Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

ISBN: 0415977169

Author: Tougaw, Jason

Condition: New

Strange Cases is the story of the mutual influence of the case historyand the British novel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Fictions from Defoe's Roxana to James's The Turn of the Screw andcase histories from George Cheyne's to Sigmund Freud's have foundnarrative impetus in pathology. The writer of a case history faces arhetorical bind unique to the human sciences: the need to display theacumen of a scientist and the sympathy warranted to the sufferingpatient. Repeatedly, case historians justify their publicizing ofextreme, often morbid or perverse, states of mind and body byappealing to readers to take pity on patients and to recognize thenarrative as a vital social document. Diagnosis and sympathy, explicitrhetorical modes in case histories, operate implicitly in novels,shaping reader-identification. While these two narrative forms set outto fulfill an Enlightenment drive to classify and explain, they alsoraise social and epistemological questions that challenge some of theEnlightenment's most cherished ideals, including faith in reason, theperfectibility of humankind, and the stability of truth.