Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s–1910s

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Alison Moulds

   Pages 1-21

3. The Young Practitioner

   • Alison Moulds

   Pages 23-69

4. The Metropolitan Practitioner

   • Alison Moulds

   Pages 71-116

5. The Country Practitioner

   • Alison Moulds

   Pages 117-162

6. The Medical Woman

   • Alison Moulds

   Pages 163-211

7. The Colonial Practitioner in British India

   • Alison Moulds

   Pages 213-259

8. Conclusion

   • Alison Moulds

   Pages 261-275

9. Back Matter

   Pages 277-288

   PDF

This book examines how the medical profession engaged with print and literary culture to shape its identities between the 1830s and 1910s in Britain and its empire. Moving away from a focus on medical education and professional appointments, the book reorients attention to how medical self-fashioning interacted with other axes of identity, including age, gender, race, and the spaces of practice. Drawing on medical journals and fiction, as well as professional advice guides and popular periodicals, this volume considers how images of medical practice and professionalism were formed in the cultural and medical imagination. Alison Moulds uncovers how medical professionals were involved in textual production and consumption as editors, contributors, correspondents, readers, authors, and reviewers. Ultimately, this book opens up new perspectives on the relationship between literature and medicine, revealing how the profession engaged with a range of textual practices to build communities, air grievances, and augment its cultural authority and status in public life.

• medical profession
• print culture
• medical press
• advice manuals medicine
• medical practioners nineteenth century
• medical journals
• medical humanities

“This well-researched text will be an asset to those researching the expansion of the medical Profession … . This comprehensive and meticulously researched book will provide an excellent reference guide for academic research, at the same time it is a book that the general reader with an interest in the social and cultural history of medicine will find accessible and absorbing.” (Kathleen Beal, BAVS Newsletter, Vol. 23 (1), 2023) “Skilfully blending historical and literary analysis, Moulds expertly charts how print and literary culture became instrumental in contesting, constructing, and consolidating medical practices and identities. She pushes beyond the metropole to weave a nuanced and sensitive narrative of professional life not just among London elites, but also those in country practice, the Indian Medical Service, lower-status urban posts, and the ever-growing ranks of women entering the profession. A masterful interdisciplinary study.” (Anne Hanley, Lecturer in History of Medicine and Modern Britain, Birkbeck, University of London, UK)

“The historical and literary medical humanities have developed an exciting critical momentum recently. This is thanks, in no small part, to in-depth approaches like those presented in Alison Moulds’ Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s-1910s. This is a timely study packed with information and critical reflections that will prove essential to those of us working in a similar area.” (Andrew Mangham, Professor of English Literature, University of Reading, UK)

“This excellent book evidences the powerful role of textual practices in shaping and performing a range of professional medical identities through the Victorian period and into the early twentieth century. It provides novel insights into how medical practitioners represented themselves and their practices to both the lay public and other practitioners via medical fiction and the medical press. Methodologically rigorous, highly original, and accessible to scholars across disciplines, it is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between medical and literary cultures in the nineteenth century.” (Megan Coyer, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Glasgow, UK)

• Independent Scholar, London, UK

  Alison Moulds

Alison Moulds is a cultural historian and literary scholar. She completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford, UK, as part of the AHRC-funded Constructing Scientific Communities project. Moulds then worked on Diseases of Modern Life (ERC-funded, University of Oxford, UK) and Surgery & Emotion (Wellcome Trust-funded, University of Roehampton, UK). She now has a career in health policy.

Policies and ethics