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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
Narratives of Women’s
Health and Hysteria
in the NineteenthCentury Novel
Melissa Rampelli
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Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
Jessica Howell
Department of English
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX, USA
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Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting series
that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised
of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the
series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction
with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all
aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics
as well as established ones.
Editorial board:
Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages and
Cultures, Durham University, UK
Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK
Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony
Brook University, USA
Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA
Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies,
University of Oxford, UK
Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College,
University of Oxford, UK
Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania
State University, USA
Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK
Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA
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Melissa Rampelli
Narratives of Women’s
Health and Hysteria in
the Nineteenth-­
Century Novel
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For Brendan and Declan
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Contents
1 Introduction: Hysteria and the Plot of Pathology 1
2 The
Sentimental Heroine and Hysteria in Jane Austen’s
Sense and Sensibility 13
3 The
Woman Detective and Hysteria in Charles Dickens’s
Bleak House 53
4 The
Married Woman and Hysteria in George Eliot’s
Middlemarch105
5 The
New Woman and Hysteria in Thomas Hardy’s
The Woodlanders145
6 Epilogue:
Continued Preoccupations—The Shell-Shocked
War Veteran and Hysteria in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway197
Index211
ix
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About the Author
Melissa Rampelli is Associate Professor of English and the English and
Writing Director at Holy Family University in Philadelphia, PA. She specializes in medical humanities, nineteenth-century British literature and
culture, and the novel. Her articles have appeared in The Journal of Medical
Humanities and Modern Language Studies, and readers can find her
Psychology Today articles at her column, “The Fainting Couch.”
xi
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Hysteria and the Plot
of Pathology
What do we think of when we think of hysteria? Perhaps it is the voicelessness of Freud’s Dora, or the frenzy of the liberated Suffragette, or the
swoon of a delicately constituted woman at the sight of a black-edged
envelope. And, if we continue this line of thinking, to what do we attribute the cause in order to account for these instances or prolonged states?
Perhaps they spring from a trauma, or a proneness to sexual aberrancy, or
a finer nervous constitution as medicine has told us. But then what, based
on the cause, is the self-evident cure? Maybe it is talk therapy and dream
analysis, or the physician’s vibrator, or smelling salts and rest. In the nineteenth century, as today, the medical and cultural imagination readily followed this arc of questioning and spun plots of pathology. Every illness
had its narrative: its cause, its crisis, and its cure.
Hysteria has long been a problem to be fixed, and in fixing it, a society
has reigned in and tamed its broader social fears. When a woman’s (and,
at times throughout history, a man’s), swoons and delirious states were
labeled as symptoms of hysteria, her individual affliction was not solely a
personal matter; her disease was also a barometer of social change and of
social anxiety.1 As G. S. Rousseau writes, “hysteria itself is a reflection of
the cultures it imitates.”2 Janet Oppenheim concurs when she writes,
“[t]hat mental illness [,] as a medical category [,] reflects shifting social
1
M. Rampelli, Narratives of Women’s Health and Hysteria in the
Nineteenth-Century Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science
and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39896-4_1
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2
M. RAMPELLI
and cultural contexts is beyond dispute.”3 Social history and hysteria discourse closely twined around one another, with hysteria discourse morphing to reflect or participate in the social concerns of the day. This book
looks specifically at shifts in gender issues across the nineteenth century.
There was, at the turn of the century, for example, worry over the sexuality inherent within women’s sensibility. Though sensibility was to make a
woman a more emotionally attuned, sympathetic, and responsive mother
and wife, its focus on nerves, pulses, vibrations, and relationships toward
and with others also, by its definition, implied a sexuality that jarred with
and threatened the model of feminine virtue it was to help undergird. By
mid-century, a surge in city living and industrialization coincided with the
new field of occupational health and the ideological celebration of the
adult-breadwinner wage and separate spheres. Tension around women’s
work and health arose even as lower-middle-class and working-class
women needed to work and contribute to their family income to survive.
By the 1870s, laws had begun to slowly chip away at the assumed sanctity
of marriage as it stood, creating concern around the future of marriage as
a mainstay in women’s and society’s health. The Custody of Infants Act
(1839) allowed women to gain custody over children under the age of
seven; The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) established a
Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, allowing for divorce proceedings without an Act of Parliament; and the Married Women’s Property Act
(1870) allowed married women to retain their wages and to inherit property.4 Near the close of the century, the increasing popularity of the New
Woman lifestyle fueled fear toward a New Woman’s degenerative threats
to marriage, motherhood, and masculinity—in essence, the future of
Britain. “Hysteria,” as a medical diagnosis, has thus historically been protean in nature, because it morphs to imitate that which a culture deems
socially disruptive or diseased. Though there are essential characteristics of
a hysterical fit that have remained consistent throughout history (delirium, fainting, chills, shortness of breath, agitation, catalepsy, for example),
the causes and cures for hysteria appear historically episodic because they
are socially imitative of and responsive to their moment.
