Textualizing Illness investigates how colonial New England writings
represented and contributed to the meaning-endowment of diseases. It
explores how the textual configurations of illnesses changed in the wake
of the scientific revolution, growing numbers of non-Puritan settlers
and African slaves, and increasing contacts with Native Americans. The
representations of colonial body perceptions and illness experiences are
often hidden in a broad textual archive and thus require "reading
across" different texts and authors to analyze the positions and
functions of the sick body in both medical and cultural discourses. In
the illness narratives surveyed here, medical issues - from actual
practices to intellectual responses to diseases - illustrate how early
American literature and society developed a regional distinctiveness
while being embedded in transnational circuits of knowledge formation
and cultural practices.