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I'm writing a chapter on smell in an early 20thC novel, which I bought for £2. Its a great source to research the senses, hospitals and med education. But so are other novels, which med historians with English degrees could use in their teaching next year; here are some more.
1) The first module I taught was on the hist of occ. health and students could write essays on work hazards as depicted in novels. Some memorable ones used Kingsley's Water Babies, Alton Lock, and you can find almost anything in Dickens. Another good source was Zola's Germinal.
Favorites were Upton Sinclair's novels, including the Jungle, but he also wrote on the oil industry and mining. I always wanted a student to read Thomas the Tank Engine and examine the depiction of the 'accident' and analyse this using Luckin and Cooter's History of the Accident.
2) Various aspects of 'madness' could be examined in Jane Eyre, Mary Barton, Peer Gynt, The Yellow Wallpaper and Smollett's Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves. Allan Beveridge has written a lot about madness in lit and film https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-psychiatric-treatment/article/is-everyone-mad-the-depiction-of-mental-disturbance-in-the-work-of-dostoyevsky/93AA567E56C90363B561FCB6077AE6F8
3) Physicians are represented in numerous novels and contexts, including Middlemarch, Moliere, and Smollett of course, who was a naval surgeon, and country doctors feature in Balzac's and Bulgakov's novels. I enjoyed Davies's The Cunning Man. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315377872
4) I have a student writing about disability in Gaskell's fiction (thanks @DrDavidMT); but disability features in literature from Oedipus to Morrison's Beloved. Other sources include Dickens, Collins' Poor Miss Finch, Craik's Olive and Treasure Island. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-literature-and-disability/AB919D5944918503BBB8B4C036FB9450
5) Medical institutions feature as settings in novels, most famously in Mann's Magic Mountain, but also Solzhenitzyn's Cancer Ward, Stewart's Sanatorium (1930), and Maugham's short story 'Sanatorium'. https://metode.org/issues/monographs/sanatoriums-in-contemporary-narratives.html
6) Antibiotics and magic bullets feature centrally in the plot of Lewis's Arrowsmith, Shaw's the Doctor's Dilemma, and Fulda's Das Wundermittel. Ilana Lowy and Robert Bud have both addressed these in their books and articles. https://www.shellsandpebbles.com/2013/10/13/sinclair-lewis-arrowsmith-why-everyone-should-read-this-1925-medical-novel/
7) Childbirth and pregnancy feature in a number of novels that have been scrutinized carefully by historians. These include Tristram Shandy, Anna Karenina, Richardson's Pamela, Middlemarch, Sense and Sensibility and of course Martin Chuzzlewit. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2013/07/best-births-literature/313057/
8) Fashionable diseases have been studied recently by historians and might be explored in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Johnson's Rasselas. https://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/file_store/production/224604/68A47E52-116C-4E3E-9D78-9713AB6FAB7D.pdf
9) Epidemic novels have received much coverage recently and include Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, but also less known novels like Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and Mary Shelley's The Last Man. Here's a good recent article on the latter https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/30/what-our-contagion-fables-are-really-about
10) AIDS itself has generated a host of contemporary writings which students might engage with, including Kushner's Angels in America, Shilts' The Band Played On, Brunt's Tell the Wolves I'm Home, Push, by Sapphire, and Berger's To the Wedding for example. https://hekint.org/2017/02/01/aids-literature-a-cross-cultural-perspective/
I'll be encouraging students to use novels this year, not least because many like revisiting their favorite novels and seeing them in new ways. I'll be reading Joyce's Ulysses and those of Francis Brett Young for smell, but there are many, many more. Feel free to add some below.
