Authorizing the Body: Scientific Medicine and The Scarlet Letter

^Authorizing the Body: Scientific Medicine and The Scarlet Letter Stephanie P. Browner College-bound and anxious to choose a career, Hawthorne writes to his mother in 1821: "I have not yet concluded what profession I shall have." He rejects three professions. He will not be a minister, Hawthorne writes, because he "was not born to vegetate . . . and to live and die as calm and tranquil as—A Puddle of Water." Law, he argues, is unacceptable because there are too many lawyers; and medicine is out because "it would weigh very heavily on [his] Conscience if . . . [he] should chance to send any unlucky Patient ... to the realms below." "What do you think," he asks his mother, "of my becoming an Author, and relying for support upon my pen."1 Hawthorne's letter is most often cited as evidence of an early awareness of his calling,2 but it is also useful as a representation of the competition among several professions for social authority in early nineteenth -century America. During the first half of the century, the clergy was rapidly losing influence as churches were disestablished through the loss of state sanctions and support. Lawyers and physicians, on the other hand, were gaining economic and political power. Through protective regulation and the establishment of professional schools, journals, and societies, medicine and law were able to consolidate their prestige and authority.3 Literature was also beginning to emerge as an important cultural force. By the middle of the century there would be a dramatic increase in the production of all kinds of literature, and, through the promotional work of such publishers as Evert Duyckinck and James T. Field, a small group of ambitious and self-consciously professional writers could stake some claim in the battle for cultural authority.4 Given this competition among professions, it is not surprising that The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hawthorne's first romance, as well as his earlier letter, is marked by a concern with the relative merits of religion, law, Literature and Medicine 12, no. 2 (Fall 1993) 139-160 © 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 140 SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE AND THE SCARLET LETTER medicine, and literature and by an anxiety to affirm and legitimate literature 's social authority. Throughout The Scarlet Letter and the prefatory sketch, "The Custom-House," Hawthorne mocks and condemns political , clerical, and medical authorities. The sketch lambastes ancient Puritan authorities as well as current politicians and custom-house officials; the romance, which focuses on a cowardly minister and an evil physician, indicts the stern and hypocritical rule of Puritan political authorities. The author-narrator, on the other hand, appears as an unpretentious and unassuming man who is much put upon by those in power and nearly prevented from revealing his discovery—an important story from the past. In short, in The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne rejects existing authorities and sets up literature as a more humane and a more knowing authority. Significantly, both Hawthorne's youthful note home and the romance he writes thirty years later reveal the same biased view of the professions. To the young Hawthorne religion and law are dull or impoverishing , and to the mature author clerical and legal men are buffoonish and pathetic.5 Medicine, on the other hand, is a powerful force. In the letter Hawthorne suggests that medicine is a frightening profession that can heal or kill, a parasitic profession that depends upon "the diseases and Infirmities of [one's] fellow Creatures."6 Thirty years later, Hawthorne represents medicine as an evil power that enables Roger Chillingworth to prey upon the weaknesses of others. But the romance's condemnation of medicine is no vague preference for the world of imagination over the world of science.7 Rather, it is a pointed critique that goes to the very center of nineteenth-century medical science—its claims to social authority and its political appropriation of the body. The Scarlet Letter condemns the clinical gaze championed by American physicians returning from Paris, rejects medicine's celebration of observation over interpretation, and resists medicine's reduction of bodies—multiple and idiosyncratic—to a single representative body—generic and predictable. The body was at the center of competition for social authority in...