Instructor: Carlisle Yingst
Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: Barker 211
Course Site
What is the relation between the humanities and the sciences? What separates these broad fields of knowledge, and how do ideas move between them? This course will consider these and related questions by turning back to a moment when the boundaries between disciplines were not so clear, and by focusing on an especially rich site for considering them: medicine and writing about the body in eighteenth-century Britain.
Exploring this time and place—characterized by increasing public access to scientific knowledge, innovations in literary culture, and continuous interactions between them—the course will take as its starting point the waning of humoral theory and the emergence of the British novel; continue through the Enlightenment foundations of modern medicine; and conclude with a book often read as issuing a humanistic challenge to science: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. We’ll read work by physicians, novelists, and poets, as well as by writers who brought literature and medicine together, like Tobias Smollett (whose surgical training shaped his novels’ descriptions of the body), Erasmus Darwin (whose poetry about the natural world was deeply intertwined with his medical studies), and William Earle (whose fictional account of obeah was shaped by a British physician practicing in Jamaica.)
More specific topics and themes are likely to include: plague narratives; accounts of illness and disability; colonialism and indigenous medicines; the popular circulation of race-science and -medicine; and anatomical and literary representations of gender, sex, and sexuality. Other readings may include: Cavendish, Defoe, Haywood, Sancho, Sterne, Austen, and the contemporary novelist Jordy Rosenberg, as well as shorter selections from periodicals, letters and diaries, physician's notes, and other related material.
This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.