{"rowid": 48, "title": "[\"Cancer and the emotions in 18th-century literature\"]", "DOI": "10.1136/medhum-2018-011639", "URL": "http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2018-011639", "created": "2019-11-06T22:15:31Z", "subject": "[\"Philosophy\", \"Pathology and Forensic Medicine\"]", "references-count": "0", "is-referenced-by-count": "0", "ISSN": "[\"1468-215X\", \"1473-4265\"]", "container-title": "Medical Humanities", "abstract": "<jats:p>This essay argues that the emotional rhetoric of today\u2019s breast cancer discourse\u2014with its emphasis on stoicism and \u2018positive thinking\u2019 in the cancer patient, and its use of sympathetic feeling to encourage charitable giving\u2014has its roots in the long 18th century. While cancer had long been connected with the emotions, 18th-century literature saw it associated with both \u2018positive\u2019 and \u2018negative\u2019 feelings, and metaphors describing jealousy, love and other sentiments as \u2018like a cancer\u2019 were used to highlight the danger of allowing feelings\u2014even benevolent or pleasurable feelings\u2014to flourish unchecked. As the century wore on, breast cancer in particular became an important literary device for exploring the dangers of feeling in women, with writers of both moralising treatises and sentimental novels connecting the growth or development of cancer with the indulgence of feeling, and portraying emotional self-control as the only possible form of resistance against the disease. If, as Barbara Ehrenreich suggests, today\u2019s discourse of \u2018positive thinking\u2019 has been mobilised to make patients with breast cancer more accepting of their diagnosis and more cooperative with punitive treatment regimens, then 18th-century fictional exhortations to stay cheerful served similarly conservative political and economic purposes, encouraging continued female submission to male prerogatives inside and outside the household.</jats:p>", "author_number": "1", "orcids": "[\"http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7826-495X\"]", "names": "[\"Noelle Gallagher\"]", "award_numbers": "[]", "funder_names": "[\"University of Manchester\"]", "funder_dois": "[\"10.13039/501100000770\"]"}