Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel

Strange Cases is the story of the mutual influence of the case history

and the British novel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Fictions from Defoe's Roxana to James's The Turn of the Screw and

case histories from George Cheyne's to Sigmund Freud's have found

narrative impetus in pathology. The writer of a case history faces a

rhetorical bind unique to the human sciences: the need to display the

acumen of a scientist and the sympathy warranted to the suffering

patient. Repeated...