Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture

Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture assesses medicine and mobility as two intertwined discourses and practices that constituted, influenced, and transformed not only each other but were increasingly represented as such in various literary and cultural texts from 1800 onwards. Bringing together internationally renowned academics with emerging scholars, the volume includes contributions to the field of literary and cultural studies and history of medicine. The essays proceed from the premise that disease and health are inseparable from mobility in material and conceptual terms. Examining nonfiction and fiction literary texts, the volume details the use of new modes of transport and mobility for medical and therapeutic measures, how these modes were pathologised, and the psychological and physiological consequences arising from such prescribed forms of mobility and immobility. The volume scrutinizes how intersections are represented and negotiated in literary and cultural texts, including their aesthetic, poetic, ideological, and socio-critical dimensions.

'From Heroic Exploration to Careful Control: Mobility, Health, and Medicine in the British African Empire', 'White Fluff - Black Pigment: Health Commodity Culture and Victorian Imperial Geographies of Dependence', 'Upright Posture and Gendered Styles of Body Movements in The Mill on the Floss' and 'Embodied Interdependencies of Health and Travel in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles' are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.