Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies

By Laura R. Kremmel

This book debates a crossover between the Gothic and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. It explores the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, and expands the possibilities of medical theories in a speculative space by a focus on Gothic novels, short stories, poetry, drama and chapbooks. By comparing the Gothic’s collection of unsavoury tropes to morbid anatomy’s collection of diseased organs, the author argues that the Gothic’s prioritisation of fear and gore gives it access to nonnormative bodies, reallocating medical and narrative agency to bodies considered otherwise powerless. Each chapter pairs a trope with a critical medical debate, granting silenced bodies power over their own narratives: the reanimated corpse confronts fears about vitalism; the skeleton exposes fears about pain; the unreliable corpse feeds on fears of dissection; the devil redirects fears about disability; the dangerous narrative manipulates fears of contagion and vaccination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786838506

Book preview

ROMANTIC MEDICINE AND THE GOTHIC IMAGINATION

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

For all titles in the Gothic Literary Studies series

visit www.uwp.co.uk

© Laura R. Kremmel, 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

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EPUB ISBN 978-1-78683-850-6

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The right of Laura R. Kremmel to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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To Grandma Pat and Granddad Peters

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Laboratory of the Gothic Imagination

1Reanimated Corpses, Blood, and the Gothic Vital Element

2Anaesthetic Skeletons and the Pain of Melancholy

3Counterfeit Corpses and Evaded Dissection

4The Devil and the Disability Narrative

5Contagious Narratives and Gothic Vaccination

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Though drafts of this book have been developed over many years, the final text was largely written during the 2020–1 COVID-19 pandemic. As such, it is tempting to view it as a product of isolation. Nothing could be further from the truth. My work has been inspired and guided by so many mentors and friends whose support from afar has been even more meaningful in these trying circumstances of quarantine and social distance.

I must start by expressing gratitude to my dissertation committee at Lehigh University, all of whom have continued to volunteer caring professional and personal support over the years. Their belief in the value of my work has been instrumental to the completion of this project. I hardly know how to begin to thank Beth Dolan for all her warm encouragement over the past fourteen years. She has been my consistent role model for careful scholarship and compassionate teaching. On top of the incredible work she does at Lehigh, she still has time to offer feedback, wisdom, and kind words. Similarly, a simple thank you to Dawn Keetley seems inadequate. She has been an eager mentor and source of inspiration for over a decade, and she continues to go out of her way to support and encourage me. Immense thank you also to Michael Kramp, whose enthusiastic confidence in my ideas and endeavours – especially the crazy ones – has been invaluable at all stages of the research and drafting process. The unfaltering support of these three mentors has given me strength time and time again. A special thank you to Dale Townshend, whose teaching was foundational for my development as a scholar of Gothic literature, and his involvement in the important early stages of this project was crucial. The training in Gothic Studies I received from Dale and Glennis Byron through the Gothic Imagination MLitt programme at the University of Stirling set me on my current path.

I have benefited from several academic communities. Many of the faculty, staff, and fellow students in the Lehigh English graduate programme have either read versions of this work or been subjected to excited conversations about it (willingly or unwillingly). Pete Nagy has frequently been the victim of such conversations. He has provided feedback on recent drafts and years of encouragement through eighties movie quotes. I think he understands how I think better than I do. Dashielle Horn, David Fine, and Kyle Brett have helped me maintain perspective and a sense of humour on countless occasions when I needed them most. I am also grateful to my many friends and mentors at Lehigh, especially but not limited to Wade Linebaugh, Abby Aldrich, Sara Monahan, Carol Laub, Anne Nierer, Jenna Lay, Suzanne Edwards, Scott Gordon, Kathleen Hutnik, and members of the Lehigh Gothic Reading Group, particularly Ashley Pfeiffer and Jimmy Hamill. I have and continue to benefit from the generous advice and camaraderie of the 18th/19th-Century Writing Group at Lehigh. Additional thanks to members of that group, Lyndon Dominique, Sarita Mizin, and Dana McClain.

I’d also like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, especially Haley Armstrong, Christy Tidwell, Kayla Pritchard, Carlie Herrick, and Allison Gilmore for their support and for putting up with conversations about things like exorcism and leeches at happy hour.

The community of the International Gothic Association – the IGA family – has been a cherished source of belonging, friendship, and pleasure, not to mention of scholarly inspiration. Most of the ideas in this book were presented over the years at its biennial conferences, where I benefited from a collective of brilliant friends: Enrique Ajuria Ibarra, Matt Foley, Neil McRobert, Chloé Germaine Buckley, Neal Kirk, Lorna Farnell, Gwyneth Peaty, Tuğçe Biçakçi Syed, Rebecca Duncan, Kate Gadsby-Mace, Daniel Kasper, and so many others. I am also thankful for my Romanticism friends and colleagues from the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, especially Niffy Hargrave, Talia Vestri, and Emily Stanback, as well as members of the newly formed Disability Studies/Health Humanities writing group, who provided generous feedback on an early draft of the Introduction.

