Physiology and the Literary Imagination: Romantic to Modern (review)

It is a rare thing to find an academic based in a department of English literature with a decent understanding of medical history, and even more rare to find one who can traverse the two domains in a cogent and—shock!—well-written book. John Gordon is to be congratulated on his excellent contribution to our understanding of what exactly writers make of medical ideas and technologies. Perhaps his most important point is to show that the literary imagination, as manifested in a sample of stellar authors, does use medicine in the most profound ways.

Also impressive is the chronological range. The book does precisely what its title claims in the phrase Romantic to Modern, covering seven authors in five chapters: Wordsworth; Dickens; Hopkins and T. S. Eliot; Joyce; Dylan Thomas and Plath. One's initial skepticism about the ability of any writer to discuss such major and compendious figures in anything like a competent manner, let alone relate them to medical history, is quickly alleviated by Gordon's sure touch in both big ideas and small details. This is clearly a book that has been maturely digested over a number of years, and the evenness of the writing and research across the chosen writers is a testament to this. It is also clear that the canonical figures selected—although Gordon says nothing that I can find about the reasons for his choice—are intended to be so in order to mark the fact that this is a magnum opus of sorts. It seems churlish to complain about the domination of Great White Western Males apart from Plath (whose sections are in no way deficient), but it would have given a more complicated picture if we had seen a varied sample.

The good news is that Gordon has succeeded within his own parameters: his narrative is coherent and persuasive through all seven authors. His methodology consists of "a reading of a writer's governing medical assumptions, as indicated by biography, acquaintances, letters, and a body of work"; an examination of the history of medicine (including technologies and popular myths) for likely sources; and then a return to the author's works to find how these "received notions of medical fact" manifest themselves in either the characters or the author's "own lyric sensibilities" (p. 1). This is a big job, but Gordon does it well. By tying his medical-historical narrative to a specific writer, he avoids many of the vague pronouncements that tend to dog large-scale comparisons of medical paradigms to literary ones. Each author or pairing of authors tends to manifest, in more or less unique ways, the (sometimes competing) medical systems and myths of the day. Wordsworth, for example, followed the influence of Thomas Beddoes—his good friend—and the Brunonians in reading illness as an imbalance in equilibrium and as inflammation, with the solution lying in bleeding out excess "pressure" in the system. Dickens inherits this model, in that blood stays at the center of his imaginings about illness, but he moves on to visualize blood as a mobile system whose speed of flow needs to be regulated.

Literary scholars can learn much from this book about just how implicated in medical discourse (and even practice) these major writers were, but, just as impressively, Gordon analyzes both prose and poetry with great sensitivity. His elegant close readings are a joy as they identify the creative value of the writer's medical ideas and images. At the end of the book, for example, Plath's sense of human identity is convincingly shown to be formed by the modern, cellular conception of life and—in particular—the human body. Gordon forces the reader of Plath's poetry, as well as the other authors here, to reinterpret familiar images and themes (bees, her parents, the sea . . .) in a medical manner. Medicine is not merely a "background" to Plath or any of the other authors: their writing could...