City of Health, Fields of Disease

Martin Wallen is Associate Professor in the English Department at Oklahoma State University, USA.

• Contents: Introduction; Lyrical health in Wordsworth and Coleridge; Coleridge's scrofulous dejection; The medical frame of character and the enforcement of normative health in Thomas Beddoes' 'Observations on the Character and Writings of John Brown, M.D.'; A secret excitement: Coleridge, John Brown, and the chance for a physical imagination; Schelling's medical singing school in the Yearbooks of Medicine as Science; The electromagnetic orgasm and history outside the city; Notes; Works cited; Index.

'A superb study of the interdisciplinary connections between medicine, literature, and philosophy that will be of interest to Romanticists, comparatists, and all scholars working on disciplinarity and the organisation of knowledge.' Tilottama Rajan, Canada Research Chair in English and Theory, University of Western Ontario 'Martin Wallen [...] has made a useful contribution to the ongoing debate by applying his literary learning to the ways in which northern European Romantic medical throught remained in the clutches of Brunonianism, the theory that all human life reduces to states of 'excitement'... Wallen's geographical framing of the conflict as 'city of health, fields of disease' - the dissymmetry of his trope: the singular city and plural fields is noteworthy - grasps the attention. So too do his ancient Greek contexts arrest... Wallen's 'fields of disease', with its 1755 Ordinance Survey map of Spittle Fields on the dust jacket, contributes to this growing library.' Medical History '... a suggestive account that offers a fresh perspective on important issues and ideas in the philosophy of science.' Isis