{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.04093567251461988, 'fraction_numerical': 0.02456140350877193, 'mean_word_length': 5.202898550724638, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Martin Wallen, City of health, fields of disease: revolutions in the poetry, medicine, and philosophy of romanticism , The Nineteenth Century Series, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004, pp. x, 202, £40.00 (hardback 0-7546-3542-2).

Romanticism continues to beguile for its ability to deflect scholars aiming to deconstruct its understanding of things medical: poles of health and disease, especially in cases of genius and idiocy, as well as what we moderns loosely term a “culture of health” configured as medicine's language, ideology and politics. Now Martin Wallen, an American professor of literature, has made a useful contribution to the ongoing debate by applying his literary learning to the ways in which northern European Romantic medical thought remained in the clutches of Brunonianism, the theory that all human life reduces to states of “excitement”.