- Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England, and: Health in the Marketplace: Professionalism, Therapeutic Desires, and Medical Commodification in Late-Victorian London
Historiographically speaking, a casual reader might see little to choose between these two books. Both paint pictures without much regard to the intricate politics of history writing around the body and biopower over the past several decades. Mary Wilson Carpenter's Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England stands on the edifice of the social history of medicine developed over forty years ago, while Takahiro Ueyama's Health in the Marketplace cuts an impressive revisionist swath through a literature of much the same vintage. Yet, inasmuch as they articulate at all with each other, it is mainly as fingerposts to past and present representations of the history of medicine.
Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England, to be fair, is not intended as much more than a summary of this field of study for the general reader. As a part of a series on "Victorian Life and Times," its object is "to explain and enrich the simple pictures that show only a partial truth," according to the foreword by the series editor, Sally Mitchell (ix). Which "partial truth" is not made clear, but for Carpenter the task [End Page 352] entails structuring a history mainly around cholera, tuberculosis, syphilis, smallpox, and—less conventionally—deafness and blindness. Chapters on these are sandwiched between an opening one on patients and practitioners and a concluding one on women as patients and practitioners—the de rigueur tropes of the so-called history from below in medical history. Those on blindness and deafness chart a shift of sorts from senti-mentalization to medicalization. They break no new ground, but nevertheless suggest how the Victorians deprived of these senses were increasingly regarded as a threat to a culture built around the power of the written word. Paradoxically, however, the more that these newly "disabled" persons were compelled to enter into that culture, the more they acquired a new apartness, since ever more esoteric (if rationalized) systems of sign-language and Braille-like typographical scripts increasingly excluded those with sight and hearing.
Overall, Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England meets the series's brief to provide texts that are "authoritative and dependable but written in straightforward language" (x). Carpenter draws on fiction, poetry, biography, letters, and diaries, sufficient to suggest to her that her book "may also be considered a cultural history of Victorian medicine" (3). But she is unable to cast off the narrative monkey of medical progress—the compelling "transformations in medicine" that shore up its medico-centric history and broker no distraction from the profession's self-styled image of its humanist project (4). The heroes of that project—the Snows, the Listers, the Laennecs, and so on—loom large (in text and image) in Carpenter's account. Despite a prefatory acknowledgement of the historiographical importance of Michel Foucault, one could never guess from Carpenter's text his place in the history of medicine and the body, through turns literary, somatic, visual, and material.
Nor might this be guessed from Health in the Marketplace, although for different reasons. Scrupulously researched, lavishly documented, engagingly written, and handsomely produced and illustrated, it sets a benchmark not only for the study of the cult, culture, and commercialization of health and wellbeing in late-nineteenth-century London (in fact, the West in general), but also for comprehending transformations in the history of commerce and culture more broadly. Focused on the commercialization of "therapeutic commodities" and electro-technology devices in particular (57), it argues that the remarkable explosion in the promotion and consumption of these in the late nineteenth century is best explained, not by reference to new technologies and means of advertising, but "by a changing ethos in the medical marketplace" (3). It...