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This book considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this period about the ability of poetry to create affect. In the course of the nineteenth century, new medical investigations into the heart, along with the development of instruments such as the stethoscope, gave the pathological heart a strong presence in popular culture. As poets feared for their own hearts, their poetry embodied concerns about heartsickness in form as well as content. Concerns about the heart's status and its actions fed into the broader discourses of religion, gender, and nationalism, as well as medicine. These discourses are examined through close readings of works by Arnold, Barrett Browning, Tennyson, and others.

In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press investigates how Romantic periodicals cultivated innovative literary forms, ideologies and discourses that reflected and shaped medical culture in the nineteenth century. It examines several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential literary periodical of the time, and draws upon extensive archival and bibliographical research to reclaim these previously neglected medico-literary figures. Situating their work in relation to developments in medical and periodical culture, the book advances our understanding of how the nineteenth-century periodical press cross-fertilised medical and literary ideas. In the case of Blackwood’s, it is argued that the magazine’s distinctive Romantic ideology and experimental form enabled the development of an overtly ‘literary’ and humanistic popular medical culture, which participated in a wider critique of liberal Whig ideology in post-Enlightenment Scotland.

In the past twenty years, health humanists and scholars of literature and medicine have drawn on Romantic ideas to argue that literature can cure spiritual ills by making sufferers feel whole again. But this model oversimplifies the relationship between literature and pain, perpetuating a distorted picture of how Romantic writers thought literature addressed suffering. The Poetics of Palliation documents how writers like William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley developed more complex, palliative forms of literary medicine: therapies that stressed literature’s manifold relationship to pain and its power to sustain, comfort, and challenge even when cure was not possible. The book charts how Romantic writers developed these palliative poetics in conversation with their medical milieu. British medical ethics was first codified during the Romantic period. Its major writers, John Gregory and Thomas Percival, endorsed a palliative mandate to compensate for doctors’ limited curative powers. Similarly, Romantic writers sought palliative approaches when their work failed to achieve starker curative goals. The startling diversity of their results illustrates how palliation offers a more comprehensive metric for literary therapy than the curative traditions we have inherited from Romanticism.