This book demonstrates how fiction and medicine have a tradition of looking towards each other for inspiration in questions of gender. Medical textbooks and pamphlets have cited fictional plots and characterisations as a way of communicating complex or 'sensitive' ideas. Essays explore historical accounts of clinical procedures, the relationship between gynaecology and psychology, and cultural conceptions of motherhood, fertility, and the female organisation through a broad range of texts including Henry More's Pre-Existency of the Soul (1659), Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1855), and Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues (1998).
This interdisciplinary collection considers the tensions that have developed between the historical privilege often ascribed to the male and the vulnerabilities to which his body is prone. Using historical and literary approaches, the essays consider the critical ways in which medicine's interactions with literature reveal vital clues about the ways sex, gender, and identity are constructed through treatments of a range of 'pathologies' including deformity, venereal disease, injury, nervousness, and sexual difference. The relationships between male medicine and ideals of potency and masculinity are explored through a range of sources including African American slave fictions, southern gothic, early modern poetry, Victorian literature, and the Modern novel.