1st Edition

Strange Cases The Medical Case History and the British Novel

By Jason Tougaw Copyright 2006
    254 Pages
    by Routledge

    254 Pages
    by Routledge

    Strange Cases is the story of the mutual influence of the case history

    and the British novel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

    Fictions from Defoe's Roxana to James's The Turn of the Screw and

    case histories from George Cheyne's to Sigmund Freud's have found

    narrative impetus in pathology. The writer of a case history faces a

    rhetorical bind unique to the human sciences: the need to display the

    acumen of a scientist and the sympathy warranted to the suffering

    patient. Repeatedly, case historians justify their publicizing of

    extreme, often morbid or perverse, states of mind and body by

    appealing to readers to take pity on patients and to recognize the

    narrative as a vital social document. Diagnosis and sympathy, explicit

    rhetorical modes in case histories, operate implicitly in novels,

    shaping reader-identification. While these two narrative forms set out

    to fulfill an Enlightenment drive to classify and explain, they also

    raise social and epistemological questions that challenge some of the

    Enlightenment's most cherished ideals, including faith in reason, the

    perfectibility of humankind, and the stability of truth.

    Introduction A Story of Two Genres; Chapter 1 Is Reading a Condition?; Chapter 2 Science and Sensibility: Invasions of Privacy in Breast Cancer Narratives; Chapter 3 Narrating Hypochondriacs: Jane Austen’s Fiction and Three Case Histories; Chapter 4 Agents of Insensibility: Altered States in Victorian Medicine and Fiction; Chapter 5 “The Story Won’t Tell”: Ambiguity and Intersubjectivity in Henry James and Sigmund Freud; Chapter 6 Afterword;

    Biography

    Jason Tougaw is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. He is the co-editor of Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community (with Nancy K. Miller). His essays have appeared in JAC, Auto/Biography Studies, and The Scholar and the Feminist.