Chapter 8 Phrenological Controversy and the Medical Imagination: 'A Modern Pythagorean' in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine

• Main Author: E. Shuttleton, David (auth)
• Other Authors: J. Coyer, Megan (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam/New York Rodopi 2014
• Series: Clio Medica: Perspectives in Medical Humanities
• Subjects: History of medicine; literature; medical ethics; literary culture; scotland; medicine; Anatomy; Blackwood's Magazine; Guillotine; Metempsychosis; Phrenology; Physiology; Pythagoras
• Online Access: DOAB: download the publication; DOAB: description of the publication

Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726-1832 examines the ramifications of Scottish medicine for literary culture within Scotland, throughout Britain, and across the transatlantic world. The contributors take an informed historicist approach in examining the cultural, geographical, political, and other circumstances enabling the dissemination of distinctively Scottish medico-literary discourses. In tracing the international influence of Scottish medical ideas upon literary practice they ask critical questions concerning medical ethics, the limits of sympathy and the role of belles lettres in professional self-fashioning, and the development of medico-literary genres such as the medical short story, physician autobiography and medical biography. Some consider the role of medical ideas and culture in the careers, creative practice and reception of such canonical writers as Mark Akenside, Robert Burns, Robert Fergusson, Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth. By providing an important range of current scholarship, these essays represent an expansion and greater penetration of critical vision.