Introduction: False professions: defining orthodoxy and quackery -- Orthodoxy or quackery? anatomy in Frankenstein -- Doctoring in Little Dorrit and Bleak House -- Legerdemain and the physician in Charlotte Bronte's Villette -- Poisons and the poisonous in Wilkie Collins's Armadale -- The quackery of Arthur Conan Doyle -- Conclusion: The in-laws: orthodoxy and quackery in Vernon Galbray
Summary
If nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the rise of medical professionalism, it also witnessed rampant quackery. It is tempting to categorize historical practices as either orthodox or quack, but what did these terms really signify in medical and public circles at the time? How did they develop and evolve? What do they tell us about actual medical practices? Doctoring the Novel explores the ways in which language constructs and stabilizes these slippery terms by examining medical quackery and orthodoxy in works such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Little Do