Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Joan Burbick has given us a lucid cultural history of certain literary relations between politics and hygiene in the United States. Healing the Republic brings together medical and literary narratives in service of a cogent theoretical analysis. Following the conceptual work of Martha Banta, the literary historian, and the political theories of the philosopher Antonio Gramsci and the feminist Chantal Mouffe, Burbick takes seriously the analog of the “body politic,” recognizing it to be an old yet fecund source of models and metaphors for constitutional governance.

The work, the author acknowledges, is the product of ten years’ thought—and it shows. Well supported, subtly nuanced, and rigorously argued, Healing the Republic integrates medical writings familiar to the Bulletin’s readers with related works of fiction, both classical and obscure. Burbick entertains several medico-political worlds of the nineteenth century while slighting neither medical nor cultural history.

The rewards of this effort are surprisingly symmetrical: Burbick plies medical history with her literary knowledge, and expands the literary purview with informed medical-historical insights. She has a fine command of both literatures, and a deft, eclectic approach to theory that eschews obscurantism. Healing the Republic, though clearly engaged with issues that literary theorists will appreciate, is not beholden to any critical orthodoxy. Burbick uses theory, rather than allowing it to use her, and her historical analysis gives the reader not only a richer understanding of nineteenth-century medicine, culture, and political thought, but a set of conceptual tools for working other ground.

The book is divided into two large sections: the first, on the structures of political and medical authority; and the second, on the significance of the body’s anatomy. In the first, “Textures of Authority,” we are treated to readings of Thoreau’s Walden and the predicaments of truth and sensation, of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the human body as the fundament of democracy. In section two, “Fictions of the Body Politic,” Burbick parses her analysis into parts, exploring the political and cultural meanings of the brain, the heart, the nerves, the eye. Yet this does not entail a “clinical gaze” that takes apart body and soul; Burbick’s own search for historical meaning is respectful of the meaningful worlds of past lives.

For all of its merits, this work has two related shortcomings. The cataclysmic war that divided the nation and the nineteenth century, and nearly made two hostile nations of one, barely appears in Burbick’s account, and is not mentioned at all in the index. Further, the multiple discourses of race, enslavement, and freedom appear oddly muted. While her analysis of Whitman’s various drafts of Leaves of Grass is compelling, we are left to wonder what place that celebrated abolitionist’s body, John Brown’s body, had in Whitman’s political iconography. We do not glimpse the Civil War, or the unfree labor over which it was fought, except through Whitman. Given the importance of the Civil War to the authority structures of both medicine and politics, and given the centrality of medical expertise to the delineations of race that framed these social structures, these omissions are surprising.

This underplaying of race also appears in Burbick’s discussion of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s weird 1861 novel, Elsie Venner. The reptilian Elsie Venner is the child of symbolic miscegenation, her mother having been bitten by a “serpent.” Burbick does not explain, however, that the serpent was a topical symbol of treachery, representing in Southern politics the dangerous masterless “negro”; in Northern politics, conversely, it represented the treacherous Confederate. These symbolic usages were both historically specific to the moral, political, and martial contests over slavery, and at the same time references to biblical archetypes. A thoroughgoing engagement with the political speeches of abolition, Civil War, and Reconstruction would have deepened the literary interpretation without contradicting...