Frances Burney's Mastectomy Narrative and Discourses of Breast Cancer in the Long Eighteenth Century

Meek, Heather

doi:10.1353/lm.2017.0001

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Many medical and historical accounts of breast cancer in the 18th century highlight the pain of the disease and its treatments (most notably mastectomy). On this issue, see Kaartinen, 89–124; Heather Meek (2017) , “Frances Burney’s Mastectomy Narrative and Discourses of Breast Cancer in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Literature and Medicine 35, esp. 32–4.…”

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confidence: 99%

Cancer and the emotions in 18th-century literature

Gallagher

2019

Med Humanities

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This essay argues that the emotional rhetoric of today’s breast cancer discourse—with its emphasis on stoicism and ‘positive thinking’ in the cancer patient, and its use of sympathetic feeling to encourage charitable giving—has its roots in the long 18th century. While cancer had long been connected with the emotions, 18th-century literature saw it associated with both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ feelings, and metaphors describing jealousy, love and other sentiments as ‘like a cancer’ were used to highlight the danger of allowing feelings—even benevolent or pleasurable feelings—to flourish unchecked. As the century wore on, breast cancer in particular became an important literary device for exploring the dangers of feeling in women, with writers of both moralising treatises and sentimental novels connecting the growth or development of cancer with the indulgence of feeling, and portraying emotional self-control as the only possible form of resistance against the disease. If, as Barbara Ehrenreich suggests, today’s discourse of ‘positive thinking’ has been mobilised to make patients with breast cancer more accepting of their diagnosis and more cooperative with punitive treatment regimens, then 18th-century fictional exhortations to stay cheerful served similarly conservative political and economic purposes, encouraging continued female submission to male prerogatives inside and outside the household.

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confidence: 99%

Cancer and the emotions in 18th-century literature

Gallagher

2019

Med Humanities

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“…While there are historical records of patient-driven accounts of cancer since at least the 19 th century (Meek, 2017), research often points to the work of Jo Spence, Matuschka and Hannah Wilke between the 1970s and the 1990s as a departure from traditional photography and into a new image, owned by patients. Through their visual accounts of their cancer treatment, the three photographers offered an image that was radically different from that of medical and commercial photography.…”

Section: From Medical Photography To Auto-pathographiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Si bien hay registros de relatos de la enfermedad por pacientes de cáncer desde al menos principios del Siglo XIX (Meek, 2017), las investigaciones suelen apuntar al trabajo de Jo Spence, Matuschka y Hannahh Wilke como un distanciamiento de la fotografía de cáncer tradicional. Las tres fueron pacientes de cáncer, y las tres ofrecieron una imagen radicalmente opuesta a la comercial y a la médica.…”

Section: De La Fotografía Médica a La Auto-patografíaunclassified

The shape of cancer: Socialisation and visual representations of the illness on Instagram

Rodríguez¹

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This accompanying document offers an overview of the conceptual framework, the methodology, the thematic linkages between the papers presented, and the logic followed throughout the process, as well as a series of conclusions. Following the visual spirit of the thesis, the text is accompanied by a series of visualisations that encapsulate the main points made in each chapter.For ease of reference, each paper is referred to by its short name:1. Systematic review 2. Scattered Images 3. Whose Cancer 4. Crying Photographs avoid colon cancer, make sure to eat plenty of vegetables; to avoid skin cancer, apply sunscreen. I also remember my father's call for our public health system to be more humane, egalitarian, and closer to the patient. My wife's experience as a psycho-oncologist has also influenced my work greatly. Sheltered from the cold fog of November in a local café, we argued about how anxious cancer patients must feel when they are presented with discourses of cancer that do not align with their experience.

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Medicine in theMonthly Review: Revealing public medical discourse with topic modelling

Arnold

2021

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

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Historians of science and medicine have long argued for the need to recover non-specialist views of medicine and health, as research has often concentrated on practitioner accounts. In this paper, we examine medical discourse in the British periodical the Monthly Review. Published monthly from 1749 to 1844, the Monthly was greatly influential in its time. However, it has received limited scholarly attention, due in part to the unwieldy size of its corpus, which spans 96 years and 246 volumes, each composed of three–six monthly issues. We employ statistical topic modelling to analyse the Monthly, revealing the presentation and prevalence of various public medical discourses, as well as how these discourses varied over the course of the periodical’s almost 100 years. As the Monthly aimed to review every published text, it provides records of and contemporary discussions about thousands of texts currently lost from archives. This analysis of the Monthly ultimately sheds light on the medical topics and texts that featured prominently in British public discourse during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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Frances Burney's Mastectomy Narrative and Discourses of Breast Cancer in the Long Eighteenth Century

Cited by 4 publications

References 8 publications

Cancer and the emotions in 18th-century literature

Cancer and the emotions in 18th-century literature

The shape of cancer: Socialisation and visual representations of the illness on Instagram

Medicine in theMonthly Review: Revealing public medical discourse with topic modelling

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