a key literary case study for this discourse, but it also turns in its final section to consider the surprising ways in which early fictional representations of the consumptive Wild West gunslinger Doc Holliday depart from it. This article argues that writers such as Alfred Henry Lewis and Walter Noble Burns convert the tropes of consumptive dangerousness into signs of martial valour, reworking the narrative structures of pathological criminality into forms more suited to their frontier setting. In the presence of Holliday, works like Lewis’s The Sunset Trail (1905) and Burns’s Tombstone (1927) come to suggest that there is something tubercular about the character of the American West itself.

The rapid advancement of medical technology has introduced new ethical quandaries that are increasingly explored within medical fiction. To explore these ethical misconducts and implications of technology misuse, the study selects the medical novel Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This study uses the Neutralization Theory of Sykes and Matza to examine the moral arguments and ethical conundrums raised in Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In that, the novel investigates how authors use the medium of fiction to not only highlight the profound ethical questions surrounding the development and application of new technologies but also to expose the fragility of the systems and individuals tasked with wielding such power. This selected medical narrative serves as cautionary tales that force readers to confront the moral and philosophical implications of technological progress in the medical field, calling doctors to consider the delicate balance between scientific advancement and preserving human dignity, autonomy, and the sanctity of life.

The question of control—over bodies, knowledge, narrative, and nation—interweaves throughout Dana Medoro’s Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion and Stephanie Peebles Tavera’s (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship. Medoro focuses on discourses of life and women’s (non)reproductive sexuality in Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction. She establishes that the two authors were deeply skeptical of medicolegal definitions of life that created racial and economic hierarchies; through focal characters and indirect, playful prose, they critique discourses of life that valued some lives over others in the creation of Anglo-American nationalism. Tavera investigates late-nineteenth-century woman-authored medical fiction as directly engaging many of the same concepts Medoro explores. (P)rescription Narratives calls attention to the ways that Comstock-era censorship colluded with race science, medicine, and the law to limit women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy. It demonstrates literature’s agential capacities as the writers it addresses explicitly refute and redirect objectifying narratives. Combined, these texts show that questions of what “counts” as life, and by what (and whose) paradigms those lives can be lived, are hardly theoretical musings. Rather, they determine, systemically and corporeally, “life’s legibility and reproduction … in the name of American citizenship” (Medoro 19). These texts, in other words, are highly relevant and important as literary and cultural scholarship, making a powerful argument for the study of the humanities. But they are also important because they document the subversive and agential power of the written word to discern, document, and possibly heal—to affect change for today and the future.

(P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship by Stephanie Peebles Tavera (review)