Although doctors did not produce these plots of pathology within a
cultural vacuum—nor impose a narrow medical gaze on a receiving public—at the same time, they did produce and reproduce narratives. This is,
in part, because medicine is culturally contingent. As Oppenheim writes,
“[s]cientists and medical doctors, belonging integrally to the public thus
affected, share many of the biases and expectations. Their
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1
INTRODUCTION: HYSTERIA AND THE PLOT OF PATHOLOGY
3
pronouncements are not objective, or free of implicit moral judgment, for
science and medicine are interpretive endeavors into which the surrounding social context constantly intrudes.”5 It is also, in part, because medicine is fundamentally narrative in its delineation of a desired pathway from
crisis to cure. Medical practitioners and narratologists alike have thought
of diseases as narratively structured in their changeability and causality. In
her monograph titled, How Doctors Think, Kathryn Montgomery tunes
into the narrative movement of illness when she writes, “[d]iseases are
narratives with recognizable variations unfolding over time.”6 Medicine
uses the rhetoric of narrative to discuss illness, grounding our understanding of disease and treatment in plot structures. Erika Wright anatomizes
the ever-­present “disease-cure model” as consisting of a linear movement
along the “familiar narrative arc of prelude, crisis, cure.”7 This narrative
arc is both linear and causal, since “[t]o cultivate practical wisdom in the
diagnosis and treatment of patients, physicians are taught to employ a narratively mediated casuistry.”8 To experience illness is to embark on a story
that moves, in plot points, from cause, to effects, and, ideally, to cure.
Focusing on the ailing body, John Wiltshire claims how “[t]he unhealthy
body, as a site of anxious self-concentration, is the source of events, of narrative energies,’”9 and, in agreement, Athena Vrettos follows up that “[t]o
be ill is to produce narrative.’”10 In their medical practice, doctors and
nurses, like the detective Sherlock Holmes, must begin with the effects of
illness and reason backward to the causes of disease. Montgomery uses the
language of “[c]linical plots” to discuss how doctors think in terms of
stories, employing narratives of “hundreds of maladies and their variants”
in their daily work.11 On the patient-provider level, the actual process of
diagnosis is fundamentally interpretive and narrative: “the knowledge possessed by clinicians is narratively constructed and transmitted.”12 The clinician listens to the patient’s story and then works, like a detective, to map
out the narrative of the disease from effects (backward) to cause and then
(forward) to cure. But medical practitioners are not alone in using narrative rhetoric to discuss patients and diseases. On the other hand, narratologists and literary critics also use the rhetoric of medicine to discuss
fictional plots. As Wright articulates, “[m]edical rhetoric, particularly the
language associated with crisis and recovery, seeps naturally into theories
of narrative action.”13 Examining Peter Brook’s Reading for the Plot and
D.A. Miller’s Narrative and its Discontents, in particular, Wright illuminates how “both critics examine the reader’s and the narrative’s
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4
M. RAMPELLI
relationship to beginnings and ends and to the traditional narrative of
crisis and recovery.”14 In both medicine and in literature, the narrative
impulse is to dispel the “undesirable or diseased.”15
Understandably, doctors and patients gravitate toward discovering,
delineating, and discussing medical plots because doing so offers knowledge of structured causality and, subsequently, a sense of comfort and
control. As Roy Porter explains, “[t]he public wants from doctors explanations no less than medications; society looks to the profession for exhortation and excuses. Medicine is called upon to supply stories about the
nature of man and the order of things.”16 Montgomery elaborates, posturing that “[t]o know the cause of disease is to have control. Medicine is
driven by it, and patients and their families are part of that drive.”17
Though she acknowledges that disease is anything but simple and linear,
Montgomery points out that we as a society want to view medicine as
“[s]atisfactorily linear” and operating according to a “simple causal norm”
because doing so carves out space for intervention.18 If medical providers
can identify the cause and effects, then they can intervene in this chain “so
as to alter outcome.”19 Although this approach may appear too simplistic
and reductive in its focus on “stimulus and response,” so long as it allows
for palliative and curative efforts, we will seek comfort in it.20
This drive to narratively structure medicine along the linear plot (from
cause to crisis to cure) can be both beneficial and disciplinarian in nature.
