Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading charts how medicine influenced the literature of British Romanticism in its themes, motifs, and—most fundamentally—forms. Drawing on new medical specialties at the turn of the nineteenth century along with canonical poems and novels, this book shows that both fields develop analogies that saw literary works as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts. Such analogies invited readers and doctors to produce a shared methodology of interpretation. The book’s most distinctive contribution is protocols of diagnosis: a set of practices for interpretation that could be used by doctors to diagnose disease, and by readers to understand fiction and poetry. In Romanticism, such interpretive protocols crossed between the emergent medical fields of anatomy, pathology, psychiatry, and semiology, and the most innovative literary texts, including the lyrics of William Wordsworth and John Keats, the elegies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Alfred Tennyson, and the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. Romantic poems and novels were read through techniques designed for the analysis of disease, while autopsy reports and case histories employed stylistic features associated with poetry and fiction. Such practices counter the assumption of a growing specialization in Romanticism, while suggesting that symptomatic reading (treating a text’s superficial signs as evidence of deeper meaning), a practice still debated today, originated from medicine. Romantic Autopsy provides an original account of the life and afterlife of Romantic-era medicine and literature, offering an important new history underlying modern-day approaches to literary analysis.