General:Female Diagnosticians and Healers in the Eighteenth Century

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Revision as of 14:26, 10 November 2009 by HeatherMeek (Talk | contribs)

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Name: Heather Meek

Email: heather.meek@uregina.ca

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Role: Assistant Professor

Institution: University of Regina

Field of Study/Creative Endeavor: English

Self-description

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I am a literary scholar and teacher specializing in eighteenth-century literature and women’s writing. My most recent work focuses on cultural, literary, and medical representations of hysteria in the Age of Reason, and I am currently exploring the relationship between illness and creativity in a group of women writers. Though I rely heavily on print texts not yet digitized, I use various databases (including Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, Google Books, JSTOR, and MLA bibliography) frequently in my research and teaching.

Project

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Most of my work to date has focused on recovering and analyzing materials on eighteenth-century hysteria (a condition akin to modern depression). I have considered how women's accounts of hysteria both intersect and collide with received medical wisdom that described the condition as rooted in wandering wombs, weak nerves, and inherently disordered female bodies. The majority of relevant medical literature is online, but the women’s accounts have been harder to track down (most of them are scattered in print versions of letters, journals, and diaries). I will not be able to pursue certain ideas until more of these works become available in digital form.



Story


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Keywords: Eighteenth Century


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