These narratives are generally thought of as an advantageous because, as
discussed above, this plotting identifies spaces in which medical personnel
can intercede and alter the prognosis. On the individual level of the
patient, it can alter an individual’s personal outlook by making daily affliction more endurable and providing hope. In Healing Dramas and Clinical
Plots, Mattingly discusses the role of narrativism in therapeutic clinical
work. She calls the process of shaping treatments and recovery into a plot
“therapeutic emplotment”; “[t]his form of therapeutic emplotment may
also influence or change the patient’s time horizon for the course of the
illness, by establishing a link between the medical interventions and the
trajectory of recovery, and engendering hope of eventual cure.”21 If, as
research has suggested, a patient’s psychological outlook can affect the
patient’s physical health, then this therapeutic emplotment can have positive implications for a person’s outcome.
However, given how hysteria discourse developed its own plots of
pathology in relation to the broader social concerns of the day, the identified social impetus behind the disease can be problematic for groups.
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INTRODUCTION: HYSTERIA AND THE PLOT OF PATHOLOGY
5
When, in his 1896 Lowell Lectures on Exceptional Mental States, William
James wrote about medical men learning the “danger of drawing the line
of health too narrowly,” he not only acknowledged how doctors, and society at large, shape the narratives and signs of illness, but also implied how
this power to define health can dangerously pathologize actions, behaviors, and states of being.22 In Reading for Health, a project that is adjacent
to the Foucauldian model, Wright discusses the disciplinarian energy of
emplotment:
For the doctor, illness is a problem to solve; it must be diagnosed, treated,
and cured. For the patient, illness is an obstacle to overcome or perhaps a
punishment for sin. Indeed illness forces us to take notice of our bodies and
behaviors, to experience compassion, to purge, to repent. In contrast, health
signifies the absence of all of this: if anything it functions merely as the end
of the action, the prize rewarded. It provides the requisite closure or the
inaugurating condition that incites narrative.23
The plot of pathology narrates, broadly, the movement from states of
health to illness to recovery.
I look to Erika Wright’s mapping of the therapeutic plot, which she
adopts from Galen’s demarcation between hygiene and therapeutics, for
my definition of the telos of disease in nineteenth-century novels and culture. In Reading for Health, Wright’s therapeutic plot, which I am calling
the plot of pathology, is a “familiar narrative arc of prelude, crisis, and
cure.”24 Within this teleological narrative model, the “prelude” serves as
an inaugural period of physical and moral health when the catalyst for illness is introduced. The middle stage (crisis) narrates the illness, which
becomes “a problem to solve” for the doctor and an “obstacle to overcome
or perhaps punishment for sin” for the patient.25 The final state, or cure, is
a period of recovery wherein a person has purged or repented and gains
physical and moral health as a reward.26 Fashioning illness as a state to
overcome and a problem to solve provides narrative energy and the trajectory toward cure. But if, as I have argued, hysteria has been defined
amongst social and historical conditions, then it becomes inextricably
linked to an individual’s behaviors and state of being. Cure becomes the
drive against illness and also the drive against inciting causes. Behaviors
and conditions regarded as causative become pathological. In this narrative model, then, illness can serve as a morally or philosophically chastising
force, and the cure can right an individual and a society by purging the
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6
M. RAMPELLI
social ill, if only temporarily. This disciplinarian model—building off of
Wright, D.A. Miller, and Brooks—is the model that informs my analysis here.
My examination of novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George
Eliot, and Thomas Hardy thus focuses in on two main points. Each chapter examines, in part, how the cause and cure for a given character’s hysterical illness intersect with social norms and fears of the day, separating
out what is deemed normal and what is deemed pathological in behavior.
Secondly, and most importantly, I argue that these nineteenth-century
authors used generic literary figures to intervene in these medical and
cultural narratives. The authors under study play with and manipulate
stock narrative figures in literature to offer their new definitions of women’s health. Austen takes up the sentimental heroine; Dickens focuses on
the detective figure; Eliot uses the married woman; and Hardy centers on
the New Woman. Manipulating the literary stock figures enables them to
critique existing cultural narratives about women’s health. These literary
types become the literary authors’ entry point to intervene in medical and
cultural discourse.
