Stephanie M. Hilger

Introduction: Bridging the Divide Between Literature and Medicine

The first part of the introduction discusses the need for scholarship that reconnects the disciplines of literature and medicine, which were not separated until the Early Modern period when the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy was mapped onto and institutionalized by the split between the sciences and the humanities. It briefly surveys the history of the related fields of “literature and medicine” and “medical humanities,” which emerged in the 1970s, and discusses their impact on present-day interdisciplinary scholarship. The second part of the introduction describes the four parts of the handbook: history and pedagogy, the mind-body connection, physical and cultural alterity, and the professionalization of medicine. The chapters in each of these thematic clusters focus on one particular way of reconnecting the disciplines of literature and medicine and, by extension, the humanities and the sciences.

Imagining a New World: Henriette Frölich's Virginia oder die Kolonie von Kentucky (1820)

The title of Henriette Frölich’s Virginia oder die Kolonie von Kentucky (1820) voices the nineteenth-century imagination of America as the locus of a new civilization in the wake of post-Revolutionary disillusionment. The novel’s subtitle, Mehr Wahrheit als Dichtung, echoes the title of the autobiography of Goethe, author of the German Bildungsroman par excellence, Wilhelm Meister. Frölich’s title establishes a correlation between new concepts of community and the individual’s “Bildung” as the basis for novel forms of communal living in the early nineteenth century. This paper explores the ambivalent legacy of Frölich’s text. On the one hand, Virginia has been described as a socialist utopia modeled on thinkers such as François-Noël Babeuf, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, and Étienne-Gabriel Morelly. On the other hand, however, this new community does not extend equality to women, Native Americans, Blacks, and non-French European immigrants such as Germans. Ethnic, racial, and gender inequalities persist in the North American colony. Frölich’s utopia is, therefore, also a dystopia, which is shaped by the same social injustice that provided the impetus for its creation.