Where Similar Cases Are Stated: Medical Case Studies and Provisional Knowledge in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland

• Published in: Literature and medicine 2020, Vol.38 (1), p.26-50
• Main Author: Ryan, William J
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 18th century; Aesthetics; Allegory; Bibliographic literature; Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810); Case studies; Domestic violence; Empiricism; Epistemology; Exegesis & hermeneutics; Fate; Genre; Gothic fiction; Heroism & heroes; Knowledge; Literary characters; Literary criticism; Literary language; Literature; Logic; Medicine; Morality; Narrative techniques; Narratives; Narratology; Novels; Plot (Narrative); Readers; Reading; Reasoning; Source materials
• ISSN: 0278-9671; 1080-6571; 1080-6571
• DOI: 10.1353/lm.2020.0002

Scholars of literature and medicine have begun to address the under-studied relationship between the medical case study and the novel, two central genres emerging out of Enlightenment empiricism. This essay contributes to this line of inquiry by focusing on Charles Brockden Brown's novel Wieland (1798) and the medical case study. It unpacks the connection between Wieland and the launching of the first medical journal in the U.S., the Medical Repository. While scholarship has attended to the influence of contagious disease and medicine on Brown's later novels, this essay demonstrates the importance of medical ways of knowing at the beginning of the novelist's brief career. Specifically, it argues that Brown borrows a provisional mode of reasoning from medical literature, a mode of reasoning that finds literary form in the case study of the pre-clinical era.