Diagnosing history

Introduction – Katherine Byrne, Julie Anne Taddeo, and James Leggott

Part I: Early modern professions and disease
1 Golden rats and sick empires: portraying medicine, poverty, and the bubonic plague in La Peste – José Ragas, Patricia Palma, and Guillermo González-Donoso
2 Wellness, womanhood, and witchcraft in Outlander: televised historical portrayals of women’s shifting roles in medicine – Jennifer M. Fogel and Serenity Sutherland
3 Avoiding ‘the faddlings of Dr Choake’: the professionalisation of medicine in Poldark – Barbara Sadler
4 ‘Infection was Mary’s reward’: Harlots and televising the realities of eighteenth-century English prostitution – Kristin Brig and Emily J. Clark

Part II: Pioneers, heroes, and villains
5 Feminist doctors and medicine women: the lady physician in the American western – Jacqueline D. Antonovich
6 The Black doctor on the historical small screen: African American physicians in television period dramas – Kevin McQueeney
7 When women were nurses: gender, nostalgia, and the making of historical heroines – Aeleah Soine
8 Heroic childbirth and Call the Midwife – Katherine Byrne
9 ‘Physician, heal thyself’: the good doctor of When the Boat Comes In – James Leggott

Part III: Dissecting the body
10 ‘And when you touched my naked body … your fingertips running along my flesh … this was abuse, not science’: Victorian medicine in Showtime's Penny Dreadful – Julie Anne Taddeo
11 The surgical gaze in the operating theatre: early twentieth-century surgery on screen – Marie Allitt
12 Of gods, monsters, and men: science, faith, the law, and the contested body and mind in The Frankenstein Chronicles and The Alienist – Andrea Wright

Part IV: 'Treating' the mind
13 Bad or mad?: Branwell Brontë, mental health, and alcoholism in Sally Wainwright’s To Walk Invisible – Sarah E. Fanning and Claire O’Callaghan
14 ‘After I left England, they thought I was mad. But they taught me to use it – now it’s a gift’: representations of mental illness in the period dramas of Stephen Knight – Dan Ward
15 Bitter living through science: melodramatic and moral readings of gay conversion therapy in A Place to Call Home – Gordon R. Alley-Young

Afterword – Jessica Meyer
Index