Nervous Conditions: Science and the Body Politic in Early Industrial Britain (review)

For the historian of technology it is intriguing to see how widely technological metaphors are deployed in other areas of historical writing. Indeed, social and intellectual historians often record past figurative appeals to the "machine-like" without subjecting such discourse to deep analysis. Metaphorical borrowings are all the more interesting when their narrative thrust appeals to the problematic nature of technology. Elizabeth Green Musselman's Nervous Conditions makes such an interpretive move in surveying the collective and individual infirmities of selected British male natural philosophers of the "industrial age": George Airy, Charles Babbage, David Brewster, John Dalton, Humphry Davy, John Herschel, and James Clerk Maxwell. It seems that neither the careers nor the bodies of these gentlemen straightforwardly epitomized the mechanistic certainties that they sought in the natural and social worlds—a fashionable irony for the twenty-first century, albeit one that might only prove shocking to an ingenuous hagiographer.

Musselman goes beyond merely reminding us of the rich historiographical payoff of seeing the machine philosopher as thoroughly embodied in a cultural-corporeal frame. She also makes the gendered point that it was not only women—famously the astronomer Mary Somerville and computing virtuoso Ada Lovelace—who struggled publicly against ill health in pursuing their demanding work. As the opening chapter on "The Nervous Man of Science" asks, if masculinity and science epitomized "vigor and rationality in industrial Britain," why did so many men of science frequently endure "nervous illness," famously later redescribed by Elaine Showalter as the "female malady" (p. 3)? Musselman thus documents how her small cast of "manly" characters diagnosed and dealt with such classic pathologies of color blindness, migraine headaches, and hallucinations that specifically threatened their capacity to interpret the material world. Much less attention is paid to the more overtly "nervous conditions" of neuralgia and neurasthenia, and the reader will soon realize that the title derives from (some) sufferers' own apparent—albeit disputed—self-diagnosis of their optical maladies as deriving from bodily, rather than cultural or emotional, trauma.

Since much of the book's content is chiefly of interest to historians of science and medicine, I will comment on the explicitly technological themes. The steam-engine governor is a key metaphor in the chapter titled "Mental Governance and Hemiopsy." In discussing how male intellectuals tried to cope with the epistemic disruptions of migraine, Musselman contends that they envisioned their bodies as "efficient industrial machines overseen by rational mental governors" (p. 6). On this account the (presumptively unimpaired) mind consciously compensated for the imperfections of the bodily machine by analogy with the way the famous spinning centrifugal governor automatically regulated the idiosyncrasies of the steam generator. While this is a fascinating suggestion, Musselman does not cite any of her characters as explicitly making this claim, although she does show how Babbage uses a related metaphor in The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832) to describe the political function of the House of Lords as a regulatory flywheel. As if to demonstrate the complexity of the issues, she cites Andrew Ure's contemporary Philosophy of Manufactures (1835) economy-body homology—"a steam engine physiology"—to correlate the action of the bodily nervous system to the moral economy rather than to the mechanical, which Ure saw as linked rather to the muscular (pp. 108–9).

More useful for Musselman's analogical purposes—and indeed forming the substance of her conclusion—is the more familiar interpretive parallel between the nervous system and the telegraph network that developed from the 1840s. Here she cites from Iwan Morus's oeuvre an American rather than British source, George Prescott, describing the remarkable way in which human nerves send telegraphic messages to produce remote yet nearly instantaneous physical effects. Importantly, however, she also notes that optimism about both telegraphy and nervous physiology was undermined later in the nineteenth century by awareness of the managerial problems of fallible action at a distance. Intelligence combined...