Although Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was not a physician, his writings often concern themselves with medicine and disease. His childhood was shadowed by illness. He  injured his leg at age nine and had a long period of recovery and convalescence, being confined indoors for nearly two years. This period of immobility, often cited as the genesis of his passion for books, also acquainted him early with the world of sickness and bodily vulnerability. The medical treatments of the early nineteenth century—bloodletting, herbal remedies, and prolonged rest—colored his view of illness as both a trial and a formative force. Hawthorne’s health remained delicate for much of his life. He frequently complained of headaches, weakness, and depression, conditions that shaped both his temperament and his art.

Hawthorne’s writing reveals a persistent fascination with the relationship between the body and  the soul. In The Scarlet Letter (1850), Arthur Dimmesdale’s physical decline under the weight of hidden guilt illustrates the psychosomatic link between conscience and corporeal suffering. His heart, often described in imagery of sickness and fever, becomes a medicalized emblem of sin. The novel also places Hester Prynne’s punishment in dialogue with the medical discourses of public health and social contagion, as though her scarlet letter were both a stigma and an infection that spreads moral anxiety through the community.

Likewise, in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), illness becomes hereditary, suggesting a proto-genetic vision of disease transmission. The Pyncheon family’s curse resembles a chronic disorder passed down through generations, combining superstition with the emerging nineteenth-century interest in heredity and degenerative illness. Here, Hawthorne anticipates medical debates about inherited weakness and constitutional disease that would later preoccupy both physicians and novelists.

Hawthorne’s short stories often highlight the tension between scientific ambition and human vulnerability. In “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), the scientist’s experiments in toxicology transform his daughter into a living embodiment of poison. The tale dramatizes anxieties about medical research and the dangerous crossing of natural boundaries. Rappaccini resembles the experimental physiologists of Hawthorne’s time, whose invasive methods raised ethical concerns about the limits of medicine.

In “The Birth-Mark” (1843), the obsession of a physician, Aylmer, with removing a small imperfection from his wife’s cheek becomes a chilling allegory of medical hubris. His surgical and chemical interventions, couched in the language of medical progress, result in death rather than perfection. The story critiques medicine’s desire to eradicate natural flaws and foreshadows later debates about plastic surgery, eugenics, and the medicalization of normal human variation.

Hawthorne’s later years were marked by increasing ill health. He suffered from chronic digestive troubles, insomnia, and nervousness. Despite his reluctance to consult physicians, his decline reflected the limited therapeutic options of mid-nineteenth-century medicine. On a trip to the White Mountains with his friend Franklin Pierce in 1864, he died quietly in his sleep, perhaps from a stroke. His passing, unaccompanied by effective medical intervention, underscores the fragility of life despite the modern advances of medicine.

Hawthorne’s characters suffer from wasting illness and nervous collapse, and poisonous obsession that embody the results of secrecy, and human pride. His tales about physicians and scientists criticize the arrogance of medicine when divorced from humility and compassion. And his depictions of psychological torment foreshadow the later insights of psychiatry. Hawthorne offered not only literature of enduring power but also an anatomy of the moral and mental illnesses that plague human life.