This timely collection examines representations of medicine and medical practices in international period drama television. A preoccupation with medical plots and settings can be found across a range of important historical series, includingOutlander,Poldark,The Knick,Call the Midwife,La Peste andA Place to Call Home. Such shows offer a critique of medical history while demonstrating how contemporary viewers access and understand the past. Topics covered in this collection include the innovations and horrors of surgery; the intersection of gender, class, race and medicine on the American frontier; psychiatry and the trauma of war; and the connections between past and present pandemics. Featuring original chapters on period television from the UK, the US, Spain and Australia,Diagnosing historyoffers an accessible, global and multidisciplinary contribution to both televisual and medical history.

Katherine Byrne is Lecturer in English at Ulster University
Julie Anne Taddeo is Research Professor of History at the University of Maryland
James Leggott is Associate Professorof Film and Television Studies at Northumbria University

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 inLa Peste José Ragas, Patricia Palma, and Guillermo González-Donoso
2 Wellness, womanhood, and witchcraft inOutlander: televised historical portrayals of womens shifting roles in medicine Jennifer M. Fogel and Serenity Sutherland
3 Avoiding the faddlings of Dr Choake: the professionalisation of medicine inPoldark Barbara Sadler
4 Infection was Marys 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 andCall the Midwife Katherine Byrne
9 Physician, heal thyself: the good doctor ofWhen 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'sPenny 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 inThe Frankenstein Chronicles andThe Alienist Andrea Wright

Part IV: 'Treating' the mind
13 Bad or mad?: Branwell Brontë, mental health, and alcoholism in Sally WainwrightsTo Walk Invisible Sarah E. Fanning and Claire OCallaghan
14 After I left England, they thought I was mad. But they taught me to use it now its 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 inA Place to Call Home Gordon R. Alley-Young

Afterword Jessica Meyer
Index