The chapters thus function as case studies for how each type of literary
stock character can be used to intercede in the medical and cultural narrative, expanding the definition of women’s health and offering a fuller
range of experience for women. Each chapter could have expanded well
into a book in itself on how Eliot, for example, used the figure of the married women or Hardy used the figure of the New Woman in his novels.
This project is not exhaustive in its examination of each author’s oeuvre.
Rather, each chapter serves a case study for how the given author uses a
character, or constellation of characters, within the novel as a physician
would examine an individual patient. Moreover, each of the four chapters
and epilogue take a more episodic approach rather than following a linear
or sequential history of hysteria given that medicine responded to the
concerns of the time. In the end, each chapter analyzes a moment in medical and literary time: one literary figure in a particular medical and cultural moment.
Chapter 2 situates Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) in relation to
the sensibility-hysteria plot of pathology. Among concerns of sensibility’s
implied sexuality, sensibility and hysteria conjoined on a double-sided coin
with hysteria playing sensibility’s dangerous doppelganger. Reigning in
one’s sensibility (so as to not slide down the slippery slope into excess and
illness) depended on a woman’s will and power to exert herself as a
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INTRODUCTION: HYSTERIA AND THE PLOT OF PATHOLOGY
7
self-­governed subject. In the sensibility-hysteria plot at the turn of the
century, the deciding fulcrum between wellness and illness was a woman’s
adherence to moderation and delicacy. According to the medicine of the
day, those women who became hysterical, like Austen’s Marianne
Dashwood, did so because a lapse in individual will allowed bodily processes and sexual desires to consume them. The cure was to enforce selfexertion in order to return Marianne, and others, to a state of prized
self-governance and wellness. But Austen uses the sentimental heroine
ironically in the context of the sensibility-hysteria narrative. She treats the
insistence on Marianne’s “exertion” to regain health ironically and in
doing so teases out the idealist assumptions of certain models of sensibility. By revising the content of the stages of the plot of pathology, the novel
ultimately forwards a more psychophysiological theory of mind-body relationality as a cornerstone for health. Austen’s model of mind-body coconstitution in Sense and Sensibility challenges a cultural climate that
predicated the self-­governed subject’s health upon the mind’s ability to
control the material agency of the body. Austen still champions the selfgoverned subject, but she bases this stability on mind-body relationality
that in effect undercuts the absolute idealization of the mind and the gender implications of this idealization.
Chapter 3 contextualizes Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–1853) within
the “mental emotion” plot, which claimed that women’s inability to adequately process external stimuli led to morbid emotions and hysterical fits.
This cautionary medical tale dove-tailed with occupational health’s concerns over working women’s health in a period when numerous working-­
class and lower-middle-class women needed to work yet felt pressured to
uphold idealized views of women’s gentility and respectability. If Dickens’s
Esther Summerson was under the care of a leading physician of the day, he
would likely attribute her fainting fits while accompanying Inspector
Bucket through London to her constitutional inability to handle exposure
to her city environs. The cure would be for Esther to return to her housekeeping duties within the gates of Bleak House and leave the amateur
detective work for the all-male inspectors and constables of The
Metropolitan Police. I argue that Dickens uses the detective figure in
Bleak House in the context of the detective genre and the mental-emotion
narrative. By foregrounding Inspector Bucket’s stimuli- and environment-­
dependent detective process and extending it to his amateur women
detectives—Mrs. Bucket, Mrs. Bagnet, and (at times) Esther Summerson—
Bleak House offers an image of women using what I term bodily knowing
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8
M. RAMPELLI
for the betterment of the community with no risk to their own health or
domestic roles as wives and mothers. Further, by locating much of Esther’s
hysteria within the scope of personal and domestic concerns, Dickens challenges the sanctity of the home as a guarantee of women’s health. In doing
so, the novel speaks to the tension between the rhetoric and reality of
women’s work and health, and suggests that negotiating this rift can start
within the home.
