In his 1768 Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, a text that went through six editions between 1768 and 1811, James Lind describes the coastal regions of West Africa in a manner that indicates that medical and aesthetic appreciations of landscape are not necessarily equivalent. Upon examining the face of the country, it is found clothed with a pleasant and perpetual verdure, he writes, but altogether uncultivated, excepting a few spots, which are generally surrounded with forests or thickets of trees, impenetrable to refreshing breezes, and fit only for the resort of wild beasts.' This passage provides a useful point of departure for understanding the medical geopolitics of landscape in Charlotte Brontt's work. Jane Eyre's description of the environs of the Orphan Asylum is similar to Lind's in that it is shaped as much by the language of medical geography as by aesthetics. Initially, we are presented with what appears to be an idyllic scene. With the coming of spring, Lowood shook loose its tresses; it became green, flowery; its great elm, ash, and oak skeletons were restored to majestic life; woodland plants sprang up profusely in its recesses; unnumbered varieties of moss filled its hollows, and it made a strange ground sunshine out of the wealth of its wild primrose plants.2 Jane declares that all this I enjoyed often and fully, freed, unwatched, and almost alone. We learn, however, that the unwonted liberty that underlies this Romantic appreciation of nature has been made possible by the appearance of epidemic typhus at Lowood, caused she believes by these surroundings. Thus, disease can be said to be integrally bound up with both this landscape and its appreciation: