Vital signs : medical realism in nineteenth-century fiction

Resource Information

The work Vital signs : medical realism in nineteenth-century fiction represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri-St. Louis Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Vital signs : medical realism in nineteenth-century fiction

Title remainder

medical realism in nineteenth-century fiction

Statement of responsibility

Lawrence Rothfield

Creator

• Rothfield, Lawrence, 1956-

Subject

• Comparative literature -- French and English
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
• French fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
• History
• Literature and medicine -- France -- History -- 19th century
• Literature and medicine -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
• Medical fiction -- History and criticism
• Medicine in Literature
• Medicine in literature
• Physicians in literature
• Realism in literature
• Comparative literature -- English and French

Genre

• History
• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

Vital Signs offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. Rejecting theories that equate realism with representation, Lawrence Rothfield argues that literary history forms a subset of the history of discourses and their attendant practices. He shows in particular how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, and models of professional authority, and he traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism. Rothfield first demonstrates, in discussions of Balzac's The Country Doctor and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, that the nature of the connection between medicine and realism varies with the purpose and period of each author, even where realists unabashedly appropriate the clinical viewpoint. In Eliot's Middlemarch, however, a crisis of medical authority--provoked by emerging alternative scientific conceptions of the body and by medicine's loss of charismatic appeal as it consolidates into a profession--makes the connection between medicine and realism increasingly difficult to maintain. Zola and Conan Doyle respond by subordinating the clinical viewpoint to others in their "pararealistic" fiction, while modernists negate medicine's basic presuppositions about the body, truth, and professional authority. Pathology, Rothfield concludes, constitutes a category of social differentiation equivalent to race, class, or gender; it generates a politics of knowledge irreducible to either "policing power" or Marxist totalizing

Member of

• Literature in history (Princeton, N.J.)

Cataloging source

DLC

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Literature in history