Ecrire la maladie et l'identité dans le 17e siècle britannique

Writing Illness and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Britain

David Thorley


Series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Hardcover: 231 pages
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 1st ed. 2016 edition (August 25, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1137593115

His book is a survey of personal illness as described in various forms of early modern manuscript life-writing. How did people in the seventeenth century rationalise and record illness? Observing that medical explanations for illness were fewer than may be imagined, the author explores the social and religious frameworks by which illness was more commonly recorded and understood. The story that emerges is of illness written into personal manuscripts in prescriptive rather than original terms. This study uncovers the ways in which illness, so described, contributed to the self-patterning these texts were set up to perform.