This book focuses on the centrality of illness - particularly psychosomatic illness - as an imaginative construct in Victorian culture, emphasising how it shaped the terms through which people perceived relationships between body and mind, self and other, private and public.The author uses nineteenth-century fiction, diaries, medical treatises, and health advice manuals to examine how Victorians tried to understand and control their world through a process of physiological and pathological definition. Tracing the concept of illness in the fiction of a variety of authors - Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Henry James, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Meredith, Bram Stoker, and H. Rider Haggard - Vrettos shows how Victorians attempted to manage diffuse and chaotic social issues by displacing them on to matters of physiology.
