Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel

Maureen Tuthill is Associate Professor of English and A.P. Green Endowed Fellow in English at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, USA. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Literature of the Early American Republic, and Early American Literature.

• Preface.- Acknowledgments.- Introduction.- 1. A “Very Unfeeling World”: The Failure of Social Healing in Rowson’s America.- 2. “Your Health and My Happiness”: Sickness and Health in The Coquette and Female Quixotism.- 3. “The Best Means of Retaining Health”: Self-determined Health and Social Discipline in Early America.- 4. “The Means of Subsistence”: Health, Wealth, and Social Affection in a Yellow Fever World.- 5. The “Learned Doctor”: Tyler’s Literary Endorsement of a Federalist Elite.- 6. “Some Yankee Non-sense about Humanity”: Hiding Away African Health in Early American Fiction.- Epilogue.- Notes.- Bibliography.- Index.-

“Maureen Tuthill’s fascinating book demonstrates how American assumptions about healthcare have their roots in the eighteenth century and, in particular, the two decades following the USA’s founding. … Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel is deeply researched, tightly structured and consistently well argued. … The book makes thought-provoking and sobering reading … .” (Rowland Hughes, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, November, 2017)