Book Review:

Review of Laura R. Kremmel’s Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies, Gothic Literary Studies, University of Wales Press, 2022. 272 pp. Hardcover (ISBN: 978-1-78683-848-3). Kindle (ASIN:  B0B25L2CRZ).

Towards the end of Laura R. Kremmel’s erudite and expansive Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies, I was reminded of Rachael Scarborough King’s important claims about the value of generic reading, especially when we examine a capacious body of writing—such as Romantic-era literature and medical writing—produced during transitional moments in literary and cultural history. King writes, “Generic reading combines a historical understanding of the status of a genre with attention to how the creation of new texts restructures genre identity, reorganizing relationships among genres and illuminating the process of literary change” (264). By focusing on the relational connections between Gothic literature and Romantic-era medical writing, Kremmel traces a fascinating network of canonical and lesser-known literary and medical writers whose works collectively suggest how marginalized bodies can resist the rise of paternalistic medical and cultural authorities and instead “reallocate authority back to . . . the patient, enabling the body to participate actively in discourses about its own experience that establish its place in the medical, social, and political spheres” (Kremmel 214).

Kremmel begins her study by noting how the nebulous and often-contested terms “the Gothic imagination” and “the medical imagination” are both grounded in fear, terror, the unknown, and the unknowable. Gothic writers find radical power in these spaces of excitement and indeterminacy, and from them come demands of social justice for bodies that have been abused, discarded, or both: “By harnessing the power of fear,” Kremmel writes, “the tropes applied to these bodies allow them to reclaim agency over their own treatment at a time when medical authority was itself in flux” (2). Kremmel imposes order on this sizeable network of texts and writers by focusing each of her five chapters on a frequently used symbol or trope found in Gothic literature (reanimated corpses, skeletons, counterfeit corpses, the Devil, and contagion), and she pairs these tropes with a medical theory or debate (vitalism, melancholy, dissection, disability, and vaccination). In so doing, Kremmel provides a truly exemplary set of close readings that yield new insight into both canonical works by the likes of Matthew and Joanna Baillie, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Romantic poets including Coleridge and Byron, and lesser-known works, including an array of Gothic chapbooks and Joshua Pickersgill Jr.’s novel The Three Brothers (1803).

Chapter 1 considers the relationship between the figure of the reanimated corpse in Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Tales of Wonder (1801), and Romantic Tales (1808) and the theory of vitalism, or the idea that living organisms possess a vital force that animates them, popularized in the period by physician John Hunter. Kremmel sees vengeance as a “Gothic element” that “repurpos[es] a medical principle of life into a Gothic principle of death” (29). While impressive readings abound in the chapter, a standout comes with Kremmel’s analysis of Lewis’s poem “Bill Jones: A Tale of Wonder” from Romantic Tales, which depicts the titular sailor who seeks vengeance on an abusive captain from beyond the grave, after the captain stabs him. Kremmel notes that while the poem is set on a slave ship, and while its images of drownings invoke the horrific scenes of the Zong massacre, Lewis “denies these slaves the power of Gothic vitalism which he grants other vengeful characters” (59), a denial that likely stems at least in part from Lewis’s status as a member of plantation-owning family (he would inherit the plantation after his father’s death several years later).

In Chapter 2, Kremmel shifts from organ- and blood-filled corpses to the ways that Dacre uses images of skeletons, whose very lack of flesh symbolizes an escape from women’s embodiment and physical and mental pain, suggesting a fantasy of early anesthesia. Kremmel sees these representations as Dacre’s argument for much-needed pain management for women, one that she reads, interestingly, as aligned with the proto-feminist beliefs of Mary Wollstonecraft. Chapter 3 revisits the corpse—this time the counterfeit corpse—through the lens of conflicting anxieties about dissection that were pervasive across the early modern period. In this chapter, Kremmel explores multiple Gothic literary genres—the canonical novel The Mystery of Udolpho (1794), lesser-known (and fascinating) Gothic chapbooks, and Joanna Baillie’s play The Family Legend (1810)—to consider how demands for empirical truth in medicine require either vivisection, and thus the horror of murder, or a dead body, which is ultimately a counterfeit of a living body.

Chapter 4 provides an insightful reading of early nineteenth-century theories of disability made legible through supernatural depictions of the devil. Kremmel begins with a reading of Byron’s The Deformed Transformed (1822), which was informed by his lifelong struggles with a congenital foot deformity. The real focus of the chapter, however, is on the novel that inspired Byron’s play, Pickersgill Jr.’s The Three Brothers. Kremmel argues that the novel shows how “pathologising deformity in an oppressive society can be just as damaging to a vulnerable body as any wound and just as alienating as transplanting subjectivity into an entirely foreign body. What is more, it reveals the instability of the body that refuses to be bound to such categories as ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy,’ ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal,’ ‘ideal’ and ‘deformed’” (173). The disabled body thus becomes a powerful tool of resistance against medical and cultural authority.

In the final chapter, Kremmel reads Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) not as a Gothic novel itself, but rather as a work that ruminates “about the creation and behavior of Gothic narratives” (177). In the face of wholly absent medical voices or authorities, medical narratives need to be managed, and Kremmel argues that “the safely controlled written record Verney creates mediates the audience experience by mimicking vaccination techniques, preventing the narrative-induced plague from spreading to a new generation” (178). By way of conclusion, Kremmel invites scholars to continue the critical conversation that she’s begun in matters of Gothic literature’s capacity to promote social justice for historically marginalized bodies and groups.

Kremmel’s study is a welcome contribution to the scholarship of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, the history of medicine and the body, and Gothic and supernatural studies. For scholars in these fields, her monograph shows that such an ambitious exploration of genre indeed has the capacity to illuminate the process of both literary and cultural change. Yet for all of the changes to medical authority and popular culture that have occurred between the early nineteenth century and today, Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination offers a keen reminder: in the ongoing fight for bodily autonomy, the spectral figures of the past, whose hauntings resisted paternalism and promoted social justice for marginalized groups, remain urgently needed in our present.

Work Cited

King, Rachael Scarborough. “The Scale of Genre.” New Literary History, vol. 52, no. 2, 2021, pp. 261-284.

-30 Aug. 2025