I became interested in the history of medicine when I started visiting medical museums. I discovered the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 2010 and returned as frequently as I could. Less frequent wanderings through the Hunterian Museum in London and Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh have been more directly influential on this book. My work has benefited from several Lehigh University funding sources, including the Strohl Graduate Summer Research Fellowship, the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute Research Grant, the Lehigh College of Arts and Sciences Summer Research Fellowship, the Doctoral Travel Grant for Global Opportunities, and the Lehigh Humanities Center Faculty Seminar, which allowed me to do archival work at the National Library of Scotland, the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh Library, the British Library, Edinburgh University Special Collections, and the Wellcome Library.

A version of Chapter 4 was published in European Romantic Review in 2016, and I am grateful for permission from Taylor & Francis to include the current version with several overlapping sections. I’ll take this opportunity also to thank the late Diane Long Hoeveler for her encouragement of my work at that early stage. Thanks also to Sarah Lewis, Head of Commissioning at University of Wales Press, for her generous guidance and kind enthusiasm to see this project become a book.

Finally, I must express gratitude to members of my family who have, in equal measure, humoured and supported my academic pursuits. Friends Leah Van Tassel, Katie Ressel, and Lisa Belczyk have always been family and have always welcomed me ‘home’, no matter where they are or how far away I roam. Thanks to my Mom and Dad (who have wondered why I don’t study ‘nice things’), and Greg and Em for their support. This book is dedicated to my late grandparents, who would have been thrilled at its very existence.

Introduction

The Laboratory of the Gothic Imagination

Situations of torment, and images of naked horror, are easily conceived; and a writer in whose works they abound, deserves our gratitude almost equally with him who should drag us by way of sport through a military hospital, or force us to sit at the dissecting-table of a natural philosopher.¹

We begin with two anatomists: one an accomplished physician with a background in surgery, the other a fictional malcontent created by an author well aware of medical innovations. Both Matthew Baillie and Victor Frankenstein would have been at home at the dissecting table mentioned in the above quotation, and Baillie knew his way around a hospital, if not a military one. While most aspects of Romantic medicine could be considered gruesome, both anatomists devoted their lives to the study of the particularly macabre interior body, attracted to what they could learn from the dead and from the abnormal, the unnatural, the morbid.

Through the examples of the fictional Frankenstein and historical Baillie, I will demonstrate the convergence of the medical imagination and the Gothic imagination within the contexts of medicine and literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. When Romantic medicine struggled to test or prove its innovative theories because of physical restraints, the Gothic transgressed the medically possible, picking up its own scalpel to experiment with the same ideas in an imaginative and disturbing space that includes the supernatural among the natural and unnatural. Unafraid to explore the gore typical of medical experimentation to produce shock and horror, Gothic experiments expand the possibilities of medical theories by showing what they might look like in a speculative space without limits. In Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination’s collection of morbid anatomies, the reanimated corpse confronts fears about vitalism; the skeleton exposes fears about pain; the counterfeit corpse feeds on fears of dissection; the devil redirects fears about disability; the dangerous narrative manipulates fears of contagion and vaccination. The Gothic tradition, itself considered to be a diseased collection of unsettling and unhealthy tropes provides access to non-normative bodies that call for or embody fluctuating medical theories. By harnessing the power of fear, the tropes applied to these bodies allow them to reclaim agency over their own treatments at a time when medical authority was itself in flux. To understand the context of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s comparison of the Gothic to medical spaces in the epigraph, we must first consider the state of medicine in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By reconsidering the concept of medical uncertainty as indicative of possibilities rather than restrictions, it will become clear why the Romantic-era Gothic’s engagement with medical debates is a vital but often ignored contribution to medical Gothic and medical horror studies.

