Fear in the Medical and Literary Imagination, Medieval to Modern

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction: A Dreadful Start

   • Daniel McCann, Claire McKechnie-Mason

   Pages 1-14

3. Treating Fear: Medicine, Illness, Therapy

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 15-15

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   2. Dreadful Health: Fear and ‘Sowle-hele’ in The Prickynge of Love

      • Daniel McCann

      Pages 17-36

   3. Without a Cause: Fear in the Anatomy of Melancholy

      • Mary Ann Lund

      Pages 37-54

   4. ‘The Gloom of Anxiety’: Fear in the Long Eighteenth Century

      • Allan Ingram, Clark Lawlor

      Pages 55-78

   5. Dreadful: Aesthetic Fear in Victorian Reading

      • Pamela K. Gilbert

      Pages 79-99

   6. ‘Frightened and Rather Feverish’: The Fear of Pain in Childbirth

      • Joanna Bourke

      Pages 101-127

4. Writing Fear: Rhetoric, Passion, Literature

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 129-129

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   2. Fresh Terror, New Horror: Fear and the Unfamiliar in the Old English Exodus

      • Andy Orchard

      Pages 131-156

   3. Damned Above Ground: Dreadful Despair in Elizabethan and Stuart Literature

      • Elizabeth Hunter

      Pages 157-175

   4. Fear, Phobia and the Victorian Psyche

      • Sally Shuttleworth

      Pages 177-201

   5. The Mass Dread of Quietude and the British Anti-Noise Crusade 1919–1939

      • Neil Pemberton

      Pages 203-229

   6. The Fearful Body in Contemporary Medical Television Drama and Medical Case Reports

      • Martin Willis

      Pages 231-248

   7. Ending on a Note of Fear

      • Priscilla Wald

      Pages 249-257

5. Back Matter

   Pages 259-261

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This book is about an emotion constantly present in human culture and history: fear. It is also a book about literature and medicine, two areas of human endeavour that engage with fear most acutely. The essays in this volume explore fear in various literary and medical manifestations, in the Western World, from medieval to modern times. It is divided into two parts. The first part, Treating Fear, examines fear in medical history, and draws from theology, medicine, philosophy, and psychology, to offer an account of how fear shifts in Western understanding from the Middle Ages to Modern times. The second part, Writing Fear, explores fear as a rhetorical and literary force, offering an account of how it is used and evoked in distinct literary periods and texts. This coherent and fascinating collection will appeal to medical historians, literary critics, cultural theorists, medical humanities’ scholars and historians of the emotions.

• medicine and literature
• medieval medicine
• medieval literature
• fear in literature
• medical humanities

“This is an inquiry into fear as both a psychological and physical condition to be dealt with in medicine … . This is a set of contributions that will be of interest to a wide audience, from writers and artists to practitioners … . This study is different, starting with its double approach: medicine and the arts.” (Alain Touwaide, Doody's Book Reviews, August, 2018)

• Lincoln College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

  Daniel McCann

• Glasgow Centre for Population Health, Glasgow, UK

  Claire McKechnie-Mason

Daniel B. McCann is the Simon and June Li Fellow in Old and Middle English at Oxford University’s Lincoln College.

Claire McKechnie-Mason is a management officer at NHS Cardiff. 

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