Phrenological controversy and the medical imagination : 'a modern Pythagorean' in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine / Megan J. Coyer.

Format:

Journal/Periodical

Author/Creator:

Coyer, Megan J., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Medicine in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Other Title:

Phrenological controversy and the medical imagination

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam : Rodopi, 2014.

Summary:

The periodical press in the early nineteenth century was a site of dynamic exchange between men of science and men of letters, and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was a particularly rich site of expression for medical ideas. This chapter explores the symbiotic relationship between the Blackwoodian prose fiction and the scientific and medical investigations of of the Glaswegian surgeon and writer, Robert Macnish (1802-37), and in particular, his explorations of altered states of consciousness and phrenology. It is argued that his prose tales reveal the Blackwoodian 'tale of terror' to be an experimental template for the medical theorist and budding phrenologist, revealing problematic sites for medical hermeneutics in early nineteenth-century Scotland.

Contents:

AcknowledgementsNotes on Contributors1. "Introduction: Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726-1832"Megan J. Coyer & David E. Shuttleton2. "'Nothing is so soon forgot as pain': Reading Agony in The Theory of Moral Sentiments"Craig Franson3. "The Origins of a Modern Medical Ethics in Enlightenment Scotland: Cheyne, Gregory and Cullen as Practitioners of Sensibility"Wayne Wild4. "The Demise of the Preformed Embryo: Edinburgh, Leiden, and the Physician-Poet Mark Akenside's Contribution to the Re-Establishing of Epigenetic Embryology"Robin Dix5. "Benjamin Rush, Edinburgh Medicine and the Rise of Physician Autobiography"Catherine Jones6. "The Construction of Robert Fergusson's Illness and Death"Rhona Brown7. "'Groaning under the miseries of a diseased nervous System': Robert Burns and Melancholy"Allan Beveridge8. "Phrenological Controversy and the Medical Imagination: 'A Modern Pythagorean' in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine"Megan J. Coyer9. "Blood and the Revenant in Walter Scott's The Fair Maid of Perth"Katherine Inglis10. "Magic, Mind Control, and the Body Electric: "Materia Medica" in Sir Walter Scott's Library at Abbotsford"Lindsay Levy11. "An Account of ... William Cullen: John Thomson and the Making of a Medical Biography"David E. Shuttleton12. "Transatlantic Irritability: Brunonian Sociology, America and Mass Culture in the Nineteenth Century"Gavin BudgeIndex.

Notes:

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