Literature and medicine is a very broad church indeed, even within the narrower confines of the long eighteenth century, that imperialistic concept covering the period 1660–1832, or thereabouts. Even imperialistic concepts have their uses, however, and this span of time allows us to think outside traditional literary history and incorporate the interaction of matters medical with literary genres and texts. Our volume begins with the slow demise of humoural theory and the foundation of the Royal Society, and takes us to the end of a period in which the profession of medicine was not compartmentalised and hived off into one of the ‘two cultures’ posited by C. P. Snow.