“Not […] Bodily Illness Merely”: Framing Disease and the Physician in the Medical Narratives of Jane Austen and George Eliot

This thesis explores the medical narratives of Jane Austen and George Eliot using a framework that combines literary analysis, historical contextualisation, and the categories of 'clinical gaze' and 'narrative medicine' coined by Michel Foucault and Rita Charon respectively. The study recovers the important social changes that gradually led to the professionalisation and hyper-specialisation of the medical field in the long nineteenth century, and how these are reflected in the plots and language of Austen's later novels Emma (1815), Persuasion (1817), and the unfinished fragment of Sanditon (written in 1817), and of Eliot's Middlemarch (1874 edition), with a focus on the intersections of medical knowledge, the authoritative status of medical professionals, and issues of gender. The analysis draws connections between the ways in which the two authors engage with the scientific and medical discourses of their time while simultaneously providing alternative models for scientific objectivity, ones that include practices of care and compassion as the structural core for the pursuit of scientific knowledge.