Melville's Complaint: Doctors and Medicine in the Art of Herman Melville (review)

Book Reviews 341 ers of their anthology to read the novels and collections from which these works are drawn, as well as works by other African-American writers. With its excellent range of African-American writers, moreover, Trials, Tribulations, and Celebrations is worthwhile reading for anyone interested in these issues. Secundy and Nixon are to be warmly thanked for giving us such a thoughtful—and useful—beginning. NOTES 1. Marian Gray Secundy, discussion at the Spring National Meeting of the Society for Health and Human Values, Tampa, Florida, 30 April-3 May 1992. 2. Beverly Robinson, "Africanisms and the Study of Folklore," in Africanisms in American Culture, ed. Joseph E. Holloway (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 218. —Gay Wilentz East Carolina University and Suzanne Poirier University of Illinois at Chicago Richard Dean Smith, Melville's Complaint: Doctors and Medicine in the Art of Herman Melville. New York: Garland Publishing, 1991. xiv + 213 pp. Clothbound, $32.00. Melville's Complaint, the first volume of a new series, Garland Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, contains a brief introduction and twelve chapters: one devoted to each of the major Melville novels (Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Pierre, The Confidence-Man, and Billy Budd); one devoted to the short stories of the 1850s (including a discussion of the novel Israel Potter); one devoted to Melville's poetry (including a brief, three-page discussion of Melville's long narrative poem Clarel); and one final chapter, titled "Melville and the Doctors: Helen Maria's Operation," which discusses Melville's sister's surgery for clubfoot, and which also aims to summarize Melville's attitudes toward physicians and illness. An index lists diseases, materia medica, and other items of medical relevance, as well as names of physicians and cultural figures discussed in the text; it does not, however, 342 BOOK REVIEWS include Melville's works. Endnotes follow each chapter, and there is no bibliography. Melville's Complaint is an important book—or at least a book that deals with an important subject. It focuses on one of the three titans of American fiction (the other two being Henry James and William Faulkner), and it discusses Melville's work from a perspective that is both unique and valuable. Without a doubt, the reader will come away from Melville's Complaint with an array of discrete insights into Herman Melville, his writing, and nineteenth-century medicine. Smith is comprehensive in surveying Melville's fictional doctors—both the trained physicians and the pseudophysicians —and he is especially good in discussing the ways in which Melville's novel The Confidence-Man "faithfully reflects the controversy in medicine in the nineteenth century between the two main contestants, the mineral doctors and the herb-doctors" (p. 160). Smith is also good in his discussions of a number of the fictional illnesses in Melville's works and the actual illnesses of members of the Melville family. Discussing Moby-Dick, for example, Smith convincingly suggests that Queequeg's acute illness ... is most likely typhus, also called "ship fever," caused by Rickettsial infection transmitted by fleas. Ships were often infested by fleas carried by rats and mice. Typhus is characterized by fever, prostration, headache, muscle aching and a rash lasting ten to fourteen days. Jacob Bigelow (1786-1879), in Nature in Disease (1854), subsequently mentioned in The Confidence-Man (Ch 16), discusses "self-limited diseases" in which medical treatment has no effect and patients recover without treatment; he specifically mentions typhus . (P. 88) This hypothesis about Queequeg's illness offers an illustration of Smith at his best. Here the author's diagnosis is presented with clarity; it is clearly relevant to the text under examination (its value rooted most in what is unstated, the credibility of Queequeg's sudden recovery from his illness); and it is linked to a specific medical work that Melville seems to have been acquainted with. Elsewhere in the book, however, the author's medical expertise results in medical anecdotes, bits and pieces from medical history that, although interesting and although inspired by Melville's texts, are of little or no significance to those texts. We are informed, for example, in Smith's discussion of Captain Ahab's leg...