This collection establishes the term medical paratexts as a useful addition to medical humanities, book history, and literary studies research. As a relatively new field of study, little critical attention has been paid to medical paratexts. We understand paratext as the apparatus of graphic communication: title pages, prefaces, illustrations, marginalia, and publishing details which act as mediators between text and reader. Discussing the development of medical paratexts across scribal, print and digital media, the collection spans the medieval period to the twenty-first century.Dissecting the Page is structured in two thematic sections, underpinned by a shared examination of ideas of medical and lay readership and a history of reader response. The first section focuses on the production, reception, and use of medical texts. The second section analyses the role and significance of authority, access, and dissemination in discussions of health, medicine, and illness, for both lay and medical readerships.

Hannah C. Tweed is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of York, UK, on the Cultures of Care project. She received her PhD from the University of Glasgow, UK, on representations of autism in contemporary literature and film. Her research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century literature, with specialisations in disability studies and the medical humanities.  Diane G. Scott is the Research Associate for the AHRC Digital Transformations Theme and teaches in the department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Glasgow, UK. She received her PhD on late medieval book history from the University of Glasgow, UK. Her research focuses on fifteenth and sixteenth century literacy and literary culture.  

1. Foreword: Jeremy J. Smith.- 2.Authority, Authenticity and Representation: An Introduction to Medical Paratexts: Hannah C. Tweed and Diane G. Scott.- 3. [P]rophane fidlers: Medical Paratexts and Indecent Readers in Early Modern England: Harry Newman.- 4. Touching Twins in the Texts and Medical Paratexts of Seventeenth-Century Midwifery Books: Louise Powell.- 5. Graphic Surgical Practice in the Handbills of Seventeenth-Century London Irregulars: Roberta Mullini.- 6. Profit and Paratexts; the Economics of Pharmaceutical Packaging in the Long Nineteenth Century: Laura Mainwaring.- 7. Remedies for Despair: Considering Mental Health in Late Medieval England: Natalie Calder.- 8. The Medical Paratexts as a Voice in the Patients Chamber: Speech and Print inPhysick for the Poor (1657): Elspeth Jajdelska.- 9. Archives, Paratext and Life Writing in the First World War: Hannah C. Tweed.- 10. Nonsense Rides Piggyback onSensible Things: The Past, Present, and Future of Graphology: Deborah Ellen Thorpe.- 11. Medical Marginalia in the early printed books of University of Glasgow Library: Robert MacLean.