Meiners, Katherine T. “Reading Pain and the Feminine Body in Romantic Writing: The Examples of Dorothy Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge.” Centennial Review 37.3 (Fall, 1993): 487–512.
“Romantic encounters with illness and pain precipitate crises of intelligibility, moments when intense pain makes a sufferer unintelligible to others as much as to herself. The nineteenth-century witnesses an increased tendency to professionalize such suffering and turn pain into an event to be objectified and co-opted by other intelligibilities, including those of poetry and medicine. This essay will address Romantic understanding as a complex cultural practice greater than the making of literature which is inclined to seek its remedies for human suffering outside the medical disciplines as much as within them” (p. 487).
Dorothy Wordsworth 