Matthew Baillie’s The Morbid Anatomy

In many ways, Matthew Baillie’s study of morbid anatomy both represents the irregularities of medicine in the Romantic era and mirrors the reception of Gothic literature as spectacular and marginalised. Refreshingly, Baillie is best known amongst literary critics in relation to his sister, successful dramatist Joanna Baillie, though he was well known in his time for his kind bedside manner, posh respectability, inherited surgical skill, popular lectures, and attendance on royalty. The Baillie siblings spent much of their lives in the company of the famed physician, surgeon, and anatomist brothers, William and John Hunter. As such, Joanna became known for her medicalised mental experiments on the stage, and Matthew went into the family business, following his uncle William to become an accomplished physician with a deep knowledge of surgery. With three extensive medical collections of various bottled and dried body parts from human and animal alike (that of his two uncles and his own) at his disposal, Baillie honed a collector’s eye to specialise not in healthy organs but in diseased ones. In his ground-breaking publication, The Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body, first published in 1793, again in 1798, and yet again with a series of engravings in 1812, he reprioritised knowledge of undesirable or diseased parts and their impact on the ‘natural’, healthy body featured in most textbooks that was often an impossible ideal. In other words, Baillie’s greatest contribution to medicine was his insistence on the value of the morbid body.

In simple terms, morbid anatomy is the study of diseased organs and their impact on the body as a whole. As Domenico Bertoloni Meli writes, morbid anatomy ‘is to pathology as anatomy is to physiology’, a mapping of the ‘unnatural’ body that medicine has failed in life but that now provides medicine with the value of education in death.² The first edition of The Morbid Anatomy systematically catalogues the major organs and every unusual variation of them that Baillie has seen, remarking on appearance, texture, smell, sometimes even taste. Fully engrossed in the minutiae of these separate parts, Baillie provides only a cursory and noncommittal briefing of symptoms, which wasn’t added until the second edition. While the Italian anatomist Giovanni Battista Morgagni vies for the title of ‘father of anatomical pathology’ with his 1761 De sedibus et causis morborum per anatomen indagatis (The Seats and Causes of Disease Investigated by Anatomy), Baillie’s book ultimately made a bigger impact in Britain for its heightened detail and applicability for practical use. As such, it resulted in over a dozen editions, including ‘eight English, three American, and five foreign-language’.³ Baillie’s repeated hope is that the graphic detail of his obsessively attentive catalogue would lead future readers to better understand the diseases themselves and their symptoms before the patient became postmortem. Like many medical textbooks of the time, this collection of morbid organs is essentially a record of the body’s ability to elude medical understanding. But even that acknowledgement serves an important purpose.

Though Baillie’s textbook is admittedly incomplete, its contents make an important contribution through their classification as morbid, emphasising their exclusion from other textbooks. Samuel J. M. M. Alberti calls pathology ‘the unpredictable diversity of the diseased body’, which is ‘as much a value judgement as it is a diagnosis’.⁴ Pathology establishes difference through the categories of normal and abnormal, often translated as acceptable and unacceptable, which affects the ways bodies were and are treated: morbid bodies need to be fixed or managed. The underlying assumption of The Morbid Anatomy, that all its contents are ‘not natural’, is so prevalent that moments when Baillie is torn between unhealthy and healthy stand out, like one of his descriptions of the spleen. The morbid condition of this organ is common and causes no pain, yet ‘is a very obvious deviation from its healthy structure’.⁵ Thus, he is unsure whether to classify it as diseased, but his very inclusion in the textbook does so, despite it not interfering with the patient’s overall health. Historically, the anatomical pathology to which Baillie’s book contributed has been used to impose labels like abnormal, unnatural, or unhealthy on non-normative bodies to make judgements about their validity. Pathology attempts to negotiate with the unpredictability of the body because of its tendency to escape these categories, an escape Romantic medical writers openly admitted throughout their works. While Alberti means that morbid anatomy is devalued compared to its healthier counterparts, I will argue here that Baillie valued what he studied, and even what he did not understand, with an endearing enthusiasm.

With his emphasis on observation and empirical investigation of the body, one would assume that Baillie confirms Michel Foucault’s argument in The Birth of the Clinic (1963) that the defining component of medicine’s transition after the turn of the century – from the primitive hospital to the modern clinic – is the objectifying, authoritative medical gaze, indicative of a shift in interpreting the body’s structure and ailments from imagination to observation and articulation. According to Foucault,

the fantasy link between knowledge and pain is reinforced by a more complex means than the mere permeability of the imagination; the presence of disease in the body, with its tensions and its burnings, the silent world of the entrails, the whole dark underside of the body lined with endless unseeing dreams, are challenged as to their objectivity by the reductive discourse of the doctor, as well as established as multiple objects meeting his positive gaze.⁶

Replacing the ‘fantasy link’ with discursive understanding built on authoritative and objective observation may leave behind the dark and mysterious body’s interior that Foucault describes, but Baillie does not do so. The silence and the darkness are where morbidity is found and are an inherent part of it.

