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September 2024 Vol. 62 No. 1

The familiar story about 18th-century medical care is that it became increasingly empirical, scientific, and especially professional—which meant that it also became more male. Women had a place among midwives and folk healers, but the professions admitted only men, and so women were written out of the story of medicine. Meek (Univ. of Montreal, Canada) argues that the real story is more complicated, making her case through six, now-canonical women authors who participated in medical discourse in 18th-century Britain. The book is clearly structured, with chapters on Jane Barker and “hysterical affliction,” Anne Finch and “melancholy,” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and smallpox, Hester Piozzi and maternity-related conditions, Mary Wollstonecraft and consumption, and Frances Burney and breast cancer. Meek manages to treat fiction, poetry, journals, letters, and essays from across the century. Throughout, she resists the temptation to tell simple stories of patriarchal oppression, instead staying attentive to complexity in both the medical and the literary texts. Meek writes clearly, and she effectively summarizes the current state of knowledge before extending it, making her book useful to newcomers and old hands alike.

--J. T. Lynch, Rutgers University–Newark

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.