“What it must mean, if we are to be present in this age of challenges, is a profound rethinking of our pedagogical priorities, disciplinary boundaries, and subject positions. Let us actually be Victorianists.” –Christie Harner, “Victorian hybridities”[i] Travis Chi Wing Lau // As I begin to construct my syllabus for my introductory seminar on medical…
Tag: victorian medicine
Recording Women’s Contributions to the History of Victorian Health and Wellness
Jessica Kirwan // I recently interviewed Dr. Lesa Scholl, Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Victorian Women Writers, which is soon to be published by Palgrave Macmillan for their Major Reference Works portfolio. Dr. Scholl is Head of Kathleen Lumley College at the University of Adelaide in Australia. Readers of Synapsis will be interested to know…
Free Indirect Diagnosis: Reading Alongside the Doctor in Middlemarch
Livia Arndal Woods // One of the techniques par excellence associated with the nineteenth-century novel is free indirect discourse, a literary device in which the cadences of a character’s interior, subjective voice are mapped onto an authoritative, third-person narrative voice. For example,”Ella thought Susan’s dress was silly” rendered in free indirect discourse might read more…
Fevered Bodies in Early Victorian Fiction & Medicine
Diana Rose Newby // On October 24, 1840, the British Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal published a piece by physician James Eager on “continued fevers”: afflictions which he insists “more justly merit the patient investigations of observers” than any other known disease (57). What makes these maladies so difficult to diagnose or treat, according to…