Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture

Description

Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture analyses the cultural and literary histories of medicine and mobility as entangled processes whose discourses and practices constituted, influenced, and transformed each other. Presenting case studies of novels, poetry, travel narratives, diaries, ship magazines, skin care manuals, asylum records, press reports, and various other sources, its chapters identify and discuss diverse literary, historical, and cultural texts, contexts, and modes in which medicine and mobility intersected in nineteenth-century Britain, its empire, and beyond, whereby they illustrate how the paradigms of mobility studies and the medical humanities can complement each other. Acknowledgements Contents Notes on Contributors List of Figures Chapter 1: Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture: An Introduction Historical Coordinates: Medicine, Mobility, and Their Entanglements in Nineteenth-Century Britain Theoretical Cornerstones: Mobility Studies and the Medical Humanities Dissecting Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Contributions Works Cited Part I: Travel and Health Chapter 2: Doctors’ Ships: Voyages for Health in the Late Nineteenth Century The Ocean as a Health Resort A Doctor’s Narrative: Francis Workman Life On-Board the Sobraon: Passenger Narratives Ship Newspapers The Arrival of the Invalids Conclusion: Slow Travel for Health Works Cited Chapter 3: Watering Holes: Healthy Waters and Moral Dangers in the Nineteenth-Century Novel Bathing Spas and Seaside Resorts The Novel Conclusion: Spa Novels and Sedentarism Notes Works Cited Chapter 4: Embodied Interdependencies of Health and Travel in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles Movements of Travellers and Dancers Ailing and Itinerant Bodies as Liminal Spaces of Health Maternity, Mobility, and Mortality Conclusion: Victorian Heroines’ Health and Travel Notes Works Cited Chapter 5: (Mental) Health and Travel: Reflections on the Benefits of Idling in the Victorian Age Mary Shelley and (Mental) Health Taking a Rest? Dickens and Collins Gissing’s Brooding Conclusion: Resting Minds in Idly Moving Bodies Notes Works Cited Part II: Pathologising Mobilities Chapter 6: Upright Posture and Gendered Styles of Body Movements in The Mill on the Floss Masculine Variations of Body Movements: Tom’s Correct Posture Feminine Variations of Body Movements: Maggie’s Deviant Posture Conclusion: Maggie’s Expansion of the Victorian Repertoire of Feminine Mobility and Beyond Works Cited Chapter 7: The Mobility of Water: Aquatic Transformation and Disease in Victorian Literature Mobile Matter Aquatic Transformations: Rain as an Agent of Disease in The Woman in White The Flow of Disease: Aquatic Infection in Three Men in a Boat Conclusion: Aquatic Agency and Mobility Works Cited Chapter 8: A “Feverish Restlessness”: Dance as Decadent Mobility in Late Victorian Poetry Urban Mobility, Dance, and the Medical Rhetoric of Late Victorian Cultural Criticism Compulsive Restlessness: Oscar Wilde’s Dancers The Malady of Monotony: Arthur Symons’s Dancers Paralysis and Desire: Michael Field’s Dancers Conclusion: Progressing in Circles Works Cited Chapter 9: The Wandering Irish: Mobility and Lunacy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Lancashire Reception, Discrimination, and Anti-Irishness Migration, Wandering, and Asylum Admissions Anti-Irish Hostility and Stereotyping Irish Insanity Conclusion: Irish Mobility, Sympathy, and Frustration Works Cited Part III: Mobilities and Medical Regimens Chapter 10: Exposure, Friction, and “Peculiar Feelings”: Mobile Skin in Victorian Medicine and Literature Exercise: The Skin in Motion Checked Perspiration: The Motions of the Skin Horseback Riding: Cutaneous Friction The Railway Carriage: The Skin as Contact Zone Works Cited Chapter 11: White Fluff/Black Pigment: Health Commodity Culture and Victorian Imperial Geographies of Dependence Victorian (Health) Commodity Culture and the Tropics Agents of Disease: Intercontinental and Domestic Ecologies Conclusion: Health, Commodities, and Global Networks of Dependence Works Cited Chapter 12: From Heroic Exploration to Careful Control: Mobility, Health, and Medicine in the British African Empire Travelling in the Shadow of Fever Mobility as Prophylaxis and Cure Regimes of Care in British Central Africa Female Explorer-Hero in West Africa: Mary Kingsley on Mobility and Health Conclusion: From Transit to Settlement and Back Again—Mobilities, Contacts, and Colonial Health Works Cited Index