In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture, which served as a signifi cant medium for the dissemination and exchange of medical and literary ideas throughout Britain, the colonies, and beyond. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press explores the relationship between the medical culture of Romantic-era Scotland and the periodical press by examining several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the most infl uential and innovative literary periodical of the era. Situating these men's work in relation to developments in medical and periodical culture, the book illustrates how the nineteenth-century periodical press crossfertilised medical and literary ideas. As we will see, the Romantic periodical press cultivated innovative ideologies, discourses, and literary forms that both refl ected and shaped medical culture in the nineteenth century; in the case of Blackwood's, the magazine's distinctive Romantic ideology and experimental form enabled the development of an overtly ‘literary’ and humanistic popular medical culture, which participated in a wider critique of liberal Whig ideology in post-Enlightenment Scotland.

We may begin with a brief example from Blackwood's by a nonmedical contributor. The quotation at the head of this introduction comes from ‘Clark on Climate’, a hybrid medico-literary review of the second edition of Dr James Clark's The Influence of Climate (1830), attributed to John Wilson (1785–1854), Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh from 1820 until 1851 and a leading fi gure in the Blackwood's circle.