This book examines how the medical profession engaged with print and literary culture to shape its identities between the 1830s and 1910s in Britain and its empire. Moving away from a focus on medical education and professional appointments, the book reorients attention to how medical self-fashioning interacted with other axes of identity, including age, gender, race, and the spaces of practice. Drawing on medical journals and fiction, as well as professional advice guides and popular periodicals, this volume considers how images of medical practice and professionalism were formed in the cultural and medical imagination. Alison Moulds uncovers how medical professionals were involved in textual production and consumption as editors, contributors, correspondents, readers, authors, and reviewers. Ultimately, this book opens up new perspectives on the relationship between literature and medicine, revealing how the profession engaged with a range of textual practices to build communities, air grievances, and augment its cultural authority and status in public life.

Brings together a diverse range of primary sources, interweaving its analysis of medical journals and fiction Interrogates how professional identities were mediated through different forms of writing Appeals to scholars of literature and medicine, the history of medicine, and the medical humanities as well as those interested in periodical studies and the history of professions

Autorentext

Alison Moulds is a cultural historian and literary scholar. She completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford, UK, as part of the AHRC-funded Constructing Scientific Communities project. Moulds then worked on Diseases of Modern Life (ERC-funded, University of Oxford, UK) and Surgery & Emotion (Wellcome Trust-funded, University of Roehampton, UK). She now has a career in health policy.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. The Young Practitioner.- 3. The Metropolitan Practitioner.- 4. The Country Practitioner.- 5. The Medical Woman.- 6. The Colonial Practitioner in British India.- 7. Conclusion.