In eighteenth-century Britain the worlds of literature and medicine were closely intertwined, and a diverse group of people participated in the circulation of medical knowledge. In this pre-professionalized milieu, several women writers made important contributions by describing a range of common yet often devastating illnesses.

In Reimagining Illness Heather Meek reads works by six major eighteenth-century women writers – Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frances Burney – alongside contemporaneous medical texts to explore conditions such as hysteria, melancholy, smallpox, maternity, consumption, and breast cancer. In novels, poems, letters, and journals, these writers drew on their learning and literary skill as they engaged with and revised male-dominated medical discourse. Their works provide insight into the experience of suffering and interrogate accepted theories of women’s bodies and minds. In ways relevant both then and now, these women demonstrate how illness might be at once a bodily condition and a malleable construct full of ideological meaning and imaginative possibility.

Reimagining Illness offers a new account of the vital period in medico-literary history between 1660 and 1815, revealing how the works of women writers not only represented the medicine of their time but also contributed meaningfully to its developments.

Heather Meek is associate professor of English studies at the Université de Montréal.

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"Meek she resists the temptation to tell simple stories of patriarchal oppression, instead staying attentive to complexity in both the medical and the literary texts. Highly recommended." Choice

“Putting women's literary works in conversation with the emergent discipline of medicine in the eighteenth century, Heather Meek explores the nuanced positions of women in relation to the often-competing medical discourses of the time. Never before has a study brought together eighteenth-century medical and women's literary texts in such a deep and extensive way. And the very fact that six major writers of the period can be studied together to demonstrate their serious engagement with what is typically understood as a male-dominated field indicates the immense value of this project.” Betty A. Schellenberg, Simon Fraser University and author of The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain

“A genuinely insightful, multi-perspective overview of the literature of a period that was rife with intense intellectual tumult.” Polish Review of English Studies

“Through six case studies, Reimagining Illness positions women not as mute objects of male medical science, but as active agents analysing their experience of sickness and its treatment. In Meek's excellent survey, diseased women write back, laying claim to consideration as “medical thinkers” in their own right. Meek takes the reader securely through this unfamiliar landscape of medical ideas. Orientation within chapters is provided by punchy subtitles, masterful lead sentences launching each paragraph, and compelling summary. Concerned though it is with suffering ... it is a pleasure to read.” Times Literary Supplement

“Reimagining Illness is a deeply researched and eminently readable study that offers new insights into canonical figures and texts as well as an important reminder of the value of reading literary and medical texts for their contributions to one another’s home discourses. Individual chapters not only extend understandings of the specific authors and of eighteenth-century medical knowledge about specific ailments, but also shift how we read the many genres through which medicine has been written.” *Social History of Medicine *