Romance, Poetry, and Surgical Sleep Literature Influences Medicine

Subjects:

• Health/Medicine » Health/Medicine (General)
• Literature » English Literature
• Philosophy » Philosophical Theory

Awards:

• American Medical Writers Association, Special Award for History of Medicine-Physicians Category

Reviews:

• ...should have wide appeal to those who are interested in romantic literature, the history of medicine, 19th-century and early 20th-century poets, and the discovery of anesthesia. While the question, "What took so long?" may not be unique, it has not to my knowledge been critically examined. That it has now been studied by a scholar of English literature who also happens to be a world-renowned anesthesiologist is, indeed, unique, as well as an important contribution to our understanding of how Western civilization has come to view pain and the true significance of modern anesthesiology.
  —
  JAMA

Table of Contents:

• Foreword by Sherwin B. Nuland
• An Anesthesiologist's Attempts to Understand Pain and Suffering as a Medical-Literary Conglomerate
• The Discovery of Anesthesia--An Outgrowth of an Understanding about the Prevention of Pain and Suffering
• Thomas Beddoes, Sr., Physician and Philosopher
• The Importance of Bristol as a Site for the Pneumatic Institute: Beddoes and Bristol
• The Recruitment of Scientists, Writers, and Experimenters for the Pneumatic Institute
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Pain and Suffering as Experience
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Commentary and Summary
• Epilogue
• Supplementary Reading