Nervous illness and the study of how body and mind connected, were of intense interest to Victorian medical writers and novelists alike. This elegant study offers an integrated analysis of how medicine and literature figured the connection between the body and the mind. Alongside detailed examinations of some of the era's most influential neurological and physiological theories, Jane Wood offers fresh readings of fictions by Charlotte Brontë, George MacDonald, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing.