Modern Literature, Illness, and Medicine

Catalog description

The meteoric rise of the medical profession, starting in the late 19th century, with its strictly “materialist” approach to health--and its unprecedented separation from “spirituality” and what is now called “psychology”--has greatly transformed the very conception of the human being. From that period until now, literature, which is of course centrally concerned with characters and human experience, has both reflected and contested this modern medicalization. We will consider the literary representations of illness and doctors--and their relation to the medical versions of these--in American works, as well as a couple of European works that had great impact in the US, from the 1890s to the present