The periodical press in the early nineteenth century was a site of dynamic exchange between men of science and men of letters, and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was a particularly rich site of expression for medical ideas. This chapter explores the symbiotic relationship between the Blackwoodian prose fiction and the scientific and medical investigations of the Glaswegian surgeon and writer, R...

Over the last twenty years a considerable amount of valuable research has uncovered the activities of a variety of unorthodox medical practitioners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Quack doctors, spiritual healers, medical botanists, and bone-setters have all been subjected to detailed analysis.1 In contrast, the practitioners of folk-magical healing have been largely overlooked.2 Th...