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  • Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot
  • Marcia K. Farrell
Janis McLaren Caldwell. Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. xi, 201 pp. $75.

In Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Janis McLaren Caldwell focuses on the overlap of personal experience and scientific examination to illuminate what she terms "Romantic materialism." She argues that the nineteenth century enjoyed a unique understanding of natural theology that blended the sometimes-contradictory notions of the physical and spiritual. This "Romantic materialism," she asserts, was "Romantic because they [early nineteenth-century physicians and writers] were concerned with consciousness and self-expression, and materialist because they placed a particularly high value on what natural philosophy was telling them about the material world" (p. 1). Romantic medicine envisioned a general practitioner who attempted to balance patient history with the physical examination in order to develop a more complete diagnosis of the patient.

Chapter two examines the bodily notion of sympathy and Mary Shelley's struggle with it in Frankenstein. Caldwell argues that "Shelley's primary concern is redefining sympathy, a contested term in Romantic ethics and physiology.... I hope to show that Shelleyan sympathy is intimately related to the suspense of metaphysical commitments as practiced by both Shelley and the clinical community" (p. 29). She explores the primarily problematic "search for sympathy" in Frankenstein, drawing on the works of David Hartley, David Hume, and Adam Smith to illustrate Shelley's critique of early Romantic sympathy as being predicated on similarity (p. 30). "The symmetries of Frankenstein," she argues, "contribute to a suffocating sensation of enclosure in the novel" (p. 38), which precipitates the failure of sympathy. Chapter three explicates Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Richard Owen's On the Nature of Limbs, asserting that both explore the world through both the natural, physical universe and the spiritual realm, culminating in Carlyle's natural supernaturalism and Owen's transcendental anatomy. They represent a departure from Shelley's struggle with sympathy because they are able to synthesize both worlds for potentially positive ends.

Chapter four presents a defense of Emily Brontë as a representative figure within this trajectory, claiming that although Brontë "was personally averse to any form of medical treatment," Wuthering Heights remains obsessed with health, especially "keeping in good health" (p. 68). Caldwell catapults her project into the realm of morality, suggesting that one of the [End Page 225] major concerns in the novel is "can one be both strong and good?" (p. 69). This particular strain leads her to consider the prevalence and significance of children in the text as vehicles for both strong spirits and healthy bodies. Chapter five juxtaposes Brontë's vibrant child with the "struggle toward maturation" portrayed by her sister Charlotte (p. 97). Jane Eyre depicts this struggle in the children "plagued by privation and ill health, rarely escaping the unhealthy miasmas of symbolic prisons like Lowood" (p. 97). Charlotte's Romantic materialism is manifest in "a literalized battle between stubbornly resistant parties, communicated in the language of bodily confrontation" (p. 98), often through phrenology, such as when Rochester tells Jane to read his forehead (p. 109).

Caldwell finally deals with the impending appearance of Charles Darwin in chapter six. Relying heavily on Darwin's autobiography, she argues that "Darwin's thought arises directly out of Romantic medicine, embodying the fullest and, paradoxically, the final expression of Romantic materialism" (p. 117). Given her conviction that Romantic materialists are marked by the dualism of the natural and the spiritual, Caldwell's identification of Darwin as a Romantic materialist—a figure so influential in the separation of science and faith—is unexpected. However, her reference to Erasmus Darwin's "blend of science and humanism" and its influence on his grandson offers a compelling portrait of the author of The Origin of Species, whose roots in Romanticism eventually led to his shift away from it (p. 119). Caldwell's conclusion—"If we pushed back our knowledge of the history of medicine, however, to the pre-Darwinian period, we would find a fruitful dialectic between the literature and science of Romantic materialism" (p. 142...

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