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Medicine is most often understood through the metaphor of war, as in "the fight against Ebola." What I call the "martial metaphor" is so embedded in the discourses of medicine—and the disciplines that critique it—that we do not think twice about using this construction or about its bioethical implications, much less its origins. As the first cultural history of the martial metaphor, "Medicine Is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture" shows how it gained cultural purchase throughout the nineteenth century to become the figure of speech so prevalent today. The thought of medicine as war didn't begin as a metaphor; it emerged from the material connections between the military and medicine. These material connections were reflected on and redeployed as a metaphor by such authors as Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Kingsley, Bram Stoker, and Joseph Conrad during the advent of medical modernity to become codified in everyday usage. Part I discusses how Shelley and Kingsley conflated the cholera epidemics of the first half of the nineteenth century with war in the context of pre-bacteriological theories of disease. Part II addresses the connections between empire, race, and germ theory in the second half of the nineteenth century as articulated through the writings of Stoker, Conan Doyle, and Conrad, where we see that the epistemological change to understanding disease as caused by living organisms challenged Britain's salubrious racial identity."Medicine Is War" accounts for the historical baggage in the language commonly used to articulate the encounter with disease. Scholars such as Pamela Gilbert and Laura Otis who have referenced the metaphor in the context of other investigations of how nineteenth literature dealt with biological anxieties mapped onto political ones and vice versa have not addressed the cultural work of the metaphor itself. By contrast, "Medicine is War" traces how the metaphor's history influenced its use in the Victorian era, revealing how literature occluded the military history of medical language and circulated the resulting metaphor in the public imaginary.

In Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture, Jennifer Esmail explores the cultural role of deafness in Victorian England and North America. Looking to cultural products as a reflection of wider societal beliefs, Esmail provides an in-depth history of the contrasting proponents of signed languages and oralism during this historical period.

Intro -- Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture -- Acknowledgements -- About This Book -- Contents -- List of Figures -- 1 Introduction: Ways of Seeing -- Syphilis and Its (In)Visibility -- Critical Blind Spots -- Peripatetic Viewing -- Notes -- 2 Aetiology and Etymology: Concepts, Bodies, Media -- Syphilis Concepts -- Discursive-Material Syphilis -- Syphilis-in-Media -- Media Production and Dissemination of Knowledge about Syphilis: A Case Study -- Reframing Grünewald: The Rhetorics of (Icono)Texts -- Notes -- 3 Recognizing Syphilis: Pornographic Knowledge and the Politics of Explanation -- Medical Sightings and Protective Narratives -- Professional and Civic Narratives in the Polyclinic -- Self-fashioning -- Unhealthy Sights and the Conspiracy of Silence -- Feminist and New Woman Voices on Syphilis -- Wages of Ignorance: Domestic Medicine Manuals -- Public Anatomy Museums: (Cautionary) Tales of Moral Perdition and Financial Profit -- Recognizing Syphilis -- Pornographic Knowledge -- Notes -- 4 Facing Pathology: Modern (Re)Production of Difference -- The Poetics and Politics of Syphilis Typologies -- Facing Syphilis: Visual Typologies -- Shifting Appearances: From Women's Bodies to Contagious Touch -- The Body of Consumption/Consumptive Bodies -- Syphilis for Public Consumption -- The Pleasures of the Marketplace 1: Modernist Aesthetics -- The Pleasures of the Marketplace 2: Hysteria and Individuality -- The Power of Mimicry -- Notes -- 5 Prophylaxis and Treatment: Geopolitics of Differentiation -- Mapping the Pox-Ridden World -- Geographies in Flux: Space, Syphilis and Soldiers' Mobility -- Colonies and Cordons Sanitaires -- Distance, Movement and Care -- Containment at the Border -- Lock Hospitals: Nodal Points of (In)Visibility -- Spaces of Isolation and Invisibility -- Sites of Reformation and Healing.