Medicine Is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture by Lorenzo Servitje (review)

ABSTRACT

Set in the twenty-first century, The Last Man was an apocalyptic story of a pandemic spreading around the world, causing the near elimination of the human population, almost literally to the last person standing. The links between public health and military medicine at this time are well-known and exemplified by Edmund Parkes's Manual of Practical Hygiene (1864). The claim that such literature had a "broader reach” in spreading the martial metaphor in medicine is questionable, without more evidence of impact.