“Let Me Die in Your House”: Cardiac Distress and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century British Medicine

This essay examines the prevalence of a romantic discourse (e.g., associated with the genre of romance) in nineteenth-century British treatises on diseases of the heart. The nineteenth century brought remarkable changes to cardiac medicine, from the stethoscope to the sphygmograph, rendering medical practice increasingly clinical. However, case histories of cardiac disorders from this period maintain a surprising frequency of three affective elements: sensationalism (exaggerated, dramatic, and shocking events and language), sentimentalism (pathos and melancholy), and imagined experience, where the narrator projects himself imaginatively into the lived experience of his subject. British cardiac texts during these professionalizing decades repeatedly use the ambiguous term “distress” to describe the symptoms of heart disorders but also the observer’s subjective response to the patient’s evident suffering. These “distressing” texts demonstrate how nineteenth-century British physicians narrativized their sympathy during a period we usually associate with the distancing of the patient-physician relationship.