My dissertation investigates the intertwined discourses of literature and medicine in the proto-disciplinary early American world. It makes three principal interventions. First, in contrast to existent scholarship that has actively neglected it, I bring to light an important history of early American medicine. Second, I show how early American writers produced medical models of their own. Early American literary figures did not simply reflect medicine in their texts, but used fiction to craft medical philosophies, which they believed directly promoted the health of the nation. And, finally, I argue that those histories were not separate, but intimately connected: doctors and writers worked together to craft an American body that was metonymically linked to the healthy nation. In fact, it is the literariness of early American medicine that has caused historians to dismiss the field as unoriginal and unprofessional. In mining the relationship between medicine and literature in the early republic, my project is the first to offer a genealogy of the Medical Humanities in America; it also suggests that by looking at this history, we will find promising new models for interdisciplinary scholarship.