Gender and Disease in Literary and Medical Cultures

This collection responds to recent developments in Gender Medicine and the literary and cultural history of medicine. Bringing together scholars from Medical and Humanities departments, it uses case studies to investigate the gendered construction of disease from medieval times until today. The influence of gender on the creation of medical knowledge is now recognized within various branches of the medical field: genetic research, therapy, and investigations into biologically versus life style induced types of disease. In British and American literary and cultural studies, the narrative, dramatic and cinematic representation of diseases and medical knowledge and practice, as well as the cultural history of gender-specific diseases, have long been a thriving areas of research. The collection intervenes in these debates by reexamining gendered cultural patterns of representing or responding to disease, and the gender confusions that result when such patterns are disrupted.