Laurence Talairach-Vielmas 
Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic 

This book examines how Wilkie Collins’s interest in medical
matters developed in his writing through exploration of his revisions of
the late eighteenth-century Gothic novel from his first sensation
novels to his last novels of the 1880s. Throughout his career, Collins
made changes in the prototypical Gothic scenario. The aristocratic
villains, victimized maidens and medieval castles of classic Gothic
tales were reworked and adapted to thrill his Victorian readership. With
the advances of neuroscience and the development of criminology as a
significant backdrop to most of his novels, Collins drew upon
contemporary anxieties and increasingly used the medical to propel his
criminal plots. While the prototypical castles were turned into modern
medical institutions, his heroines no longer feared ghosts but the
scientist’s knife. This study hence underlines the way in which
Collins’s Gothic revisions increasingly tackled medical questions, using
the medical terrain to capitalize on the readers’ fears. It also
demonstrates how Wilkie Collins’s fiction reworks Gothic themes and
presents them through the prism of contemporary scientific, medical and
psychological discourses, from debates revolving around mental
physiology to those dealing with heredity and transmission. The book’s
structure is chronological covering a selection of texts in each
chapter, with a balance between discussion of the more canonical of
Collins’s texts such as The Woman in White, The Moonstone and Armadale
and some of his more neglected writings.