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  • The Literary Historian as Historian of Science and Medicine
  • Raymond Stephanson (bio)
Ends of Enlightenment by John Bender Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. xvi+294pp. US$25.95. ISBN 978-0890474212-2.
Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France: Medicine and Literature by Mary McAlpin Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. xii+196pp. £55. ISBN 978-1-4094-2241-9.
Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century by Jenny Davidson New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 312pp. US$35. ISBN 978-0-231-13878-9.
Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics and Theology of Natural Knowledge, 1690–1730 by Gregory Lynall New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 224pp. US$80;£50. ISBN 978-0230343641.

A few kind words, please, for the literary historian who tackles the history of science or the history of medicine. Sometimes viewed as energetic poseurs, cross-over fakes making quickie raids on history, or well-meaning cultural-studies riff-raff trying to bulk up their readings of the canon by soft appeal to Isaac Newton, Richard Bradley, Thomas Willis, or Erasmus Darwin—name your name or substitute a category such as mechanism, vitalism, the Daniel Turner/James Blondel debate—we humble literary historians and our publications often puzzle our esteemed colleagues who profess the history of eighteenth-century science and medicine full time, and who may have never even heard of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Those colleagues have been known to remark—at times, even, to protest—that we are caught up in words, words, and more words, making castles of meaning through an exquisite attention to language that seems painfully and perhaps even comically divorced from a truer world of physical action, scientific belief and experiment, politics and power, specialized technologies, the sociological frameworks of knowledge production, virtual witnessing, and the emerging culture of scientific proof. This protest can reveal a measured contempt for the perceived evils of “Theory,” specifically of some postmodern torment of common sense. I have some sympathy for these scepticisms about what we lit-crit types might do with the histories of science and medicine because disciplinary training and protocols do count for much. And—tit for tat—from my vantage point, precious few historians of science or medicine are particularly adept at untangling the [End Page 470] complex archeological record contained within some literary artifacts. Some of these scholars prefer the simplistic view of literature as a second-order mirror that can only reflect those other greater truths entrusted to “History Departments.” The Lilliputian battle royal is that we are our own “Two Cultures” writ small, and, in the badlands of interdisciplinarity, truth is in the eye of the beholder: “we” get it, but “you” certainly do not. Gird your loins, literary brothers and sisters.

I am being facetious, of course, and exaggerating what is surely a friendly divide between the two scholarly camps (which both contain considerable methodological diversity within their ranks), but I call attention to these clichés—historians deal with chronologies of facticity, and literary critics deal finally only with words—because there are now so many literary historians who write about eighteenth-century science or medicine, and because we do well to ask ourselves yet again just exactly what sort of “history” of science or medicine does literature contain? And more importantly, what can the literary historian who dares to meddle in those dangerous borderlands between disciplines hope to contribute to the histories of science or medicine?

How we understand the history of “Literature and Science” for the period, or how the two came to be differentiated as discourses and as ways of making observations about the world, has been informed by scholarly accounts of “origins.” It seems generally agreed that for much of the seventeenth century readers did not distinguish creative imaginative works from what we would now call “science” or those printed materials dealing with aspects of the natural world.1 In this version of how things happened, certain generic features were common to both—dialogue, metaphor, narrativity, hypotheses as types of fiction—and the literary regularly contained within it the ideas and concerns of the new science (for example, Matthew Prior’s Alma, georgic poetry). As well, many natural philosophers deployed what...

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