Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817-1858

In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press investigates how Romantic periodicals cultivated innovative literary forms, ideologies and discourses that reflected and shaped medical culture in the nineteenth century. It examines several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential literary periodical of the time, and draws upon extensive archival and bibliographical research to reclaim these previously neglected medico-literary figures. Situating their work in relation to developments in medical and periodical culture, Megan Coyer’s book advances our understanding of how the nineteenth-century periodical press cross-fertilised medical and literary ideas. Case Studies – Medical Discourse and Ideology in the Edinburgh Review – The Tale of Terror and the ‘Medico-Popular’ – ‘Delta’: The Construction of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Surgeon – Professionalisation and the Case of Samuel Warren’s Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician – The Rise of Public Health in the Popular Periodical Press: The Political Medicine of W. P. Alison, Robert Gooch, and Robert Ferguson