Introduction

The introduction reimagines the historical narrative of rivalry between increasingly specialized cultures of medicine and the arts in the Romantic period as instead a period of mutual exchange. This familiar history is belied by the historical movement of the terms “autopsy” and “verve,” which traveled in opposite directions between medical and literary fields during the height of the British Romantic period. The crossing of “autopsy” and “verve” between fields introduces the book’s principal concerns: how shared concepts and critical practices were exchanged between letters and medicine, how new structures of thought crossed between biological and textual concerns, and how tropes of organicity, disease, and treatment in Romantic texts reveal the diagnostic practices that bridged literary and medical cultures. Through a study of the great developments in the history of medicine in this period, and the “metapothecaries” like Samuel Taylor Coleridge who considered literature and medicine through a shared ontology, the chapter argues that Romantic literature develops the notion of protocols of diagnosis—the idea that the same protocols of critical interpretation can be used by doctors to diagnose disease, and by readers to understand works of fiction and poetry. Outlining four protocols of diagnosis that the rest of the book will elaborate, the chapter concludes by linking these four formulations to modern methodologies of critical reading, exploring the resonance of this history to contemporary reflections on the history of what has come to be called “symptomatic reading.”