Literature and science, 1660-1834, Vol. 2; Science body and mind

This edited anthology is used to argue (explicitly in the introduction and at various points throughout the volume) that ‘the fictional literature, to use the narrow modern definition, of the long eighteenth century is permeated by images, metaphors, representations, narratives and discourses of the sciences of body and mind’. Lawlor deploys a variety of eighteenth-century authors, some medically qualified like Abraham Cowley and John Arbuthnot, to demonstrate the profound connections between discourses that have been largely separated in the modern era. He argues that ‘eighteenth-century physicians had to be polymaths: interested in all aspects of the growth of scientific knowledge including the developing disciplines concerned with the mind.’ This anthology particularly explores the ‘regimen’ genre of poetry and the influence of the concept of regimen and dieta on other genres, and follows a (Roy) Porterian line in its tracing of the development of medical and popular ideas of the ‘nerves’ and ‘Sensibility’, especially in popular medical authors such as George Cheyne, Thomas Beddoes and Thomas Trotter.