Medicine is war : the martial metaphor in Victorian literature and culture / Lorenzo Servitje.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Servitje, Lorenzo, 1983- author.

Series:

SUNY Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century Series.

SUNY Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Medicine in literature.

Diseases in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (354 pages)

Place of Publication:

Albany, New York State : State University of New York Press, [2021]

Summary:

Examines how literature mediated a convergence of militarism and medicine in Victorian culture that continues into the present via a widespread martial metaphor. Medicine is most often understood through the metaphor of war. We encounter phrases such as "the war against the coronavirus," "the front lines of the Ebola crisis," "a new weapon against antibiotic resistance," or "the immune system fights cancer" without considering their assumptions, implications, and history. But there is nothing natural about this language. It does not have to be, nor has it always been, the way to understand the relationship between humans and disease. Medicine Is War shows how this "martial metaphor" was popularized throughout the nineteenth century. Drawing on the works of Mary Shelley, Charles Kingsley, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad, Lorenzo Servitje examines how literary form reflected, reinforced, and critiqued the convergence of militarism and medicine in Victorian culture. He considers how, in migrating from military medicine to the civilian sphere, this metaphor responded to the developments and dangers of modernity: urbanization, industrialization, government intervention, imperial contact, crime, changing gender relations, and the relationship between the one and the many. While cultural and literary scholars have attributed the metaphor to late nineteenth-century germ theory or immunology, this book offers a new, more expansive history stretching from the metaphor's roots in early nineteenth-century militarism to its consolidation during the rise of early twentieth-century pharmacology. In so doing, Servitje establishes literature's pivotal role in shaping what war has made thinkable and actionable under medicine's increasing jurisdiction in our lives. Medicine Is War reveals how, in our own moment, the metaphor remains conducive to harming as much as healing, to control as much as empowerment. Lorenzo Servitje is Assistant Professor of Literature and Medicine at Lehigh University. He has published several books, including Syphilis and Subjectivity: From the Victorians to the Present (coedited with Kari Nixon); Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory (coedited with Kari Nixon); and The Walking Med: Zombies and the Medical Image (coedited with Sherryl Vint).

Contents:

Denaturing the Emergent Martial Metaphor in Mary Shelley's The Last Man

"Never Say Die:": Charles Kingsley Meets Cholera Face-to-Face

Military Pasts and Medical Futures in Bram Stoker's Dracula

Arthur Conan Doyle's Imperial Armamentarium

Modernist Refractions of Tropical Medicine in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Collateral Damage: An Afterword.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781438481692

1438481691