Livia Arndal Woods // For the better part of the past decade, my scholarship has focused on representations of pregnancy in the Victorian novel. This focus has often resonated with 21st century pregnancy narratives, and I’ve written about that. I’ve written less about the ways in which my scholarship has resonated with my lived experience…
Tag: victorian
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…
Review of Lindsey Fitzharris’s The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
Livia Arndal Woods Lindsey Fitzharris’s 2017 The Butchering Art is a compelling medical biography of Joseph Lister, pioneer of antiseptic surgical theory and practice. Lister’s work, building on the germ-theories of Louis Pasteur, “Transform[ed] the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine” from a chaotic and deadly battle against seemingly inevitable infections to a more systematic and…
Identity, Metaphor, and Illness in Emily Shore’s Nineteenth-Century Journal
One of the many lives claimed by tuberculosis was that of Emily Shore, a Victorian woman who began keeping a journal as a girl. In 1891, Shore’s sisters published excerpts of the journal under the title, The Journal of Emily Shore.1 I have previously discussed how Shore’s journal informs our understanding of the kinds of…