DescriptionThis dissertation demonstrates the previously unacknowledged role of the Hippocratic case history—a brief narrative of illness experienced by a patient and observed by a physician—in the formation of scientific and literary culture in eighteenth-century America. Specifically, I argue that the medical case registers in literary form the unresolved commingling of confidence and despair that characterizes the colonial Enlightenment. To a tradition of early American scholarship that posits complicity between medical discourse and the expansion of European empire in the New World, I offer the individual patient history as an aperture through which to glimpse the contingent, affective experience of colonization. Rather than presenting a familiar narrative of hegemony and subversion, I focus on how authors struggled in literary form with the tragic paradoxes present at the dawn of the modern age.