Chapter 4 frames Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871) within the persistence of
an ancient medical narrative about marriage long after other scientific and
medical advancements had come to light by the nineteenth century. As
laws began shifting the legal frameworks of child custody and coverture,
and thus slowly eroding the definition of a married woman as one in flesh
and identity as her husband, many physicians continued to implicitly hold
onto the ancient belief in the curative power of marriage. A hysterical fit
may be brought on by disappointed courtship or a broken engagement; or
it may be brought on by engaging in academic study and subsequently
delayed marriage. When Eliot published Middlemarch, she did so in a
medical climate where marriage could be both prevention and cure, and
safeguarding oneself from illness was only a matter of marrying and staying married. In this context, her use of the married woman figure and the
double marriage plot in Middlemarch is especially pertinent. She takes on
the role of medical practitioner, using Dorothea as a case study to trace her
degrees of health in relation to her marital state. Dorothea’s first marriage
to Mr. Casaubon does not safeguard her from illness but rather contributes to her dwindling health; her second, more compatible, marriage to
Will Ladislaw depends upon (rather than initiates) her recovery. Similar to
Austen’s project in Sense and Sensibility, Eliot rewrites the content, if not
sequence, of the marriage plot and challenges the assumptions about
women’s constitutions and health that underlie the medical understanding
of gendered hysteria. In doing so, she joins a broader cultural dialogue
that has begun to question the assumed sanctity of marriage.
Chapter 5 positions Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) within the context of two plots of degeneration: the impressionable degenerate and, secondly, the sexual and social devolution of the New Woman degenerate.
Just as the New Woman emerged on the literary scene and women were
entering new legal, educational, professional, and industrial positions, hysteria garnered increased attention and a broader diagnostic scope. Theories
of hysteria and degeneracy began to overlap and a new centuric being
emerged: the hysterical degenerate. Hysterical degeneracy was brought on
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INTRODUCTION: HYSTERIA AND THE PLOT OF PATHOLOGY
9
by the nervous fatigue of fin de siècle life, and the result was impressionability and a powerlessness, in addition to other classic hysterical symptoms. The cure became a policing of so-called degenerate philosophies
and modern behaviors. For those hysterical offenders like Hardy’s sexually
emancipated Felice Charmond and well-educated Grace Melbury, theories
of the day advised a return to women’s traditional roles. A second plot of
pathology near the end of the century responded to the New Woman by
describing how a woman’s adoption of these new behaviors could un-sex
her and render her hysterical to the detriment of herself and the posterity
of the country. Marty South’s gradual transformation into androgyny in
The Woodlanders would have been attributed to her independent economic position as a worker. Hardy uses these two New Woman figures—
Grace Melbury and Marty South—in the context of the New Woman
genre and the devolutionary narrative of the hysterical degenerate. Hardy
casts Felice Charmond and Edred Fitzpiers as classic case studies for
degenerate powerlessness to set up an analogue between so-called degenerate theories of will and heteropatriarchal will over women. In doing so,
he exposes the degeneracy of marriage custom and law: if a powerlessness
of will is a sign of degeneracy, then women’s needful passivity to father and
husband figures in marriage law is likewise a sign of social degeneracy. By
this logic, The Woodlanders asks readers to rethink whether “degeneracy”
is really a problem of the new and to acknowledge that some sacrosanct,
traditional customs and laws need revision for the health of the people and
the country. Secondly, Hardy tests theories of the un-sexed New Woman
through Marty South, who becomes increasingly androgynous through
acts of labor and financial exchange. Hardy charts her evolution into
androgyny but her descent into bodily or mental illness is pointedly missing from her fate. Rather, Marty becomes emblematic of the “unsexing”
that has to occur in order for English society to resist degeneracy. Through
Grace’s and Marty’s fates, The Woodlanders urges moving away from traditional models of marriage and toward more “abstract humanism” for
men and women alike.
This book concludes by drawing the proceeding chapters together on
the note that cultural ideologies are neither episodically isolated nor progressively linear, and thus these medio-cultural anxieties and plots of
pathology re-emerge, overlap, and intertwine in real time.27 The Epilogue
focuses in on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) to consider how the
British novel continued to be preoccupied with issues fundamental to
nineteenth-century conceptions of the mind-body connection beyond
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M. RAMPELLI
Victoria’s reign. Anxieties around the morbid power of emotion, the
porosity of the self, and lapses in will coalesce, but this time in the figure
of the effeminate, traumatized male War veteran.
Narratives of Women’s Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century
Novel takes up these four nineteenth-century novels as case studies to
examine the constellation of social history, hysteria discourse, stock literary figures, and narrative. Rousseau posits that “the unwritten history of
hysteria…is … a social history of hysteria placed in large cultural contexts
that do not mute the gleanings of literary and artistic voices. This broad
record, if appended to the medical one, is more revealing than the narrow
‘medical gaze.’”28 This book claims that examining these authors’ literary
intercessions into hysteria discourse through their use of stock literary figures further reveals to readers the gender politics latent in nineteenth-­
century medicine and literature. These authors fundamentally question
the way society narrates women’s subjectivity and health in their historical
moment and proffer new narratives of health of their own, thus challenging but also joining the “medical gaze” for a fuller history of hysteria.