Even though the field of pathology would significantly contribute to the discourse of objectification, empiricism, and categorisation that Foucault identifies, I suggest that Baillie’s textbook is still clearly a product of the time in which it was written, an era of uncertainty and speculation. Though his descriptions are systematic and methodical, they also combine rationality with creativity as he searches for practical language to describe what has rarely been seen and never been described. Clearly fascinated with the anatomical surprises he encounters, Baillie’s descriptions of specimens are specific, but he courts ambiguity in their larger implications. He openly acknowledges his position as transmitter of knowledge rather than elevating himself to its creator, evidenced by his own involvement in relation to the corpse. The most frequent words throughout this textbook are ‘I have seen’, which does not translate to the objective certainty Foucault claims accompanies the medical gaze. Without case studies, the main source of narration of Baillie’s textbook is how many times or in what circumstances he has encountered the examples from which he draws. Many have been seen only once, requiring him to use memory and imagination to reconstruct them. When he uses descriptors like ‘pulpy’, ‘earthy substance’, ‘thick as half a crown’, ‘like soft curd or cheese’, and phrases like ‘one would imagine’, ‘this effect must be supposed to be produced by’, and ‘their existence has never yet been demonstrated’, it is clear that he is combining memory, imagination, empiricism, and graphic materialism in one inclusive methodology. This technique simultaneously positions him as accomplished expert and as limited human investigator: never does he claim that the body is a certain way just because he has observed it to be such. In other words, Baillie is very clear that his expertise comes from the sheer number of specimens to which he has had access, not an inherent infallibility in his status as physician. Knowledge still belongs to the anatomy, not the anatomist.

Foucault’s shift from darkness to light is accompanied by a transfer of agency from the body to the physician, but Baillie’s candid uncertainty and the texts examined in the chapters to come show that such a forward move towards modernity may have been much more circuitous than Foucault surmises. The success of the Gothic during the transition he describes suggests a cultural reluctance to leave the past behind and embrace the new clinical. Baillie’s subversive attention to the diseased over the ‘natural’ and his predilection for collecting unsavoury parts mirrors the Gothic mode of literature that was considered to be equally unnatural. To its critics, the Gothic was a collection of unhealthy tropes that contaminated entire works of literature and, indeed, entire literary careers. Some even considered them to be contagious, a danger discussed in Chapter 5. By Gothic tropes, I mean the repetitive, predictable narrative props or cues that the Gothic relies upon for narrative cohesion, however strained. The incredibility of this narrative cohesion has led to accusations of these tropes as contrived, superficial, weak, or unnatural. The Gothic, itself a mode dismissed as diseased or dangerous by reviewers, is full of diseased and dangerous tropes: its own morbid anatomy. The rise of medical pathology at the end of the eighteenth century, then, provides a useful model for understanding the reaction against the Gothic novel that intensified in the 1790s and continued through the first part of the nineteenth century and beyond. Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies demonstrates a crossover between a literary tradition that collects unsettling Gothic tropes and a medical approach that collects diseased organs, one of many ways in which the interplay between medicine and literature broadens conversations about the institutions, conditions, and conventions that define bodies and their disobedient parts.

Romantic Medicine

Medicine during the Gothic heyday of the 1790s preceded the systematisation of medicine into consistent branches or institutions that we would recognise today, meaning there was little standardisation of education, training, procedure, or mission. The performative hierarchy of practitioners was unstable and fluid, with university-trained physicians at the top, known for their conceptual work with the theory of medicine; surgeons in the middle, known for getting their hands dirty through experiential learning; and apothecaries at the bottom, known for menial tasks and dispensing drugs until the Apothecaries Act of 1815 added more formal training requirements. Despite this theoretical hierarchy, many surgeons and apothecaries were knowledgeable beyond their reputations and fully capable of making medical decisions about their patients without the blessing of a physician. Scottish universities, centres of medical innovation, taught ‘both physic and surgery in combination, in effect [training] a new breed of mould-bursting general practitioners’, which would explain the multi-skilled Scottish Hunter brothers and their nephew.⁷

