This book is about an emotion constantly present in human culture and history: fear. It is also a book about literature and medicine, two areas of human endeavour that engage with fear most acutely. The essays in this volume explore fear in various literary and medical manifestations, in the Western World, from medieval to modern times. It is divided into two parts. The first part, Treating Fear, examines fear in medical history, and draws from theology, medicine, philosophy, and psychology, to offer an account of how fear shifts in Western understanding from the Middle Ages to Modern times. The second part, Writing Fear, explores fear as a rhetorical and literary force, offering an account of how it is used and evoked in distinct literary periods and texts. This coherent and fascinating collection will appeal to medical historians, literary critics, cultural theorists, medical humanities scholars and historians of the emotions.

Daniel B. McCann is the Simon and June Li Fellow in Old and Middle English at Oxford Universitys Lincoln College.

Claire McKechnie-Mason is a management officer at NHS Cardiff. 

1. Introduction: A Dreadful Start - Daniel McCann and Claire McKechnie-Mason.- 2. Frightened and Rather Feverish: The Fear of Pain in Childbirth - Joanna Bourke.- 3. Dreadful: Aesthetic Fear in Victorian Reading - Pamela K. Gilbert.- 4. Damned Above Ground: Dreadful Despair in Elizabethan and Stuart Literature - Elizabeth Hunter.- 5. Fear and sorrow without a just cause: the place of fear inThe Anatomy of Melancholy - Mary Ann Lund.- 6. Dreadful Health: Fear and Sowle-hele inThe Prickynge of Love - Daniel McCann.- 7. The Age of Noise and the Mass Dread of Quietude in Interwar Britain 1919-1939 - Neil Pemberton.- 8. Fears, Phobias and the Victorian Psyche - Sally Shuttleworth.- 9.  The Fearful Body in Contemporary Medical Television Drama and Medical Case Reports. - Martin Willis.- 10. Fresh Terror, New Horror: Fear and the Unfamiliar in the Old EnglishExodus - Andy Orchard.