Notes
1. I pause here to address the use of “women” and “woman” throughout this
monograph. Most of the fictional and medical texts I take up operate
according to binary understandings of gender; they often showcase essentialist thinking about “men” and “women” or conflate the categories of
biological sex and gender identification/expression. Given my aim to analyze hysteria discourse as historically contingent, my framework for discussing gender throughout this book, while outdated for our contemporary
times, reflects the discourse in nineteenth-century hysteria texts and
literature.
2. G. S. Rousseau, “‘A Strange Pathology’: Hysteria in the Early Modern
World, 1500–1800,” in Hysteria beyond Freud, ed. G. S. Rousseau
(Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 106.
3. Janet Oppenheim, Janet. “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and
Depression in Victorian England (New York, NY: Oxford University Press,
1991), 50.
4. Rachel Ablow, “‘One Flesh,’ One Person, and the 1870 Married Women’s
Property Act,” ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Romanticism and Victorianism
on the Net. BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century
History, May 2012.
5. Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves, 4.
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1
INTRODUCTION: HYSTERIA AND THE PLOT OF PATHOLOGY
11
6. Kathryn Montgomery, How Doctors Think: Clinical Judgment and the
Practice of Medicine (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), 63.
7. Erika Wright, Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-­
Century Novel. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2016), 6.
8. Kathryn Montgomery Hunter, Doctors’ Stories: The Narrative Structure of
Medical Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), 156.
9. John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body: “The Picture of Health”
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 9.
10. Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 2.
11. Montgomery, How Doctors Think, 58.
12. Hunter, Doctors’ Stories, xvii.
13. Wright, Reading for Health, 11.
14. Ibid., 11.
15. Ibid., 12.
16. Roy Porter, “The Body and the Mind, The Doctor and the Patient:
Negotiating Hysteria,” in Hysteria Beyond Freud, ed. G. S. Rousseau
(Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 241.
17. Montgomery, How Doctors Think, 57.
18. Ibid., 60, 62.
19. Ibid., 62.
20. Ibid., 77.
21. Lars-Christer Hyden, “Medicine and Narrative,” in Routledge Encyclopedia
of Narrative Theory, ed, David Herman (London, UK: Routledge,
2005), 296.
22. Eugene Taylor, William James on Exceptional Mental States: The 1896
Lowell Lectures (Amherst, MA: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1983), 110.
23. Wright, Reading for Health, 5.
24. Ibid., 6.
25. Ibid., 5.
26. Ibid., 5.
27. For a chronological history of medical theories on hysteria, see Veith.
28. Rousseau, “A Strange Pathology,” 106.
Bibliography
Ablow, Rachel. “‘One Flesh,’ One Person, and the 1870 Married Women’s
Property Act.” Edited by Dino Franco Felluga. Romanticism and Victorianism
on the Net. BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century
History, May 2012. https://branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=rachel-­ablow-­
one-­flesh-­one-­person-­and-­the-­1870-­married-­womens-­property-­act.
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
12
M. RAMPELLI
Hunter, Kathryn Montgomery. Doctors’ Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical
Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021.
Hyden, Lars-Christer. “Medicine and Narrative.” Essay. In Routledge Encyclopedia
of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, 293–97. London, UK:
Routledge, 2005.
Montgomery, Kathryn. How Doctors Think: Clinical Judgment and the Practice of
Medicine. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Oppenheim, Janet. “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in
Victorian England. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Porter, Roy. “The Body and the Mind, The Doctor and the Patient: Negotiating
Hysteria.” Essay. In Hysteria Beyond Freud, edited by G. S. Rousseau, 225–66.
Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1993.
Rousseau, G. S. “A Strange Pathology’: Hysteria in the Early Modern World,
1500–1800.” Essay. In Hysteria beyond Freud, edited by G. S. Rousseau,
91–221. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1993.
Taylor, Eugene. William James on Exceptional Mental States: The 1896 Lowell
Lectures. Amherst, MA: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1983.
Veith, Ilza. Hysteria: The History of a Disease. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago, 1965.
Vrettos, Athena. Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Wiltshire, John. Jane Austen and the Body: “The Picture of Health”. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Wright, Erika. Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century
Novel. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2016.
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