(P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship

Reviewed by: (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship by Stephanie Peebles Tavera Cynthia J. Davis (P)RESCRIPTION NARRATIVES: FEMINIST MEDICAL FICTION AND THE FAILURE OF AMERICAN CENSORSHIP, by Stephanie Peebles Tavera. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 240 pp. $110.00 hardback; $110.00 ebook. Not so long ago, we had good reason to believe that “Comstockery” had been safely relegated to a bygone era. Recently, however, alarmist “anti-woke” trends have revealed the remarkable longevity of anti-vice campaigns, especially those conducted in the name of Christian morality. How timely, then, that in (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship, Stephanie Peebles Tavera has identified the Comstock era (1873–1915)—the period when the postal special agent and reformist zealot Anthony Comstock (1844–1915) waged his campaign against perceived obscenity and vice—as the relevant context for her analysis of medical fiction produced by women writers in the United States. What Tavera calls “an anxiety of imagination” provides a through-line connecting Comstock’s era of influence to our current lived reality (p. 47). She coins the term “(p)rescription” (a portmanteau that simultaneously connotes medical prescriptions and the purportedly “healing” act of revision or “rescription”) to evoke the ways that narrative affect can therapeutically counter the shame perpetuated by cultural narratives designed to censor women’s bodies and desires (p. 4). Tavera wisely positions Comstockian censorship “not as a passive historical backdrop upon which the act of (p)rescription takes place but as itself an affective narrative” that operates in productive tension with “woman-authored medical fiction” (p. 14). Enthusiastically invested in narrative’s power to disrupt oppressive sociocultural and specifically sociobiological constructions of gendered embodiment, Tavera attends to the “failure of American censorship” referenced in her subtitle even as she acknowledges, without systematically theorizing, the apparent inefficacy of her authors’ counternarratives in their presumed efforts to not just dramatize but induce cultural change. As with many a dissertation-turned-book, (P)rescription Narratives consists of four chronologically arranged chapters (designated by Tavera as Rx 1–4), framed by an introduction and conclusion. Together the book’s constituent parts examine not only the gendered double standards and essentialist stereotypes advanced in medical and legal discourses in order to justify differential and often censorious treatment but also the narrative forms used by particular authors to rebut these discourses in the interest of women’s reproductive health and overall well-being. Writers featured include such now-familiar names as Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Angelina Weld Grimké, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, along with still-overlooked [End Page 391] authors like Annie Nathan Meyers. To my mind, the fourth chapter, “Affective Fear: Vulnerability and Risk in Anti-VD Campaign Counternarratives,” is the strongest, defined by the clarity of both its writing and its organizational structure. Additional strengths include the book’s historicism. Tavera has conducted impressive, original archival and legal research in addition to delving into pertinent secondary historical sources. The author also deserves praise for her deft yet restrained use of personal and family history to bring her observations home. Equally praiseworthy is her sustained and simultaneous attention to ascriptive identities of gender, race, and dis/ability as well as to their inextricable entanglement—or, to use her favored wording, borrowed from Karen Barad, “superposition” (p. 10). Because anti-vice crusaders sought to legislate normative white, ableist, heterosexual subjectivity while casting any divergence from this standard as culturally deviant, signifying disease or disability, Tavera relies on “crip affect” to elucidate how her chosen works strategically “rescript” Comstockian suppression (p. 8). These and other strengths are slightly undercut by several non-fatal flaws. The author’s engagement with the relevant literary criticism occasionally results in slight misreadings of critics’ claims that wind up sharpening any distinction between theirs and her own. Scattered appearances of under-established causal claims, overgeneralizations or oversimplifications, and imprecise phrasing can detract from the flow and cogency of the author’s arguments. Some assertions may trouble only specific readers; for example, for this reader, the contention that the “writers Henry James and Virginia Woolf represent expressions of suffering...

s fascinating study of how official censorship quashed women's reproductive rights in the late nineteenth century and how a cohort of women writers resisted appears uncannily applicable to our own gothic moment, in which the Supreme Court and gerrymandered state legislatures have resurrected turn-of-the-century suppressions and responses.The June 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson uncannily exemplifies Mark Antony's declamation that "the evil men do lives after them."To support their decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the six right-wing justices revived the pronouncements of Sir Matthew Hale, a witch-burner and rape apologist, whose misogyny outstripped even the mundane cruelty of his seventeenth-century peers.Such reanimations of evil men come at the expense of de-animating the palpable living, and Hale's unnatural new life reduced living women and palpable humans with uteruses to dead matter, bereaved of agency over their own bodies.

Many cultures venerate the process of dying and view it as a moment of passing into another world beyond what the living can experience with their senses.This perception especially in Abrahamic religions and cultures shaped by these religions is the source of the spiritualization of death.The process of dying becomes a journey of the spirit leaving the body, and it is a journey that needs to be honored.The adoption of Western medicine in the Arab world, however, has shifted these perceptions from venerated spiritualization to being viewed as a strictly biological process of the end of life.This cultural shift is represented in some short stories by the Egyptian writer Yūsuf Idrīs .His narrative might have been an allusion to a secular cultural shift that is experienced by medical staff in the 1960s and 1970s, who found themselves in a liminality of cultures.Yūsuf Idrīs's short stories are analyzed in comparison with The House of God (1978) by the American author Samuel Shem (b.1944).This comparative study of the two authors' texts will examine the representation of cultural tensions in the medical field caused by the shift toward secularism, as these writers focus on how the spirituality of death can be shifted to the body and even sensualized.However, as Seamus O'Mahony suggests in The Way We Die Now (2016), in the medical field, dealing with death has become an attempt to control nature.These two representations may also be related to the illusion of control over death in the medical field.

