56 research outputs found
Medicine and improvement in the Scots Magazine; and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany, 1804-17
No full textMegan Coyer’s chapter engages with periodical print as a vehicle for an improving medical culture in Scotland, concentrating on the second series of the Scots Magazine. Coyer demonstrates how the Scottish press often complemented improving civic initiatives like the Edinburgh Lunatic Asylum campaign. She focuses attention on the distinctive national dynamics associated with medical improvement efforts in early nineteenth-century Scotland, with the Scots Magazine ‘providing a public forum for the expression of a national medical identity’. This identity, as Coyer shows, had an ideology of improvement at its core. This work recovers the cultural significance of the Scots Magazine as ‘the third major player in popular periodical culture in Romantic-era Scotland’; a status overshadowed by the recent critical attention devoted to the second Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s in Scottish Romantic studies. Coyer also shows how the efforts of public health reformers highlight the complexity of improvement as both a material and moral process. She argues that print efforts dedicated to improving public health represent a ‘discursive strand in the magazine identifying a lack of cleanliness … as a moral and material blight on an otherwise improving Scottish society’. This bringing together of moral and practical aspects of improvement in the Scots also finds expression in the magazine’s series of Scottish medical biographies, whose narratives, Coyer notes, provide ‘ideal exemplars of lives dedicated to a culture of improvement’
Phrenological controversy and the medical imagination: 'a modern Pythagorean' in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
No full textNo abstract available
Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1817-1858
No full textThe first major study of the relationship between Scottish Romanticism and medical culture. In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press investigates how Romantic periodicals cultivated innovative literary forms, ideologies and discourses that reflected and shaped medical culture in the nineteenth century. It examines several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential literary periodical of the time, and draws upon extensive archival and bibliographical research to reclaim these previously neglected medico-literary figures. Situating their work in relation to developments in medical and periodical culture, Megan Coyer's book advances our understanding of how the nineteenth-century periodical press cross-fertilised medical and literary ideas
Transatlantic Irritability : Brunonian Sociology, America and Mass Culture in the Nineteenth Century
No full textThe widespread influence exerted by the medical theories of Scottish doctor, John Brown, whose eponymously named Brunonianism radically simplified the ideas of his mentor, William Cullen, has not been generally recognised. However, the very simplicity of the Brunonian medical model played a key role in ensuring the dissemination of medical ideas about nervous irritability and the harmful effects of overstimulation in the literary culture of the nineteenth century and shaped early sociological thinking. This chapter suggests the centrality of these medical ideas, as mediated by Brunonianism, to the understanding of Romanticism in the nineteenth century, and argues that Brunonian ideas shaped nineteenth-century thinking about the effects of mass print culture in ways which continue to influence contemporary thinking about the effects of media
‘Delta’: The Construction of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Surgeon
No full textThis chapter examines the construction of David Macbeth Moir (1798–1851), a prolific Blackwoodian author and surgeon, as a medical poet, by himself and others, both within Blackwood’s and beyond, as a key component of a redemptive counter-discourse of medical humanism. The idealistic image of the ‘humanistic’ literary medical man is read as developing, in part, as a counter to the negative cultural representations of medicine exacerbated by the anatomy murders as well as the growing divisions between medico-scientific and literary cultures and the perceived negative consequences of the ‘march of intellect’. Moir’s place within a tradition of literary medical men in Scotland and his role in debates surrounding the reform of medical education are discussed, as are key projects, including essays published in Blackwood’s and Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, his Outlines of the Ancient History of Medicine (1831), and his poetry.</p
Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726-1832
No full textScottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726–1832 examines the ramifications of Scottish medicine for literary culture within Scotland, throughout Britain, and across the transatlantic world. The contributors take an informed historicist approach in examining the cultural, geographical, political, and other circumstances enabling the dissemination of distinctively Scottish medico-literary discourses. In tracing the international influence of Scottish medical ideas upon literary practice they ask critical questions concerning medical ethics, the limits of sympathy and the role of belles lettres in professional self-fashioning, and the development of medico-literary genres such as the medical short story, physician autobiography and medical biography. Some consider the role of medical ideas and culture in the careers, creative practice and reception of such canonical writers as Mark Akenside, Robert Burns, Robert Fergusson, Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth. By providing an important range of current scholarship, these essays represent an expansion and greater penetration of critical vision
The construction of Robert Fergusson's illness and death
No full textThis article charts the biographical, fictional and medical constructions of Robert Fergusson’s (1750-74) illness and death from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Fergusson died at the age of 24 in Edinburgh’s Asylum for Pauper Lunatics. Because of this sad fact, commentators have become preoccupied with the legend of his illness and death. In this article, I analyse the changing attitudes towards Fergusson’s illness throughout the centuries by interrogating biographical constructions, fictional imaginings and modern diagnoses of his condition, in order to reflect on changing attitudes towards mental illness and artistic creativity
Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726-1832
No full textScottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726–1832 examines the ramifications of Scottish medicine for literary culture within Scotland, throughout Britain, and across the transatlantic world. The contributors take an informed historicist approach in examining the cultural, geographical, political, and other circumstances enabling the dissemination of distinctively Scottish medico-literary discourses. In tracing the international influence of Scottish medical ideas upon literary practice they ask critical questions concerning medical ethics, the limits of sympathy and the role of belles lettres in professional self-fashioning, and the development of medico-literary genres such as the medical short story, physician autobiography and medical biography. Some consider the role of medical ideas and culture in the careers, creative practice and reception of such canonical writers as Mark Akenside, Robert Burns, Robert Fergusson, Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth. By providing an important range of current scholarship, these essays represent an expansion and greater penetration of critical vision
An account of...William Cullen: John Thomson and the making of a medical biography
No full textJohn Thomson’s An Account of the Life, Lectures and Writings of William Cullen (1832; 1859) remains a primary source for the career of the most influential academic physician in eighteenth-century Scotland and is also a significant work of medical history. But this multi-authored text, begun around 1810 by the academic surgeon, John Thomson, but only completed in 1859 by Dr David Craigie, has its own complex history. This chapter addresses what this history can reveal about the development of medical biography as a literary genre. It argues that the Account is a hybrid work shaped by a complex array of practical, domestic, intellectual, and professional pressures, as Thomson, in seeking to bolster his own career, was caught between the demands of Cullen’s children for a traditional “Life” and his own more theoretical and socio-cultural interests
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