This dissertation treats the allegorization of cures and doctors in Don Quixote, Tom Jones, and Tristram Shandy. Beginning with Part One of Don Quixote , the analysis shows how tropes, or changes in the meaning, of curative practices in the literary realm of Cervantes' novel reflect and allude to social, political, and religious challenges associated with medical ethics. These include the ethics of nominally magical and romantic cures and lies committed for the purported good of the patient. Historicizing the cultural and political relations between Christians, Muslims, and Jews, with special attention toward the 1609 expulsion of Muslims, the argument is that the second, bleaker part of Don Quixote finds intense changes in the political climate that subjugated Jewish and Muslim physicians. In Tom Jones, despite negative representations of doctorly attempts to cure patients, Henry Fielding's novel makes a claim in support of just medical authority. The dissertation closes with an analysis of Sterne's Tristram Shandy that connects its digressive storytelling with concerns for readerly health.
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