Stephanie Peebles Tavera’s (P)rescription Narratives makes an important contribution to the literary history of gender and medical narratives as well as intervening into critical conversations concerning literary affect and material feminisms. Tavera begins her discussion on nineteenth-century medical narratives with Annie Nathan Meyers’s fascinating (and underappreciated) 1892 novel, Helen Brent, M.D. The novel’s main character, a woman physician battling dominant gender ideology of her time...

Background: During epidemic disease outbreaks, people’s daily lives are restricted by quarantine and social distancing measures that can affect not only their physical and mental health but also other aspects of their lives, including education. The quality of medical education has suffered amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, with on-site classes and conferences canceled or postponed. To address the resultant gaps in learning and supplement the rigors of formal medical teaching, recent research has suggested the use of nonfictional films. However, research on the educational and therapeutic value of fictional films is currently lacking. Methods: This study explored fiction films featuring medical practices, diseases, and treatments. The researcher conducted multiple searches using the largest internet movie databases (Internet Movie Database (IMDb), the American Film Institute Catalog, and the British Film Institute’s Collections Search) and literature research focusing on studies related to the value of films as visual learning and educational tools and their therapeutic effects on viewers in times of pandemics. Results: The researcher chose a representative selection of 20 films from over 100 years of cinematic history to educate and intellectually challenge practitioners under lockdown and use as a therapeutic tool. This study identified many ways films could be a potent instrument for medical education and a wide range of educational and therapeutic possibilities for use during public health crises. Medical fiction offers a highly entertaining and effective way to expand and improve medical knowledge and practices while respecting pandemic restrictions. The findings expand our knowledge on the value of medical fiction as an educational and therapeutic tool. Conclusions: Fictional films can be an advantageous, effective, and entertaining medium for educating physicians and improving their medical skills and practices. When public health crises or other concerns necessitate «work from home» and socially distanced conditions, movies can augment and enhance high-level medical learning and offer new perspectives that might be obscured in times of trauma, making them especially valuable for those struggling with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

After the first death of Sherlock Holmes in 1893, both Arthur Conan Doyle and L. T. Meade turned to the medical short story in order to fill the gap in the popular market. While Meade’s series in The Strand (1893–96), in collaboration with Dr Clifford Halifax, were extremely popular and created a new, sub-genre of detective fiction, Doyle’s stories, published in Round the Red Lamp (1894) were not well-received. The irony in this comes from the fact that Meade managed to adapt the Sherlock Holmes formula to medical fiction, while Doyle did not learn from his own success.

Should you set aside religious convictions to allow a medically necessary procedure to save your life? Is it wrong to interfere with those who make the choice to die for their religious convictions? In this medical and faith-based philosophical short story fiction, Jenny is a devote Christian whose life is threatened by a terminal illness. However, she can be saved by the use of stem cell technology, which she considers cloning. As such, she declines the procedure and, against the urging of her husband, accepts her pending death. Her husband secretly dismisses her wishes and lies to the doctor so that, when she is near death, she is able to accept the life-saving stem cell procedure. Jenny lives, and divorces her husband for refusing to follow her religious wishes. Her husband regrets nothing.

This essay explores the short period of time that Arthur Conan Doyle spent between March and June 1891 when he moved his family into rooms in Bloomsbury and took a consulting room near Harley Street in an attempt to set up as an eye specialist. This last attempt to move up the professional hierarchy from general practitioner to specialist tends to be seen as a final impulsive move before Conan Doyle decided to become a full-time writer in June 1891. The essay aims to elaborate a little on the medical contexts for Conan Doyle’s brief spell in London, and particularly to track the medical topography in which he placed himself, situated between the radical, reformist Bloomsbury medical institutions and the fame and riches of the society doctors of Harley Street. These ambivalences are tracked in the medical fiction he published in Round the Red Lamp, his peculiar collection of medical tales and doctoring in 1894.

