Bedside seductions

During the Victorian era, the status and meaning of the nurse experienced remarkable and telling shifts. Bedside Seductions is the first book-length exploration into the significance of the nurse in mid-Victorian literary and social history. By carefully sifting through legal, medical, and literary sources including novels, newspaper articles, and private letters, Catherine Judd reveals how the changing perceptions of the nurse during mid-Victorian times allow for fascinating insights into issues of class, gender, and race in this period.

First sentence: IN HIS VITRIOLIC ESSAY OF 1880, Fiction-Fair and Foul, John Ruskin meditates on the surfeit of death and illness in the Victorian novel, claiming that detailed, clinical depictions of morbidity are the hallmarks of the genre: "[the modern reader can] gather into one Caina of gelid putrescence the entire product of modern infidel imagination, amusing itself with destruction of the body, and busying

Year

1997

Language

English

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

Editions

1

Pages

225

ISBN

9780312177058

Data source: Wikidata