Body Language: Medicine and the Eighteenth-Century Comic Novel

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 menstru...