This book considers a moment at the turn of the nineteenth century, when literature and medicine seemed embattled in rivalry, to find the fields collaborating to develop interpretive analogies that saw literary texts as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts. Arden Hegele mobilizes startling original evidence that Romantic-era literary and clinical interpretations of illness and death arose together, entwined, irrevocably shaping one another, their shared textual practices giving voice to otherwise inarticulable thought. From early in its history, Hegele proposes, the practice of medicine has been fundamentally a narrative, and even poetic, act. Hegele's comprehensive scholarship supports her break-through findings, paving the way for even more fundamental discoveries about form, close reading, and healing. Simultaneously an authoritative reference work and a breath-taking conceptual flag planted in the fields of medical humanities and critical reading theory, Romantic Autopsy opens wide the quest for deepening the readings of the future.