ABSTRACT
Pathology is at least as dominant a theme in the British novel as development or education. Think of Roxana’s inveterate promiscuity, Caleb Williams’s monomania, Lady Delacour’s breast cancer, Marianne Dashwood’s nervous fever, Mr. Woodhouse’s hypochondria, Helen Burns’s consumption, Dr. Jekyll’s volatile psyche, Sherlock Holmes’s cocaine addiction, the governess in The Turn of the Screw’s paranoia, or Dorian Gray’s degeneration. Conditions like these are common subjects in realist fiction written during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-twentieth centuries, subjects shared with and borrowed from hundreds of medical case histories written for both popular and professional audiences during the same period. In this book, I examine the mutual influence of the medical case history and the British novel during the nineteenth century, when that influence was most dynamic.
