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Palgrave Macmillan
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Fear in the Medical and Literary Imagination, Medieval to Modern

Dreadful Passions

  • Book
  • © 2018

Overview

  • Reveals fresh perspectives on current central concerns in the medical humanities, such as the subjective experience of illness, narrative medicine, the medicinal gaze, and the doctor-patient relationship
  • Examines how literature and medicine engage with fear from medieval to modern times, and the responses evoked in these contexts
  • Looks at the narrative nature and impact of fear in literature, history, and culture

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Table of contents (12 chapters)

  1. Treating Fear: Medicine, Illness, Therapy

Keywords

About this book

This book is about an emotion constantly present in human culture and history: fear. It is also a book about literature and medicine, two areas of human endeavour that engage with fear most acutely. The essays in this volume explore fear in various literary and medical manifestations, in the Western World, from medieval to modern times. It is divided into two parts. The first part, Treating Fear, examines fear in medical history, and draws from theology, medicine, philosophy, and psychology, to offer an account of how fear shifts in Western understanding from the Middle Ages to Modern times. The second part, Writing Fear, explores fear as a rhetorical and literary force, offering an account of how it is used and evoked in distinct literary periods and texts. This coherent and fascinating collection will appeal to medical historians, literary critics, cultural theorists, medical humanities’ scholars and historians of the emotions.

Reviews

“This is an inquiry into fear as both a psychological and physical condition to be dealt with in medicine … . This is a set of contributions that will be of interest to a wide audience, from writers and artists to practitioners … . This study is different, starting with its double approach: medicine and the arts.” (Alain Touwaide, Doody's Book Reviews, August, 2018)

Editors and Affiliations

  • Lincoln College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Daniel McCann

  • Glasgow Centre for Population Health, Glasgow, UK

    Claire McKechnie-Mason

About the editors

Daniel B. McCann is the Simon and June Li Fellow in Old and Middle English at Oxford University’s Lincoln College.

Claire McKechnie-Mason is a management officer at NHS Cardiff. 

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