Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

   PDF

2. Introduction: “The Glow of Health”: Medicine Meets the Novel in Early America

   • Maureen Tuthill

   Pages 1-16

3. A “Very Unfeeling World”: The Failure of Social Healing in Rowson’s America

   • Maureen Tuthill

   Pages 17-46

4. “Your Health and My Happiness”: Sickness and Social Control in The Coquette and Female Quixotism

   • Maureen Tuthill

   Pages 47-80

5. “The Best Means of Retaining Health”: Self-Determined Health and Social Discipline in Early America

   • Maureen Tuthill

   Pages 81-114

6. “The Means of Subsistence”: Health, Wealth, and Social Affection in a Yellow Fever World

   • Maureen Tuthill

   Pages 115-146

7. The “Learned Doctor”: Tyler’s Literary Endorsement of a Federal Elite

   • Maureen Tuthill

   Pages 147-181

8. “Some Yankee Non-sense About Humanity”: Hiding away African Health in Early American Fiction

   • Maureen Tuthill

   Pages 183-213

9. Back Matter

   Pages 215-253

   PDF

This book is a study of depictions of health and sickness in the early American novel, 1787-1808. These texts reveal a troubling tension between the impulse toward social affection that built cohesion in the nation and the pursuit of self-interest that was considered central to the emerging liberalism of the new Republic. Good health is depicted as an extremely positive social value, almost an a priori condition of membership in the community. Characters who have the “glow of health” tend to enjoy wealth and prestige; those who become sick are burdened by poverty and debt or have made bad decisions that have jeopardized their status. Bodies that waste away, faint, or literally disappear off of the pages of America’s first fiction are resisting the conditions that ail them; as they plead for their right to exist, they draw attention to the injustice, apathy, and greed that afflict them.

• Medicine
• Early America
• Healing
• Disease
• Medical sociology
• Medical history
• Federal era

“Maureen Tuthill’s fascinating book demonstrates how American assumptions about healthcare have their roots in the eighteenth century and, in particular, the two decades following the USA’s founding. … Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel is deeply researched, tightly structured and consistently well argued. … The book makes thought-provoking and sobering reading … .” (Rowland Hughes, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, November, 2017)

“Tuthill offers a sorely-needed analysis of Federalist literature's depictions of medicine. She adroitly argues that scenes of care give us access to an important tension within early national identity. On the one hand, such scenes foreground a need to minister to others in times of illness in order to build bonds of social affectation and, on the other hand, they emphasize citizens' responsibility to protect their health as a form of self-interest. Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel provides valuable insights into why medicine matters for understanding what it meant to be an early American.” (Kelly Bezio, English Department, Texas A&M University, USA)

• English Department, Westminster College, Fulton, USA

  Maureen Tuthill

Maureen Tuthill is Associate Professor of English and A.P. Green Endowed Fellow in English at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, USA. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Literature of the Early American Republic, and Early American Literature.

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