Entitled, “Illness, Healing and Relationality in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Health Writing,” our panel offers an exploration of the ways in which centuries-old discourses on women’s health might inform medical practice today. This is a response to two timely topics that we interrelate: first, the consistent reporting of women’s health research as underfunded and overlooked in the United States; and second, a particular news piece released in May of this year regarding Harvard University’s decision to select as their graduating class commencement speaker “[a] physician who advocates for the power of human touch over technology” (Ebrahimji, CNN, May 26 2025). Inviting Abraham Vergehese, who emphasizes the necessity of “touch,” or a palpable connection, between doctor and patient, draws attention to the ever-raised question of how we define healing, as well as the potential roles of human connection or relationality in the healing process.

In this panel, we turn to the eighteenth century, where relationality was sometimes established by touch, but more often epistolarily and in print. Collectively, we will attend novels, medical texts, case notes and personal correspondence from the period to explore the ways eighteenth-century writers (medically trained or otherwise) variously drew upon relationality in narratives of women’s health and illness. In so doing, we are building upon recent or forthcoming scholarly contributions that consider how narrative contributed to developing conceptions of health and illness over time and that highlight eighteenth-century women’s contributions therein (e.g. Meek, 2022; eds. Blackwood, Ingram and Williams, 2023; and eds. Richards and Todd, forthcoming). Thus, our panel would be of interest to eighteenth-century studies, medical history, women’s studies, and health humanities scholars more broadly.

The seventy-five minute session will be structured accordingly: ten minutes will be allowed to accommodate the general session introduction, individual panelist introductions and transitions between papers. Forty-five minutes will be allotted to the delivery of all three papers (fifteen minutes per panelist). The final twenty minutes will be dedicated to discussion.

Our first speaker, Natasha Duquette, will open with her talk, “‘Qui me tiendra se sein?’: Touch and Healing in Frances Burney’s Life and Fiction.” She will provide a new critical perspective toward novelist Frances Burney’s famous mastectomy letter that supports a view of the narrative’s utility for patients of surgeons today. Through her comparative analysis of Burney’s letter and 1782 novel, Cecilia, Duquette will foreground the significance of human touch and relationality in Burney’s vision for women’s recovery care that can prompt us to reconsider and evaluate postoperative care practices in our own time.

Panelist Philip Trotter will extend what has been argued of Burney’s mastectomy narrative – that it can be understood as a “reparative activit[y]” for the author herself – to three eighteenth-century women novelists living in genteel poverty: Sarah Scott, Lady Barbara Montagu, and Sarah Fielding. His talk, “‘Distress in her Circumstances’: Women’s Writing, Wellness, and Charity in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” will examine how these writers’ novels and correspondence functioned as non-medicinal means of grappling with and working through their individual health challenges as well as those in their communities. In so doing, he will show how these compositions can be understood as a mode of relational healing that renders itself accessible to readers and patients regardless of class or income level.

The final speaker, Virlana Shchuka, will close the panel with her talk, “Preterm Birth, Maternal Guilt, and Relational Health in the Eighteenth Century.” Drawing upon medical discourses, she will foreground how spousal relational health came to be an integral part of pregnancy and postnatal health regimen narratives. She will then turn to understudied novels like Elizabeth Hervey’s Louisa (1790) to showcase how allegations of preterm birth on the part of the mother figure were frequently treated with suspicion, while many practitioners sought to use medical texts to assuage the eyebrow-raised husband. This talk will make connections between the depicted relational contexts of preterm birth and care approaches toward the so-called ‘maternal guilt phenomenon’ pervading today’s neonatal intensive care units.

The speakers on this panel consist of three scholars from three different institutions (University of Toronto; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College) that collectively span two countries (Canada and the United States). Panelists include a man and two women, each of whom holds a different position at his or her respective institution: a doctoral student, a postdoctoral fellow, and a professor. This panel primarily concentrates on British eighteenth-century women writers across classes to bring texts about women’s health into new conversations with one another.