Body Language: Medicine and the Eighteenth-Century Comic Novel

by Kathleen Tamayo Alves

Overview

Body Language examines the complex intersections of British eighteenth-century comic fiction and medical discourse. By engaging medical writings of renowned and widely-read physicians of the Enlightenment such as John Freind, Thomas Sydenham, Albrecht von Haller, John Whytt, and William Cullen, with novels of humor by Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, and Charlotte Lennox, Alves explains how medicine shaped comic language by dramatizing female-specific phenomena like menstruation, hysteria, nervous disorders, and pregnancy. In these novels, the medical belief that women are incapable of bodily self-regulation becomes an imperative for policing women’s bodies and highlights the enduring shortcomings of patriarchal systems. Ultimately, these comic representations offer a counternarrative of women’s bodies, agency, and selfhood, exposing masculine anxieties about the effectiveness of marriage to regulate women’s sexuality.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684485727
Publisher:	Bucknell University Press
Publication date:	11/11/2025
Series:	Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200

About the Author

KATHLEEN TAMAYO ALVES is an associate professor of English at Queensborough Community College of The City University of New York. Her research centers on eighteenth-century literature and culture, medicine, and literary history, and she has recently published in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.
 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Eighteenth-Century Medicine and Comic Representations of Women  
1. Leaky Writings and Leaky Bodies in Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741) and Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771)
2. Hysterical Language and Desiring Women in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749)
3. The Maternal Body and Obstetric Authority in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) and Tobias Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle (1751)
4. Romantic (Mis)Readings and Nervous Sympathy in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752)
Coda: Surgical Violence as a Tool of Masculine Dominance in Poor Things (2023)
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Introduction: Eighteenth-Century
Medicine
and Comic Representations
of Women
1
1 Leaky Writings and Leaky Bodies in Henry
Fielding’s Shamela (1741) and Tobias
Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771) 17
2 Hysterical Language and Desiring Women
in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742)
and Tom Jones (1749) 44
3 The Maternal Body and Obstetric Authority
in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759)
and Tobias Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle (1751) 72
4 Romantic (Mis)Readings and Nervous
Sympathy in Charlotte Lennox’s
The Female Quixote (1752) 108
Coda: Surgical Violence
as a Tool of Masculine
Dominance in Poor Things
(2023) 140
Acknowledgments
149
Notes 153
Bibliography 175
Index 000

Editorial Reviews

"An erudite, engaging account of how eighteenth-century comic novels refigure, in fascinating and unexpected ways, misogynistic medical theories about ciswomen's embodiment. Through meticulous excavation of eighteenth-century medical treatises and highly original close readings of canonical novels by Smollett, Sterne, Fielding, and Lennox, Alves offers compelling new dimensions to the literary histories of medicine, gender, and sexuality. A must-read for specialists and non-specialists alike!"

author of Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature - Jason Farr

"Offering deft and stimulating comparisons of eighteenth-century comic fiction and scientific writing, Body Language adds a vital chapter to the study of medicine, literature, and gender in the period. Alves's insightful analysis of seven novels alongside a range of medical texts shows how the female body, as a cultural signifier, can tell new stories."

author of Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain - Heather Meek

"Body Language artfully weaves an interdisciplinary web of science, sexuality, and reading practices to reveal the feminist potential of comic modes. This incredibly detailed work on the overlooked area of female bodies in comic texts makes a unique and important contribution to scholarship on literature and medicine.

author of Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies - Laura R. Kremmel

"A rich exploration of the interrelation of eighteenth-century literature and medicine, Body Language deftly connects the formal constraints on fictional characters to those medical discourse places on living women. Alves's lucid and often deeply funny readings show that a patriarchal medical establishment can find little harder to account for than the ways that women escape efforts to define and constrain them."

author of Revealing Bodies: Anatomy, Allegory, and the Grounds of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth C - Erin M. Goss