Not even included in this hierarchy were the many quacks, midwives, truss-makers, and bone-setters who made up the extensive medical market, bringing a wide range of experiences and perspectives, not to mention treatments and fees that added more variety to the medical sphere. While it is easy to dismiss these practitioners, Roy Porter insists they were ‘fanatics, not cynical exploiters but fervent believers in their own powers and pills’, and, though he elsewhere refers to their actions as ‘willy-nilly’, their remedies were often cheaper than those of their hierarchised competitors and just as effective.⁸ Finally, to this must be added charitable public health organisations like the Royal Humane Society, prevalent self-help practices encouraged by books like William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine (1769), and self-experimentation demonstrated by scientists like Humphry Davy. As Emily Stanback explains, ‘what counted as medicine and what – and who – counted as medical was not only unclear, but was actively contested’, explaining that ‘doctors had relatively little to offer in the way of effective treatments. Quack doctors and alternative healers – folk, religious, magical – flourished alongside those striving for institutional authority, regulation, and professionalization.’⁹ Unsurprisingly, such a variety of practitioners led to a variety of diagnoses: ‘In 1790, blindness could be thought of as a curse or a challenge from God, an indication of inner vision, a barrier to full participation in the body politic, a biological deficit, and/or a physiological variation that could offer insight into the operations of sensory perception and cognition.’¹⁰ An interpretive chaos of such proportions would not only permit but also encourage transgressive and graphic literatures like the Gothic to join the fray, pushing cultural obsessions with the body even further.

At the same time, Romantic-era medicine, inclusive of many types of knowledge and practitioner, also preceded the divorce of the sciences from the arts that the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Health Humanities, Medical Humanities, and Critical Medical Humanities fields work to reunite. Martyn Evans advocates a reinstatement of wonder in the Critical Medical Humanities, a quality evident in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical texts like Baillie’s. Evans describes wonder as ‘a clarion call to us to remain mindful of our materiality, our object-ness, our thing-hood. We are, to recall, things that experience themselves’, a recognition to be valued, not dismissed.¹¹ Indeed, Romantic scientific, medical, literary, and artistic approaches to the world were considered to be simply different and equally valuable ways to access and understand that materiality. In his study of Romantic neuroscience, Alan Richardson writes about this particularly rich moment for medicine and literature:

It was a time when poets (like Coleridge) consorted with laboratory scientists and when philosophical doctors (like Darwin) gave point to their scientific theories in verse, when phrenology and mesmerism gained adherents across the medical community, when Bell could work out his physiological psychology in a series of lectures to London artists, scientists could perform as showmen, and Galvani’s experiments with ‘animal electricity’ could be replicated by an eager public ‘wherever frogs were to be found’.¹²

Within its inconsistent and confusing structures, the Romantic era was a time of both exciting advances and exciting uncertainties: scientists were inspired by the mysterious abilities of the body, and that made them eager students, not just of what the body was but also of what it could be. The Romantic body, described by James Robert Allard, ‘is a product of discursive failure: the insistent visible body in and of poetic texts and the stubborn invisibilities of the body in medical texts attest to the difficulties of asserting the dominance of either materiality or immateriality.’¹³ In other words, both literature and medicine fail to fully understand the body because of its vacillation in visible tangibility – observable thingness – leading to an obsession with collecting bodies held by anatomists and with testing the limits of the body held by writers. The Gothic fits comfortably at the boundary between material and immaterial, spectre and corpse, failing to separate the material from the immaterial and perhaps offering opportunities for success discursively unifying these disparate approaches.

Sharon Ruston, in Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s, strongly advocates the study of both scientific and literary contributions by the great thinkers of and creators of Romanticism¹⁴ and similarly marks the end of the eighteenth century as a period in which scientific knowledge and imagination shared the same language, before objectivity, specialisation, and medical distance fell into favour in the nineteenth century. Baillie’s study of pathology, amidst the prolonged belief in the humours and in the hierarchy of physicians over surgeons still held by others, ‘aspired towards objectivity’ and began a process of ‘distancing – psychological and physical – of the physician from the patient, a crucial stage in the construction of scientific knowledge’.¹⁵ The focus on the parts over the whole in his textbook makes it easy to forget Baillie is describing organs within individuals who once had lives, but his descriptions are not without creativity and drama, making the vessels and organs sound like places or actors with atmospheres and actions of their own. If there is little emotion for the deceased in the textbook, there is obvious care and concern for the morbid anatomy found within. Finding that the body speaks more clearly than the patient or practitioner, he notes that

Patients often explain very imperfectly their feelings, partly from the natural deficiency of language, and partly from being misled by preconceived opinions about the nature of their complaints – Medical men also . . . sometimes put their questions inaccurately, and not unfrequently mislead patients into a false description, from some opinion about the disease which they have too hastily adopted.¹⁶

This divide between doctors and patients would lead to severe issues of mistrust and a range of medical Gothic and horror texts about it in the nineteenth century and forward. The importance of language in medicine continues to haunt medical interactions today, yet another subject for the Health Humanities and its related fields. In lieu of these difficulties, medical texts, advertisements, and pamphlets would find practical value in borrowing the language of popular literature, using the Gothic imagination to attract and provoke readers who would be familiar with Gothic tropes.

Amidst all this, the history of medicine has tended to minimise the messy categories and inconsistencies of the eighteenth and