Explorations in the Medical Humanities

Edinburgh was a hotbed of medical research and study in the early nineteenth century. The city laid claim to a thriving periodical culture, which served as a significant medium for the dissemination and exchange of medical and literary ideas throughout Britain, the colonies, and beyond. Enmeshed in this periodical culture was one of Scotland’s foremost Romantic writers, James Hogg, a poet and novelist known as ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’. Despite his dedication to the traditional and the folkloric, Hogg was imaginatively stimulated by the vibrant scientific and medical culture of post-Enlightenment Edinburgh. In this lecture, Professor Megan Coyer takes Hogg’s prose writing as a test case for analyzing pathographies and illness narratives within the distinctive cultural context of Romantic-era Scotland.