In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History
  • Rhodri Hayward
George Sebastian Rousseau , ed., with Miranda Gill, David B. Haycock, and Malte Herwig. Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. xiv + 329 pp. Ill. $69.00 (1-4039-1292-0).

Over the last two decades, historians of medicine have engaged in a steady reworking of the organizing concepts of their discipline. The bold social constructionism of the 1980s has been abandoned for the more tempered approach of "framing" epitomized in the collected essays of Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History (1992), edited by Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Golden. Against the search for social and political explanations, Rosenberg proposed a more modest project in which biological realities were seen as being mediated by the social and ethical concerns of particular historical actors. Just over a decade later, this pragmatic and pluralist methodology has itself been held up for revision. George Rousseau presents his current collection as "both child and sequel" to Rosenberg and Golden's Framing Disease.

If Framing and Imagining Disease is the offspring of Rosenberg and Golden's volume (and I think its parentage must be in some doubt), then it is an oddly dreamy, self-absorbed child. Whereas Rosenberg and his fellow essayists had described the historical mediation of biological facts by social institutions and collective agendas, the contributors to the current volume purportedly explore the frustration of individual desire and creativity by biological experience. Against the priority granted to public representations and investigations of pathology in Framing Disease, Rousseau's group celebrate the role of private fantasy and imagination in conjuring up new visions of illness. Rousseau believes that the "Rosenbergian enterprise" has to be superseded by "Rousseauvian acts" of "framing and imagining." To accomplish this, the authors turn away from the traditional subject matter of medical history—the hospital report or research article—and instead turn to more literary texts, the novel and the memoir, in their attempt to recover the voice of the individual sufferer. In a sense, then, this volume can be seen as the history of medicine's "linguistic turn," and indeed most of the contributors (with the notable exception of David Haycock and Emese Lafferton) are students of literature and criticism.

As the editors admit, there is little in the way of any common theme within the essays, barring the shared commitment to recovering the experience of illness—but perhaps more surprising is the distance between the contributions and the theoretical promise of the collection's programmatic introduction. Indeed, most of the contributions would have sat happily in the volume edited by Golden and Rosenberg a decade before. There are fine pieces by Kirstie Blair and Stephan Besser on the political work of disease concepts: Blair traces the connections between cardiology and social polity in mid-Victorian literature, and Besser explores the emergent psychiatric diagnosis, "Tropenkoller" (tropical cholera), and its use in arguments over Wilhelmite masculinity and colonialism. Other authors examine the metaphorical representation of epidemics and the genealogy of psychiatric disorders. Such topics have long been the meat and drink of [End Page 131] medical history, and there is little to distinguish the form of these current interventions from previous efforts in the field.

While two contributors, David Shuttleton and Caterina Albano, touch upon the psychological significance of disease, only Rousseau and Haycock explore this issue in any depth. Their interesting study of Coleridge's digestive complaints combines close reading with retrospective psychiatric diagnoses. Coleridge is depicted as an IBS sufferer, with his condition complicated by somatoform anxiety disorders. Yet Rousseau and Haycock's turn to psychiatric classifications in their attempt to recover the inner experience of their subject reveals some of the dangers inherent in this attempt to extend the project of "framing disease." The careful division of the world into natural kinds and social representations that characterized Rosenberg and Golden's volume is undermined and replaced instead with an "anything goes" approach in which cultural innovations (such as psychiatric categories) are granted the same status as independent biological realities. The business of demarcating the boundary between material object and social representation was always difficult within traditional framing approaches; Rousseau's addition of...

pdf

Share