Heather Meek's work explores the intersections of literary and medical cultures in the long eighteenth century, with a particular focus on texts authored by women and physicians. Her publications include investigations of Frances Burney’s early nineteenth-century mastectomy narrative (in Literature and Medicine, 2017); Samuel Richardson’s relationship to the medical milieu of his time (in Samuel Richardson in Context, Cambridge UP, 2017); medical discourse and the origins of the novel (in Literature and Medicine: The Eighteenth Century, Cambridge UP, 2021); eighteenth-century vocabularies of illness (in BMJ: Medical Humanities, 2022); and representations of blood and bloodletting (in Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2023). Her monograph, Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain (McGill-Queen’s University Press), appeared in November 2023. With Heike Härting, she is currently completing an edited collection, Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics (Routledge), that will appear in March 2024.

Livres

• Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023.
• Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics (co-edited with Heike Härting). New York: Routledge, 2024. 

Articles de revue

• “‘Meanders of [the] Purple Flood’: Blood and Bloodletting in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Medicine.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (JECS) 46.1 (2023): 41-57. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12872
• “A ‘prodigious latitude’ of Words: Vocabularies of Illness in 18th-Century Medical Treatises and Women’s Writing.” BMJ: Medical Humanities 48.2 (2022): 253-60. doi: 10.1136/medhum-2020-012133
• “Frances Burney’s Mastectomy Narrative and Discourses of Breast Cancer in the Long Eighteenth Century.” Literature and Medicine 35.1 (Spring 2017): 27-45. doi: 10.1353/lm.2017.0001
• “Medical Men, Women of Letters, and Treatments for Eighteenth-Century Hysteria.” Journal of Medical Humanities 34.1 (March 2013): 1-14.
• “Creative Hysteria and the Intellectual Woman of Feeling.” Figures et culture de la dépression (1660-1800)/The Representation and Culture of Depression (1660-1800). Vol. 1. Spec. issue of Le Spectateur européen/The European Spectator: 10 (2010): 87-98.
• “Of Wandering Wombs and Wrongs of Women: Evolving Conceptions of Hysteria in the Age of Reason.” English Studies in Canada 35.2-3 (June/September 2009): 105-28.

Chapitres de livres

• “Jane Barker, Medical Discourse, and the Origins of the Novel.” Literature and Medicine: The Eighteenth Century. Volume 1. Ed. Clark Lawlor and Andrew Mangham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 51-69. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108355476.004
• “Medicine and Health.” Samuel Richardson in Context. Ed. Peter Sabor and Betty Schellenberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 264-71. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316576755.032
• “‘[F]ictitious [D]istress’ or Veritable Woe?: The Problem of Eighteenth-Century Ennui.” Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fashioning the Unfashionable. Ed. Allan Ingram and Leigh Wetherall-Dickson. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017. 13-31. doi: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59718-2_2
• “Motherhood, Hysteria, and the Eighteenth-Century Woman Writer.” The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Raymond Stephanson and Darren Wagner. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. 238-57. 
• “‘[W]hat fatigues we fine ladies are fated to endure’: Sociosomatic Hysteria as a Female ‘English Malady.’” Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period. Ed. Yasmin Haskell. Early European Research 1200-1650 Series. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishing, 2011. 375-96.