Reforming the anatomy narrative: popular medico-gothic interventions, c.1790-1850

Brigham, Bethany (2024) Reforming the anatomy narrative: popular medico-gothic interventions, c.1790-1850. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

The medico-gothic is traditionally defined as a gothic sub-genre largely associated with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818/1831) or the clinical tales of the Victorian period. An overriding scholarly emphasis on the presence of medicine within literature has sustained a gap in the medico-gothic timeline, reaffirming broader assessments of the gothic as an ‘anti-Enlightenment’ genre that transforms the medical practitioner into transgressive villain and that speculates on the dangerous potential of medical science. Utilising a reverse methodology to examine the presence of gothic trope, narrative and convention within medical discourse, this thesis redefines the medico-gothic as a discourse mediated by a body of medical and gothic writers through the popular literary formats of the period 1790-1850. Undertaking an in-depth exploration of the parallel trajectories of medical discourse and the gothic genre in the decades immediately preceding and succeeding the 1832 Anatomy Act, I suggest that the medico-gothic most obviously emerged within the anatomy narrative. My re-evaluation of the anatomy narrative not only enables a reformed understanding of the way in which the medico-gothic addressed ethical and social issues surrounding anatomy in order to (re)shape popular perceptions of medical practice, but also facilitates a reformed approach to value judgements that regard medical discourse as empirical ‘fact’ and the gothic as lowbrow fiction. Each chapter of the thesis draws on the anatomy narrative in order to individually reassess the cultural significance of ephemeral, obscure, anonymously or female-authored gothic texts, deemed to be of low literary value because of their associations with the ‘popular’. However, these same evaluations highlight the medico-gothic as a mainstream discourse formulated between medical texts and distinctly middle-class gothic formats that predominantly diminished the poor and working-class experience of anatomy. This thesis ultimately reforms the anatomy narrative in an attempt to recover the marginalised narratives that underlie the history of anatomy.

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