In an 1812 letter to her sister Esther, Frances Burney describes the breast cancer diagnosis she received and the mastectomy she underwent with no more than a “wine cordial” as pain relief. This presentation considers this extraordinary letter not only as engaging with medical discourses in the age of Austen but also as enlarging understandings of the illness narrative genre. It begins by considering how, in the early nineteenth century, the process of medical professionalization was well underway but by no means complete, and a diverse group of people participated in various ways in the medical world. Women writers like Burney and Austen were in possession of considerable medical knowledge, which was woven into, and thus shaped, their literary work. Burney’s letter is singular, however, in offering a detailed, first-person account devoted solely to the experience of breast disease and mastectomy. As it outlines, oftentimes in excruciating detail, a patient’s acute physical and psychological distress, the letter offers a counter-narrative to the theories and case histories contained in a range of contemporaneous medical treatises. But Burney does not present a dogmatic vilification of male medical authority. Rather, her letter illustrates how doctors might grow attached to their patients, who, in turn, might defer to what they perceived as their doctors’ sound medical wisdom and benevolence. The presentation ends with a consideration of how Burney and her surgeon-writer contemporaries insist on the grim realities of breast cancer, refuse the certainty of a “perfect recovery,” and at once perpetuate and challenge enduring notions of a defective female body in ways that resonate with present-day breast cancer narratives and theories of disability.
The Details
What: “Mastectomy in the Age of Austen: Frances Burney’s ‘miserable account'” with Heather Meek
When: March 24, 2024 from 2:00-3:30 p.m.
Where: In the comfort of your home via Zoom
RSVP: This is a member-only event that is also open to any interested guests; it is FREE but RSVP is required. Register here.
Accessibility: We have auto-captions available in the Zoom meeting. There will be a PowerPoint presentation that will have a mixture of text, color, and images that will be as high-contrast as possible for ease of reading. If you have accessibility needs we have not addressed here, please let us know.
About our Speaker
Heather Meek is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Literatures and Languages of the World at Université de Montréal. Her research explores the intersections of literary and medical cultures in the long eighteenth century, with a particular focus on the works of women and physician writers. Her publications include investigations of Frances Burney’s early nineteenth-century mastectomy narrative (in Literature and Medicine, 2017); Samuel Richardson’s relationship to the medical milieu of his time (in Samuel Richardson in Context, Cambridge UP, 2017); medical discourse and the rise of the novel (in Literature and Medicine: The Eighteenth Century, Cambridge UP, 2021); eighteenth-century vocabularies of illness (in BMJ: Medical Humanities, 2022); and representations of blood and bloodletting (in Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2023). Her monograph, Re-Imagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain (McGill-Queen’s University Press), appeared in November 2023. With Heike Härting, she is currently completing an edited collection, Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics (Routledge), that will appear in March 2024.
