Introduction: becoming patient readers -- Pt. 1. Domestication -- Jane Austen's plots of prevention -- Health, identity, and narrative authority in Jane Eyre -- Pt. 2. Isolation -- Quarantine, social theory, and Little Dorrit -- The omniscience of invalidism: The case of Harriet Martineau -- pt. 3. Professionalization -- Narrative competence and the family doctor in Gaskell's Wives and daughters -- Afterword: health in narrative medicine.