Medical Progress and Social Reality: A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Medicine and Literature (SUNY series, The Margins of Literature)

An anthology of nineteenth-century literature about medicine and medical issues.

Medical Progress and Social Reality is an anthology of nineteenth-century literature on medicine and medical practice. Situated at the interdisciplinary juncture of medicine, history, and literature, it includes mostly fictional but also some nonfictional works by British, French, American, and Russian writers that describe the day-to-day social realities of medicine during a period of momentous change. Issues addressed in these works include the hierarchy in the profession, the use of new instruments such as the stethoscope, the advent of women doctors, the function of the hospital, and the shifting balance of power between physicians and patients. The volume provides an introductory overview of the most important aspects of medical progress in the nineteenth century, and it includes an annotated bibliography of further readings in medical history and literature. Selections from Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Sarah Orne Jewett, Sinclair Lewis, Mikhail Bulgakov, and others are included, as well as the American Medical Association's 1847 Code of Ethics.

"The first such resource of its kind for the study of medicine in literature. Furst's introductions and selections show that nineteenth-century literature can help students understand current medical practice because it portrays the beginnings of technological and scientific medicine, with problems, values, situations, and relationships that are still with us today." -- Peter W. Graham, coauthor of Articulating the Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick and His Interpreters

"Lilian Furst has produced a welcome and useful addition to the growing field of medical humanities. Premedical and medical students as well as doctors with an interest in medical literature and history will find this a delightful and informative read." -- Larry Zaroff, M.D., Stanford University School of Medicine