The Medical Blackwoodians and Medico-literary Synergy in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press. (360G-Wellcome-097597_Z_11_Z)

In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the capital of medical education and research in Britain and also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture, which served as a significant medium for the dissemination and exchange of medical and literary ideas throughout Britain, the colonies, and beyond. The influence of medical culture on English Romantic writers is well-established, but the same has yet to explored in regard to a distinctive Scottish Romanticism. The innovative form and ideol ogy of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential literary periodical of Romantic-era Scotland, particularly enabled medico-literary synergy, and I propose to examine several contributors to Blackwood's who also practiced medicine or received medical training. These writers had wide-ranging careers, producing significant medical texts and also contributing to numerous other periodicals, such as the Scots Magazine and Fraser's Magazine. Through a study of their role in making Blackwood' s such an influential site of Romantic medico-literary production and the function of journalistic and imaginative writing in their broader medical practice, I will examine how the Scottish periodical press cross-fertilised medical and literary ideas in the nineteenth-century. The main research outcome will be a series of articles in major peer-reviewed journals.