Joanna Baillie's Plays on the Passions and the Spectacle of Medical Science

Joanna Baillie's Plays on the Passions and the Spectacle of Medical Science KAREN DWYER An accurate Analysis of these passions and affections... is to the Moralist , what the science of Anatomy is to the Surgeon. It constitutes the first principles of rational practice. It is in a moral sense, the anatomy of the heart. It discovers why it beats and how it beats, indicates appearances in a sound and healthy state, detects diseases with their cause, and it is infinitely more fortunate in the power it communicates of applying suitable remedies. Thomas Cogan, M.D., A Philosophical Treatise on the Passions (1800) Taking for my point of departure comments made by Joseph W Donohue, Jr. and G. Wilson Knight, I would here like to explore Joanna Baillie's scientific systematic treatment of the passions,1 and particularly the extent to which she creates for our instruction an anatomical theater in which she lays bare their pathology. Throughout I'll be focusing on the permeability of the partitions between eighteenth-century literature and medicine and suggesting that Baillie derives from the scientific world of surgeons and natural historians not only empirical data about the passions but also, in part, her dramatic methodology.2 As she explains in her "Introductory Discourse " to the first volume of Plays on the Passions (1798), her approach to the passions is at once clinical, involved in anatomizing the mind and body, and also natural-historical, that is, involved in discovering the broader patterns if not invariable laws descriptive of human nature. In seeking to 23 24 / DWYER draw larger anthropological connections—for example, with those she calls the "savages of America"3—she demonstrates a concern to trace what Edmund Burke called the "great map of mankind."4 Her project, she claims, is "experimental" (15) in the sense that her "extensive design ... has nothing exactly similar to it in any language" (1) and also in the sense that she practices a medical environmentalism by mapping the various ways in which one passion affects people of different nationalities, temperaments, prejudices , and genders. Moreover, what she calls her "master propensity" (5) of "sympathetic curiosity" (2), which is something like the sympathetic theories of David Hume, Adam Smith, and the moral sense philosophers, involves and engages the spectator in the social practice of sympathetic identification with an other. Baillie's plays aim to develop our sympathetic abilities therapeutically, so that we can recognize somewhat painfully our alliance with those we observe—even the criminal, mad, and monstrous— and presumably learn from their errors. Knowing through sympathetic identification, though, has its mortal risks. What if the other is a monster or hopelessly mad? Does Baillie merely present us with a theater of curious monstrosities? A kunstkammer in which she displays marvels such as madness, melancholy, wild-eyed fear? The ordinary turned extraordinary? Or does she depict the human caught in the moment of slipping into something else, something more or less or frightfully other than human? Something nonhuman, like one of Descartes' automatons , for example, or Vaucanson's robots, for another, a mere creature of artifice or science? And if as Hobbes said "to have stronger and more vehement Passions for any thing, than is ordinarily seen in others, is that which men call madnesse,"5 are Baillie's impassioned characters borderline cases of human existence, strolling Bedlamites whose consciousness exists in an uninhabitable otherness that we call madness: a place where they are always beside themselves, never in their right minds, and therefore uninterpretable and alien? And is madness a peculiarly eighteenthcentury manifestation of the monstrous? Or rather does raging passion highlight our humanity, since it is a fate which can seize anyone and everyone, for a galaxy of reasons? In attempting to answer these and other questions, I would like to look at Baillie's anatomy of the passions within the context of eighteenth-century medicine. Of special interest are Baillie's prefaces, notes, and unpublished letters—those "metatexts," as Genette might call them—that often escape our notice, yet provide so many fascinating glimpses into an author's ideas.6 My hope is that such a study will contribute to a larger understanding of the connections...