This course will focus on the relationship between literature and medicine during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the period in which medicine became “scientific.” We will consider how literary forms—science, detective, realist, and horror fiction—negotiated cultural anxieties and aspirations during the period of some of the most rapid, radical developments in medical science and practice: germ theory, epidemiology, toxicology, antibiotics, blood transfusion, among others. Reading literature from this period not only provides us with a fascinating account of medical history but more pressingly, it pushes us to consider how literary studies provide a unique way to understand the complexities, tensions, and ambiguities that come with medical advances. In this work, we will be doing a history of the present: using interdisciplinary humanistic inquiry to understand how we have wrought the biomedical present, in turn, putting into question the very idea of objectivity, the divide between science/art, and the notion that medical progress equates to better health outcomes, access to health care, and social justice.