Baillie’s Diagnostic Sublime

Health humanities and British Romanticism

“…Consequently, and understandably, studies of it lean toward the conceptual—even when dealing directly with people's lived experience. For example, John Savarese's (2018) ERR article on Joanna Baillie claims she found the “medical gaze to be deeply humanizing” in service of an argument about how her ideas fit into Romantic theories of social epistemology (Savarese, 2018, p. 41). For another, Michelle Faubert's (2016) analysis of contagion rhetoric compares Romantic suspicion of vaccines to the “epidemic” of suicides surrounding the publication of Goethe's Werther , sourcing both in a wider fear that the “Other could become the Self … and destroy it from the inside” (Faubert, 2016, p. 389).…”