The Medical & Literary Arts

BOOK REVIEWS cause they are more vivid and inspiring. Sackville-West seems at her strongest when she writes about topics with which she clearly has an intimate knowledge. While her imagination is no less subdued, it fosters more authentic flights of fancy. It is difficult to find a passage that truly stands out as "quotable" writing. The cumulative effect of several passages are really what is needed to appreciate the clarity and confidence of her voice and descriptive powers. The selections from A Joy of Gardening (1958) are her best, and like the bulk of her travel writing, do not inspire the reader to imitate, but do inspire one to venture out and find a copy of the full edition of this marvelous work. That is not true of all the selections here, unfortunately. SackvilleWest does emerge as an interesting literary figure whose writing possesses a pleasing range of subtleties and nuances. The anthology is definitely worth perusal by those interested in Bloomsbury and of course by those wishing to encounter Sackville-West for the first time. But the reader may find the book sufficient. What Sackville-West wrote in a radio lecture on modern poetry (1928) printed in the anthology applies perfectly well to the majority of her work presented here: "Our attention is arrested for a moment, but we very quickly come to an end of it, and want to go on to something else." DAVID C. MACWILLIAMS __________________ Adams State College The Medical & Literary Arts John Gordon. Physiology and the Literary Imagination: Romantic to Modern. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. xv + 296 pp. $55.00 IN Physiology and the Literary Imagination: Romantic to Modern , John Gordon describes how concepts of body and mind have evolved in the last two centuries, and traces those changes in the interplay between the medical and literary arts. Focusing on the life and work of Wordsworth, Dickens, Hopkins and Eliot, Joyce, and finally Thomas and Plath, Gordon focuses on how "received notions of medical fact... play out in these writers' delineations either of the behavior of their fictional characters or of the workings of their own lyric sensibilities." Gordon's book offers an important new cultural study of the body, medical history, and literature. Beginning with Wordsworth—himself an amateur physician and a patient/friend of Thomas Beddoes, the well-known theorist in the hydrodynamic physiology of the body—Gordon reads the poet as ideally 203 ELT 47 : 2 2004 situated in the Lake District where he could observe and write about a landscape that mirrors the poet's body and soul. Gordon's Wordsworth is an essentialist, who envisions bodily health in holistic rather than "local " physiological terms: he observes (in the world's and in our human bodies) and he represents (in his poems) the medical concept of "allopathy ," which advocates the need to balance bodily or mental antipathies. If Wordsworth was preoccupied with the medical problem ofinflammation as a pathology that indicated a need for bleeding (his letters abunantly discuss these medical problems), then metaphors of inflammation and various poetic treatments may be expected. Gordon finds such "healing transactions" in "Resolution of Independence" where the old leech-gatherer "steadies the poet's volatile sensibility." Extending his analysis, Gordon is also alert to other "allopathetic" tropes in political violence, the dangers of gross and violent stimulants, in convulsions and the healing transactions with the natural, watery world that serve as an antidote, moving the poet and reader to a communion with and plant-like suspiration of the breath of life. His innovative reading of Wordsworth ranges easily between medical theory and insightful textual analysis. In "The Interior Dickens" Gordon outlines the development of Dickens 's career through the medical tropes he used to define characters' "somatic psychology," which posit that the appearance of a character reflects her internal dynamics. If, early in his career, as in Dombey and Son, Dickens focuses on blood and the "internal energetics of fluid motion ," by David Copperfield, Dickens focuses more on the neural and cerebral. Gordon surmises that after David Copperfield, Dickens became increasingly interested in registering psychological issues and cognitive processes through chemical and photographic metaphors. Hence, Gordon is interested in the...