George Rousseau

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George Rousseau (born 1941) is an American cultural historian. He was educated at Amherst College and Princeton University where he obtained his doctorate. From 1966 to 1968 he was part of the English Faculty at Harvard University, before moving to a professorship at UCLA, and later to the Regius Chair of English at Aberdeen University in Aberdeen, Scotland. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Since then he has been attached to the History Faculty at Oxford University in Oxford, England where he is a Co-Director of the Centre for the History of Childhood. Rousseau is recognized as a cultural historian of international stature who especially works in the interface of literature and medicine, and who emphasizes the relevance of imaginative materials - literature, especially diaries and biography, art and architecture, music - for the public understanding of medicine, past and present. Among his works are:

  • This Long Disease My Life: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (1968, with Marjorie Hope Nicolson)
  • English Poetic Satire (1969, with N. Rudenstine)
  • The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis A. Landa (1970)
  • Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays Presented to Lewis M. Knapp (1971, with P. G. BoucĂ©)
  • Organic Form: The Life of an Idea (1972)
  • Goldsmith: The Critical Heritage (1974)
  • The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Science (1980, with Roy Porter)
  • The Letters and Private Papers of Sir John Hill (1981)
  • Tobias Smollett: Essays of Two Decades (1982)
  • Science and the Imagination: The Berkeley Conference (1987)
  • Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (1987, with Roy Porter)
  • The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays (1988, with Pat Rogers)
  • Exoticism in the Enlightenment (1990, with Roy Porter).
  • The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought (1991)
  • Perilous Enlightenment: Pre- and Post-Modern Discourses--Sexual, Historical (1991)
  • Enlightenment Crossings: Pre- and Post-Modern Discourses-- Anthropological (1991)
  • Enlightenment Borders: Pre- and Post-Modern Discourses--Medical, Scientific (1991)
  • Medicine and the Muses (1993, translated into Italian and Japanese).
  • Hysteria Before Freud (1993, with Elaine Showalter, Sander Gilman, Roy Porter, and Helen King)
  • Gout: The Patrician Malady (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998)
  • Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History (2003)
  • Marguerite Yourcenar: A Biography (2004, translated into Portuguese and Romanian)
  • Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature Culture and Sensibility (2004)
  • Children and Sexuality: The Greeks to the Great War (2007)