Bücher der Reihe Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine

This book explores the rise of the aesthetic category of addiction in the nineteenth century, a century that saw the development of an established medical sense of drug addiction.

This book identifies, in contemporary fiction, a new type of novel at the interface of science and the humanities, working from the premise that a shift has taken place in the relations between the two cultures in the last two or three decades.

This collection of essays considers what constituted contagion in the minds of early moderns in the absence of modern germ theory.

The first part, Treating Fear, examines fear in medical history, and draws from theology, medicine, philosophy, and psychology, to offer an account of how fear shifts in Western understanding from the Middle Ages to Modern times.

This collection examines different aspects of attitudes towards disease and death in writing of the long eighteenth century. Taking three conditions as examples - ennui, sexual diseases and infectious diseases - as well as death itself, contributors explore the ways in which writing of the period placed them within a borderland between fashionability and unfashionability, relating them to current social fashions and trends. These essays also look at ways in which diseases were fashioned into bearing cultural, moral, religious and even political meaning. Works of literature are used as evidence, but also medical writings, personal correspondence and diaries. Diseases or conditions subject to scrutiny include syphilis, male impotence, plague, smallpox and consumption. Death, finally, is looked at both in terms of writers constructing meanings within death and of the fashioning of posthumous reputation.

This collection of essays considers what constituted contagion in the minds of early moderns in the absence of modern germ theory.