Neo-Victorian Medicine: Doctors, Patients, and Clinical Spaces in Neo-Victorian Fiction, 1996-2016

This thesis presents an original study of the depiction of medicine in nine neo-Victorian novels published around the turn of the millennium, resituating it within key contemporary and historical socio-medical contexts. I build on existing scholarship in the fields of neo-Victorian studies, Gothic studies, and the medical humanities, to argue that the dialogue between past and present in these texts is fundamentally reciprocal, and that they communicate medical ideas, practices, and anxieties which traverse historical boundaries.
Broadly, this thesis is split into two main sections: Chapters One and Two focus on the characterisation of the ‘medical man’, a central but not defining figure of the mode; Chapters Three and Four build on this analysis to consider his relationships with patients, clinical spaces, and practices of care and healing. I examine four interconnected themes through four corresponding theoretical frameworks: masculinity and modernity through theories of degeneration; medical violence and anatomical procurement through legislation; epidemics and contagious illness through phenomenology; and 'madness' through the patient narrative. These distinct thematic and theoretical interests have been selected for their enduring, or recurring, significance between the nineteenth-century settings of these novels, and their readerly reception in the late-twentieth/early-twenty-first.
Highlighting these dual temporal influences, I look both at how modern ideas around medicine are transposed onto our reimaginations of the past, and to the enduring mythologies which have surrounded medical practice from the Victorian era into the twenty-first century. In highlighting such parallels, I am concerned the implications of this recurring theme for conventional narratives of social and scientific progress, and what this reveals about continuing trends in clinical practice. I aim to move beyond an existing critical understanding of neo-Victorian medicine as primarily symbolic of social and cultural concerns; rather, I focus on its continual resurrection in neo-Victorian fiction as a manifestation of contemporary anxieties specifically relating to medicine, health, and illness. Overall, this thesis presents an interdisciplinary and cross-temporal perspective on the, as yet under-analysed, subject of neo-Victorian medicine, evaluating the social, literary, and clinical significance of its continual reoccurrence in popular culture.