Mapping the Victorian Social Body (review)

Pamela K. Gilbert's Mapping the Victorian Social Body treats the relationship between mapping and the production of urban space in the visual discourse of Victorian medicine. Though it touches on familiar urban issues of visibility, legibility, and subjectivity— analyzed in the urban cultural histories of Steven Marcus, Lynda Nead, Judith Walkowitz, and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White—it does so only in the broadest strokes. Gilbert situates her work more within recent sociology of the city that emphasizes the productive, community-building sense of space, or space as liberal "laboratory of government" (6), in order to see Victorian medical mapping less as an exercise in overt social control—a "predominant scholarly tendency," writes Gilbert—and more as an exercise in utopian imagining. This is a refreshing change, and one that makes the project widely applicable to the cultural history of the city as an expression of the Victorian liberal impulse in the second half of the century.

Urban space for Gilbert is a professional, liberal formulation—the space of science, medicine, and professionalism. While she is interested in how individuals were figured in this emergent system of thought, her interest in the creation of personhood is neither through the bourgeois subject's encounter with a conflicted, binary city (à la Walkowitz), nor through nascent consumer practices (à la Nead), but through etiology and the paths of epidemic, phenomena that helped liberal urbanists reveal not bodies, which had "individuality or subjectivity," but rather the "radical and passive sameness" of the social body (49). Only by visually creating this social body could urbanists begin to theorize the social as a coherent entity, and invest it with (usually) optimistic dreams of universal cure. Gilbert elevates the metaphor of the city as body—influentially detailed by Mary Poovey and Stallybrass and White—to the level of professional zeitgeist.

Gilbert analyzes this social space through epidemic, specifically cholera—a disease that challenged, and today represents, Victorian developments in politics, global trade, and empire. Especially during cholera's 1830s rampage, laissez-faire liberals with sanitary interpretations of disease transmission attributed it to classed habits of filth and overcrowding, thus placing it in the largely moral scope of reform and avoiding trade- threatening measures like quarantine. But as sanitary interpretations failed in the face of epidemic, medical interpretations gained momentum. Medics argued that cholera was transmitted through water, a fact disguised by the observable city itself. For these liberal medics, cholera was an opportunity to "redefine a space" (58) according to an urban ideal of civilization against the barbarism of the past. They were able, that is, to use cholera as both evidence of and argument for progress.

Gilbert focuses mainly on medical mapmakers from the mid- and late- nineteenth century, when "Victorian urbanists began working with a fully developed sense of the city as a whole" (6). She concentrates on the public health movement— loosely defined—that sought to order the social organism through emergent systems of thought based less on laissez-faire or Utilitarian political economy than on civic idealism. With the help of cholera maps, argues Gilbert, Victorian health professionals—and as a result, culture at large—came increasingly to understand knowledge of the social body as a spatial formation. To those familiar with early century Benthamite reform schemes aimed at making the city visible under a central government, Gilbert's assertion may appear unsurprising. But she argues that the visual knowledge made available by mapping elucidates the wider stakes of nation-formation through science, medicine, and government. In the name of the same middle-class domestic virtues that inspired the reforms of Edwin Chadwick and his contemporaries, medical mapmakers erased heterogeneity and drew equivalences among people and places in order to transform a disparate social body subject to disease into a homogeneous patient subject to treatment through the social equivalent of bodily medicine: statistics and maps.

Here, one can see shades of Poovey's Making a Social Body (1995), which attributes this process of abstraction to representational strategies borrowed from...