Introduction

A ‘prodigious latitude’ of words: vocabularies of illness in 18th-century medical treatises and women’s writing

“…Even though, as Leigh Whaley argues, women working in the 18th-century medical sphere lost ground with regard to professional opportunities and access to a public voice as the century drew to a close (Whaley 2011, 110), many of them, write Kathleen Hardesty Doig and Felicia Berger Sturzer, ‘became well-known midwives’, ‘wrote self-help [health] manuals’, and made ‘significant scientific contributions as anatomists, botanists, herbalists’ (Hardesty Doig and Berger Sturzer 2014, 2). In the literary sphere, Betty Schellenberg argues, the mid-18th century should be understood as a ‘high point in the cultural positioning of women writers’ (Schellenberg 2015, 42), who found, in Catherine Ingrassia’s words, ‘previously unimagined opportunities’ (Ingrassia 2015, 3).…”