Profound science and elegant literature : imagining doctors in nineteenth-century America / Stephanie P. Browner.

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2005], ©2005.

304 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Includes bibliographical references (p. [271]-287) and index.

Introduction: what's a doctor, after all? -- 1. Professional medicine, democracy, and the modern body: the discovery of etherization -- 2. Reading the body: Hawthorne's tales of medical ambition -- 3. Carnival bodies and medical professionalism in Melville's fiction -- 4. Class and character: doctors in nineteenth-century periodicals -- 5. Gender, medicine, and literature in postbellum fiction -- 6. Social surgery: physicians on the color line -- Epilogue: from the clinic to the research laboratory: a case study of three stories.