Heather Meek, <i>Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain</i> Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2023. Pp. 324. ISBN 978-0-2280-1906-0. CA$75.00 (cloth).

This excellent study shows the extensive and deep medical knowledge of six women, each of whom was a 'medical savant' (p.131) who authored imaginative texts in eighteenth-century Britain.Facilitated by cultures of medicine and professional writing that had not yet formalized sufficiently to exclude women's voices, women's imaginative writing on health and medicine flourished during the eighteenth century.Illness and the body proved generative topics in their literary output, whether in poetry, prose or autobiography.Characters' suffering prompted experimentation in communicating voice and interiority; particular medical conditions prompted new poetic forms.At the same time, these women's writings show distinctive forms of medical knowledge, particularly but not only relating to women's bodies.The book is an important contribution both to literature and to the history of medicine and science, foregrounding women's creativity and expertise even as patriarchal stereotypes of women's inferiority persisted.Meek underscores how medical ideas have been profoundly gendered in the past, demonstrating the insufficiency of a narrative of modernizing 'Enlightenment' progress in knowledge.Strikingly, though, Meek's close analysis conveys an alternative kind of dynamism, one undertaken by thinking and feeling women across the life course as they suffered, cared and treated, creating innovative imaginative responses to illness, and to medical knowledge about it.A comprehensive introduction lays out the literary and medical contexts, inviting readers to 'regard illness as at once a concrete pathology and a label attached to a range of overlapping and competing narratives ' (p.19).The six chapters that follow each explore one woman's writing within a richly drawn context of contemporary medicine literature.Chapter 1 on Jane Barker's writing on hysterical affliction makes a compelling case for Barker as a pioneer.Meek argues that her novel Love Intrigues (1713) rewrote conventional medical views on women's physical and mental illness through the protagonist Galesia, whose condition is not the result of her inherent female weakness but of very real social conditions coupled with the duplicitousness of her male lover.The women examined in the remaining five chapters are perhaps more familiar to readers interested in the topic: the poet Anne Finch on 'spleen' and melancholy; smallpox as discussed in the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi's reflections in her journals on the trials of motherhood; consumption in Mary Wollstonecraft's semi-autobiographical novel Mary, A Fiction (1788); and the experiences of breast cancer, mastectomy and recovery as conveyed by Frances Burney in a letter to her sister.Each chapter stands alone as a sophisticated and nuanced analysis.

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