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9781438481678

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...Servitje has explored a theme that medical historians have largely ignored, mining a range of medical sources and reading them in new ways. - Bulletin of the History of Medicine This is an exceedingly timely work, as the pandemic rages around us, and the language of war is heard from all sides. Servitje challenges the seemingly inevitable correlation of medicine and military extermination, and shows how this mode of perception only became entrenched within our culture and language during the nineteenth century. In wonderfully insightful readings of works, from Mary Shelley's The Last Man to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Servitje explores how literary texts worked both to challenge and promote the entangled relations of medical science and the military in nineteenth-century culture. - Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford Medicine Is War is a provocative and beautifully-written account of the emergence, popularization, and entanglement of military metaphors in medicine, public health, and popular culture. Servitje accomplishes what few scholars of the Victorian period have been able to do; connect in deep and meaningful ways cultural literary forms with medical theory and social context. Scholars have long acknowledged the ways that military metaphors have shaped modernity, but Medicine Is War provides the definitive account of how we should frame and conceptualize the 'fight,' 'war,' and 'battle' against disease. Historians and literary scholars, and also medical and public health practitioners, will find relevance in this ground-breaking work. - Jacob Steere-Williams, College of Charleston and author of The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England

This is an exceedingly timely work, as the pandemic rages around us, and the language of war is heard from all sides. Servitje challenges the seemingly inevitable correlation of medicine and military extermination, and shows how this mode of perception only became entrenched within our culture and language during the nineteenth century. In wonderfully insightful readings of works, from Mary Shelley's The Last Man to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Servitje explores how literary texts worked both to challenge and promote the entangled relations of medical science and the military in nineteenth-century culture. - Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford Medicine Is War is a provocative and beautifully-written account of the emergence, popularization, and entanglement of military metaphors in medicine, public health, and popular culture. Servitje accomplishes what few scholars of the Victorian period have been able to do; connect in deep and meaningful ways cultural literary forms with medical theory and social context. Scholars have long acknowledged the ways that military metaphors have shaped modernity, but Medicine Is War provides the definitive account of how we should frame and conceptualize the 'fight,' 'war,' and 'battle' against disease. Historians and literary scholars, and also medical and public health practitioners, will find relevance in this ground-breaking work. - Jacob Steere-Williams, College of Charleston and author of The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England

Author Information

Lorenzo Servitje is Assistant Professor of Literature and Medicine at Lehigh University. He has published several books, including Syphilis and Subjectivity: From the Victorians to the Present (coedited with Kari Nixon); Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory (coedited with Kari Nixon); and The Walking Med: Zombies and the Medical Image (coedited with Sherryl Vint).

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