Myth and (Mis)Information : Constructing the Medical Professions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century English Literature and Culture

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. -- .

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. -- .