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In eighteenth-century Britain the worlds of literature and medicine were closely intertwined, and a diverse group of people participated in the circulation of medical knowledge. In this pre-professionalized milieu, several women writers made important contributions by describing a range of common yet often devastating illnesses.
In Reimagining Illness Heather Meek reads works by six major eighteenth-century women writers – Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frances Burney – alongside contemporaneous medical texts to explore conditions such as hysteria, melancholy, smallpox, maternity, consumption, and breast cancer. In novels, poems, letters, and journals, these writers drew on their learning and literary skill as they engaged with and revised male-dominated medical discourse. Their works provide insight into the experience of suffering and interrogate accepted theories of women’s bodies and minds. In ways relevant both then and now, these women demonstrate how illness might be at once a bodily condition and a malleable construct full of ideological meaning and imaginative possibility.
Reimagining Illness offers a new account of the vital period in medico-literary history between 1660 and 1815, revealing how the works of women writers not only represented the medicine of their time but also contributed meaningfully to its developments.
“A genuinely insightful, multi-perspective overview of the literature of a period that was rife with intense intellectual tumult.” Polish Review of English Studies
"Meek she resists the temptation to tell simple stories of patriarchal oppression, instead staying attentive to complexity in both the medical and the literary texts. Highly recommended." Choice
“Reimagining Illness is a deeply researched and eminently readable study that offers new insights into canonical figures and texts as well as an important reminder of the value of reading literary and medical texts for their contributions to one another’s home discourses. Individual chapters not only extend understandings of the specific authors and of eighteenth-century medical knowledge about specific ailments, but also shift how we read the many genres through which medicine has been written.” *Social History of Medicine *
“Through six case studies, Reimagining Illness positions women not as mute objects of male medical science, but as active agents analysing their experience of sickness and its treatment. In Meek's excellent survey, diseased women write back, laying claim to consideration as “medical thinkers” in their own right. Meek takes the reader securely through this unfamiliar landscape of medical ideas. Orientation within chapters is provided by punchy subtitles, masterful lead sentences launching each paragraph, and compelling summary. Concerned though it is with suffering ... it is a pleasure to read.” Times Literary Supplement
"Reimagining Illness is a strong contribution to the study of women writers and illness, ... Meek’s research is thorough, and she engages with relevant scholarship in productive ways." Social History
"A genuinely insightful, multi-perspective overview of a literature of a period that was rife with intense intellectual tumult. [Meek] invites readers on a fascinating journey that encompasses literature, history, philosophy, culture, sociology, and medicine." Polish Journal of English Studies
"Through Meek’s in-depth analysis of the poems, essays, novels, journals, and letters they produced in the long 18th century, these women writers emerge from this study as thoughtful – though too often marginalized – members of the medical scientific community. Meek's detailed and convincing analysis makes it clear that illness could not help but occupy the imaginations of those who put pen to paper in the 18th century." Labour/Le Travail
"An important contribution both to literature and to the history of medicine and science, foregrounding women’s creativity and expertise even as patriarchal stereotypes of women’s inferiority persisted. [It] left me with a profound sense of the power of eighteenth-century women’s autonomy and individuality of body and thought." British Journal for the History of Science
"Reimagining Illness calls for a more capacious definition of scientific authorship—one that includes narrative and embodied experience as forms of knowledge work. Meek’s contribution is especially valuable for its attention to narrative as a mode of medical understanding." Science and Literature Studies in English Literature
"Meek describes [how] the long eighteenth century saw attitudes to medicine shift toward increasing professionalization [but also was] one of great public debate around medical treatments and theories. Meek comments insightfully on how the lives and writings of six women authors reflect the intellectual foment of the period. In doing so, Meek explains how these women nevertheless found outlets for their medical knowledge, often set themselves against masculine medical authority, [and] fashioned counternarratives of their own." University of Toronto Quarterly
“Reimagining Illness is an ambitious project. The book is impressively researched. This is a worthwhile and productive effort as a complementary treatment to the ongoing scholarly conversations on literary women and the experience of illness.” Eighteenth-Century Studies
“The sheer diversity of [each author's] embodied health experiences and the span of their literary works (in terms of both genre and topic) make Reimagining Illness a compelling read. As a collection, their literary works highlight diverse perspectives on the ways in which gender shaped one’s understanding of medical concepts, as well as one’s medical experiences, in daily British life. Scholars in literature will find this to be an insightful read.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences