Medicine and Modernism: A Biography of Sir Henry Head (review)

As a doctor fascinated with art and literature, perhaps the neurologist Henry Head (1861–1940) would not have been too disturbed by the fact that he is now most commonly encountered through a fictional representation. With his wife Ruth Mayhew, Head appears in Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration (1991) because of his relationship with W. H. R. Rivers and their work on the physiological basis of sensation (1903–7). There, we hear how Head became his own experimental subject, undergoing a procedure in which cutaneous nerves in his left arm were severed and then sutured together, with the resulting nerve regeneration then tested and charted. In Medicine and Modernism, L. S. Jacyna—a renowned historian of neurology—has produced a richly detailed biography of Head that works to contextualize this famous experiment, alongside Head’s other pioneering neurological work, within a culture newly obsessed with the physiology and psychology of subjective feeling, of aesthetic experience, and the ways meaning is produced by a material mind. In this book, Jacyna offers a compelling reconstruction of Head’s life and scientific work from meticulous archival research; but a fascinating and intellectually broader project simultaneously emerges that details, through biography, the profound imbrication of discourses of neurology, aesthetics, and epistemology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

For Jacyna, the connection between these discourses emerges most clearly from Head’s extraordinarily suggestive relationships with the theorists and artists of cultural modernity. We learn, for example, that Head acted as doctor to a highly nervous Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf consulted him in 1913 when she suffered a nervous breakdown; he treated Janet Ashbee in 1908 after she experienced a collapse; E. M. Forster was intrigued, though not tempted, by suggestions that “Head can convert sodomites”; whilst Roger Fry’s wife Helen was one patient for whom Head’s expertise, in the end, offered little. Head’s strong engagement with the intellectual scene drew him beyond the confines of the WC1 postcode, however. Ruth Mayhew had edited a compilation of writings of Henry James, and in 1912, after the writer had suffered a stroke, her husband spent a weekend with James professionally in Rye. Also close to Siegfried Sassoon and Alfred North Whitehead, Head is repeatedly represented by Jacyna as part of a fascinating axis of association that opens up encounters between neurology’s concern with how brain and nerves render internal and external sensations meaningful in the face of the putatively excessive stimulation of modern life, and cultural discourses of modernity.

Head was a doctor intimately engaged by somewhat romantic notions of aesthetic sensibility, and in his published poetry, his letters, and the rag books crammed with experiences, poems, and observations on art, the importance of subjective aesthetic experience for the man of science finds constant reiteration. Accordingly, Head saw himself as a fundamentally different kind of nerve doctor to those found in late nineteenth-century neurology. Jacyna convincingly argues that Head, whom we learn was admired by Bergson, forged his holistic neurology as a critique of those mechanistic models which rendered both nervous system and brain as passive matter that simply received and relayed impressions from external and internal world. Head indeed constructed both a scientific and an aesthetic critique of the “Diagram Makers” of nineteenth-century neurology, who turned the human into predictable configurations of mechanical association, reflex arcs, and the firing of localized areas of the brain. Through clinical observation of brain damage and nervous disorder, Head insisted instead that the mind should be thought of as “an artificer that actively created the world with which it interacted” (150). For Head, the mind worked to order its experience into meaningful sequences, as part of its material evolutionary development as “an imperfect organism [that] has struggled towards improved functions and psychical unity” (130). And it is this notion of the immanent orientation towards the perception of forms of unity within the human subject, reconceived as a subjective organism rather than as an objective (if...