Conrad & Illness

Book reviews what actually happened, but the manner of presenting it... the depth and complexity of the feelings involved in the action ... that settles the literary and even the moral value of my work." JEFFREY MEYERS __________________ Berkeley, California Conrad & Illness Martin Bock. Joseph Conrad and Psychological Medicine. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2002. xviii + 277 pp. $34.95 ABOUT A DECADE ago when a number of senior Conrad scholars met in London in a preliminary way to plot out topics for a never completed Conrad companion, one of the first issues to come up was Conrad's health. Illness, treatment by physicians, the state of his family 's health, and worries about coming down with this disease or that ailment play such a large part in Conrad's correspondence that the topic would hardly surprise any student of Conrad's biography. The eventual Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad (2000) by Owen Knowles and Gene M. Moore features an ably written entry on its subject's many illnesses , but in a short space cannot luxuriate on their numerous ramifications in Conrad's work. Martin Bock's full-length study, based on extensive archival and secondary research, treats this topic in depth, dealing with both physical and mental illnesses in Conrad's life story and taking up these topics as treated in the fiction where illness and disease play supporting and even at times major roles. Bock sets the stage for his discussion by sifting through the extant evidence about Conrad's childhood afflictions, his adult history of gout, depression , and neurasthenia and examines the major pre-Freudian theories and treatments for mental illness. He then goes on to examine the breakdown following Conrad's disastrous African sojourn in 1890, discussing his treatment in the German Hospital in London and then detailing the water cures Conrad underwent in Geneva, tracing the theories of the medical practitioners who treated him and the curative regimens at the hydropathic establishments he went to. The nervous breakdown of 1910 is another flash-point, with Bock contextualizing the period's attitudes towards mental illness as well as the specific treatments that Conrad underwent. Drawing on standard medical texts, inividual clinical works by Conrad's physicians, Conrad's correspondence , and descriptions of him by others, Bock presents a convincing and highly detailed picture of Conrad's medical state and the then-available ways of conceptualizing and dealing with it. 445 ELT 46 : 4 2003 Having fully filled in biographical elements mostly sketched in by Conrad's biographers, Bock turns to "Reading Medically," that is, to seeking out the consequences of Conrad's personal experience of ill health and psychological problems for his fiction and how the fiction reflects his awareness of the day's psychological medicine. The volume closes with a useful appendix detailing the training, careers, and life's work of the numerous medical professionals through whose hands Conrad and his family passed. The list generously includes family connections with medical training (Adam Marek Pulman, the well known Paul Gachet, Izydor Kopernicki), influential practitioners with whom Conrad's physicians worked (Dr. George Savage of Virginia Woolf notoriety ), and psychological theorists (Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau) with whose works Conrad engages. The research energy on display in the chapters on Conrad's treatment and in the appendix is signally impressive , and Bock opens up several areas for further investigation. "Reading Medically," the five chapters and conclusion that form the bulk of Bock's highly original study, demands a detailed, near-specialist knowledge of the Conrad canon, so wide is Bock's net cast and so thorough his mastery of the texts he draws on. Detecting a nervousness of style in Conrad's densely adjectival and occasionally overwritten first two novels, Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, Bock suggests that the vivid descriptions of nervous constitutions derive from actual observation of the physical attitudes of enervation and hyper-vitality on display at the hydropathic establishments at Champel. Male hysteria, a topic of lively debate in medical circles, is also reflected in the concerns of these early novels, which place their self-destructive male protagonists in contexts that are alienating and psychologically threatening. Bock's discussion...