Anna Kingsford’s “A Cast for a Fortune: The Holiday Adventures of a Lady Doctor” (1877) depicts a medical woman who becomes entangled in a murder plot whilst on vacation. Assuming the mantle of amateur detective, Dr Mary Thornton intervenes to prevent Dr George Pomeroy poisoning his sister-in-law, a wealthy widow. This little-known short story appeared at a critical time in the medical-woman movement in Britain. In contemporary medical writing and popular culture, the woman doctor was often represented as unfeminine and even as morbid or morally degenerate. Conversely, Kingsford portrays a healthy woman doctor who upholds professional ethics and criminal justice, while the story’s medical man is an unscrupulous villain. By exposing and denouncing Dr Pomeroy, Dr Thornton restores medicine’s reputation. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across literary studies and the history of medicine, this article positions Kingsford’s story at the advent and nexus of three emerging sub-genres: female detective fiction, the medical mystery, and medical woman fiction. I argue that, through the depiction of its heroine, “A Cast for a Fortune” constructs the amateur female sleuth and early woman doctor not as an outsider, but as the guardian of medico-morality.

The following piece is a reflection concerning the interplay between the art of writing and the art of medicine. We are exploring the similarities and disparities of the field with a focus on doctors – medical students and fiction authors/poets. We are currently medical students and we identify as poets and fiction authors since our high school years and hence we are trying to point out our perspective. In the end we give some hints about the role that literature can play in modern medicine. Key words: medicine, literature, medical humanities, fiction, poetry

Research Article| December 01 2020 Popular Medical Fiction and the Holmesian Doctor Detective in L. T. Meade's Stories from the Diary of a Doctor Christy Rieger Christy Rieger Hope College Christy Rieger is Professor of English at Mercyhurst University. She teaches courses in British literature, medicine and literature, and world literature. Her recent articles examine the representation of medicine and mystery in late-Victorian fiction. Her latest essay, “Chemical Romance: Genre and Materia Medica in Late-Victorian Drug Fiction,” was published in Victorian Literature and Culture (2019). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Victorians Institute Journal (2020) 47 (1): 115–133. https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.47.2019-20.0115 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Christy Rieger; Popular Medical Fiction and the Holmesian Doctor Detective in L. T. Meade's Stories from the Diary of a Doctor. Victorians Institute Journal 1 December 2020; 47 (1): 115–133. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.47.2019-20.0115 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressVictorians Institute Journal Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2020 Victorians Institute2020Victorians Institute Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

L’ambition de la contribution est d’étudier au sein d’une série populaire à grand succès, Les Bracelets Rouges, les conceptions et représentations des maladies et des malades quand des jeunes gens sont concernés. Sur les plans diégétique, thématique et narratif, l’originalité de la série réside dans l’entrelacement de deux traditions génériques fictionnelles, la série médicale et la série adolescente, renouvelant ainsi la caractérisation des personnages malades. Dès lors, ils peuvent se démarquer, entre autres, de la traditionnelle figure du patient et être des véritables protagonistes du récit. Les histoires de malades ne relatent pas exclusivement des histoires de maladie. Subtilement, la série montre comment la maladie et l’adolescence ont en partage d’être des moments de crise où se déclinent et se résolvent des négociations identitaires et des expériences de l’altérité. Ainsi présentée, l’adolescence ne constitue donc pas un simple cadre temporel pour les péripéties des personnages, mais permet de développer une conception de la maladie et du malade qui s’écarte des poncifs de la fiction télévisée médicale.

ABSTRACT This article discusses Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) as a work of medical fiction and partial sex education manual that engages in conversation with various Progressive-era reproductive health discourses, especially scientific sex education theory and the birth control movement. Sex education at the fin de siècle often drew upon biological texts rather than anatomical or medical texts as a way to teach reproductive health during a period of censorship under Comstock Law. Gilman's use of satire rescripts this popular comparative biology approach to sex education by using entomology rather than plant or animal biology. Through satirical inversion, parthenogenesis functions as a defense for female body autonomy—or “voluntary motherhood”—and access to birth control. Although Gilman was sincere in her feminist argument for basic reproductive rights, a feminist disability studies reading of satire in Herland reveals a eugenics approach that eliminates impaired or disabled bodies from utopia.

In the middle of the XIX century in the Kronstadt naval hospital established medical library. Area of premises 248 m2. It consists of a subscription, a reading room and medical, artistic and historical literature. The library’s collection of books is 23 288, including 10189 of the medical literature, fiction and historical literature 13 099

Medical Fiction