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.
Author(s): Sandra Dinter, Sarah Schäfer-Althaus
Series: Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 301
City: Cham
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
