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"That Old Serpent": Medical Satires of Eighteenth-Century Britain

Hungerpiller, Audrey R
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7868-7496
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1661177076915139

Abstract Details

2022, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
This dissertation will present a novel corpus of eighteenth-century medical satires to perform a reparation on the secular epistemological terrain of the eighteenth-century Medical Enlightenment. It employs an allegorical method of interpretation informed by syncretic-feminist theology to a collection of eighteenth-century Enlightenment literature to demonstrate how the satirical mode was used to push back against the bodily technologies of the medical profession. This project helps us to identify the characteristic features of these topical satires, which voice a deep epistemological discomfort with the principles, methods, and practices of the emergent secular medical field. Medical satires feature narrators and targets that elide the figures of the physician and the satirist as humoral healers, scientific methodologies applied to absurd and bawdy topics, and a considerable amount of human and animal suffering resulting from poorly-applied medical treatments. This dissertation then reads Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy as a virtuosic representative of the medical satire subgenre whose narrator thoroughly foils both his own and a reader’s attempt to rationalize and unify his creation and circumstance. This project hopes to offer literary and medical scholars an allegorical perspective into medicine’s literary origins and entanglements to support the gradual recovery and revitalization of pre-Medical Enlightenment medical wisdom.
Sandra Macpherson (Advisor)
Jennifer Higginbotham (Committee Member)
David Brewer (Committee Member)
233 p.
Literature
satire; history of medicine; genre; eighteenth-century; literature; genre; ethical non-dualism; feminist theology; quackery

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Hungerpiller, A. R. (2022). "That Old Serpent": Medical Satires of Eighteenth-Century Britain [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1661177076915139

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Hungerpiller, Audrey. "That Old Serpent": Medical Satires of Eighteenth-Century Britain . 2022. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1661177076915139.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Hungerpiller, Audrey. ""That Old Serpent": Medical Satires of Eighteenth-Century Britain ." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2022. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1661177076915139

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1661177076915139
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© 2022, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.