Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s–1910s

“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. A masterful interdisciplinary study.”

—Anne Hanley, Lecturer in History of Medicine and Modern Britain, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

“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
“Methodologically rigorous, highly original, and accessible to scholars across disciplines, this book 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

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 statusin public life.

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.