Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot (review)

The title of Janis McLarren Caldwell's book, with its promise of both categorial and temporal comprehensiveness, is misleading given its tightly focused argument and the specificity of its areas of interest. There is medicine here, and literature, too, but Caldwell's governing interest is in a particular interpretive methodology that she finds in works written in what she calls the pre-Darwinian era. Proceeding from the premise that clinical medicine and Romanticism emerged from the same cultural milieu, she adopts Gillian Beer's term "romantic materialism" to refer to a method that linked these emergent cultural phenomena and to construct a cohort of literary and scientific writers who were able to move back and forth productively between material evidence and imaginative understanding. Caldwell contends that romantic materialists were able to tolerate the tension between opposed modes of cognition and to find them useful as sources of knowledge and ethical understanding. These writers, she argues, read the world through a "two-text" approach, through the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture, in a way that diminishes the integrity of neither as distinct conceptual perspectives. Caldwell seeks to revise the view that nineteenth-century attempts to accommodate the practices of the scientific method with tenets of religious faith or Romantic idealism were poignant or wrongheaded last-ditch efforts; she asserts instead that they constituted vigorous and productive encounters between different but not self-cancelling discourses. She enlists hermeneutic theory for its model of a dual way of reading that takes into account an imagined whole and the parts that make it up; it also defers closure of ultimate questions, moving between logical and intuitive, psychological and linguistic formulations, as well as between reader and writer.

The individual chapters address literary, philosophical, and scientific texts, demonstrating how each exemplifies a different performance of "bi-textual" interpretative strategies. The first chapter, on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), argues that Shelley offers a new definition of sympathy as the reception of difference rather than sameness or identification. The disjunction between the monster's body and mind poses a problem for his sympathizing listeners—a problem that stages in a particularly graphic way the philosophical contention between materialist and transcendentalist philosophies. According to Caldwell, Shelley holds those views in tension and models a kind of listening that brackets perception of the material body in order to "hear" what can't be physically validated. The chapter on Sartor Resartus (1836) compares Thomas Carlyle's natural supernaturalism to Richard Owen's transcendental anatomy and argues that to these thinkers the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture are not disjunctive; rather, they can be viewed differently according to two opposed ways of knowing that are in perpetual dialectical engagement with each other. In Wuthering Heights (1847), this dialectic moves between Emily Brontë's dual investments in the natural child and the world of books; the suspension between these two domains—one physical, one imaginative— provides an explanatory framework for the famous bifurcation of that novel.

Caldwell pursues her thesis about dual ways of knowing in subsequent chapters on Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853), Charles Darwin's Autobiography (1929), and the four encounters between Dorothea Brooke and Lydgate in Middlemarch (1871–72). Caldwell's argument about these works is carefully and generatively situated in relation to other texts and contexts, including domestic medicine, physiological theories of sympathy, and biblical typology.

Caldwell's key objective seems to be to present an ethical mode of medical and scientific inquiry that, by emphasizing "bi-textual reading," keeps the door open for non-empiricist and more humane modes of understanding. The book moves toward advocacy. It is clear that Caldwell, a former emergency room doctor, heartily approves of hermeneutic approaches that combine a rigorous empirical approach to understanding the physical world and an openness to spiritual, imaginative, and intuitive sources of knowledge. The book ends by...