Introduction

The Introduction to the volume demonstrates how the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are particularly rich for a study of medical myth and (mis)information, considering the wealth of medical publications that emerged in that period. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, Britain had witnessed a turn from Latin to English vernacular as the standard language of medical expression. No longer did a medical author need to have received an education for which the hallmark was a solid command of the Latin tongue, a fact which enabled women to participate in public discourse in growing numbers, as sales rather than sex began to determine a work's success. The public perception of medicine was shaped, among other factors, by poetry, the stage, fiction, and the rise of the periodical press, where issues of personality, celebrity, and the creative expression of the self were foregrounded. Featuring a case study on eighteenth-century writing doctor Richard Blackmore (1654-1729), the Introduction argues that English vernacular medical texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries invite cross-comparisons with literary representations of health and medical practitioners in the period, to enrich the picture of medicine in the popular imagination and to provide important perspectives on those questions surrounding authenticity, agency, representation and accessibility that we might similarly ask about literature.