Myth and (Mis)Information

This volume of essays analyses the persuasive and sometimes deceptive means by which myths, information, and beliefs about medicine and the medical professions proliferated in English literary culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It explores how English vernacular medical texts of the this period invite cross-comparisons with literary representations of health and medical practitioners, to enrich the picture of medicine in the popular imagination and to provide important perspectives on those questions surrounding authenticity, agency, representation, and accessibility that we might similarly ask about literature. Drawing from a diverse spectrum of scholarly approaches, from medical history to book history, our essays engage with a wide range of primary source material. This ranges from canonical to less well known literary and book historical sources, including the poetry of John Arbuthnot and Jane Barker, the life writing of James Boswell, and the novels of Tobias Smollett, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry Rider Haggard, and 'Mrs. Carver' of the Minerva Press; medical works by George Cheyne and Daniel Turner; and medical material aimed at popular and public audiences, including skincare remedies, anatomical flap-books, the various (self)representations and advertisements of dog-doctors, medical trademarks, and pharmacy labels. Together, this rich array of material demonstrates how popular understanding of medical work and medical figures was informed and misinformed, whether by dishonesty, false marketing or preconceived prejudice, or through being made subordinate to non-medical ends such as comic or satiric productions or political, religious, or socio-cultural priorities. What emerges is a centuries-long 'infodemic' which invites comparisons with our present moment.