Victorian Poets and Physicians

^Victorian Poets and Physicians Stanley Weintraub Since a substantial portion of volume 6 of Literature and Medicine (General Issue—the only nonthematic issue to date) turns upon nineteenthcentury authors and themes, it is no surprise that the volume is more coherent than its subtitle suggests.1 Rather than breaking down the law of averages, the accidental critical mass recognizes, implicitly, the gains that medicine was making in the century of Lister and Jenner, Pasteur and Charcot—advances, paradoxicaUy, far slower than in other areas of technological and scientific progress. Four of the essays relate well to each other and are the springboard for the following thoughts on Victorian poets and physicians. At first, the early Victorian years appear strikingly contemporary to us—at the least their "early modern" aspects. Steamships and railways were revolutionizing transportation; rail systems were also changing the face of the land as much as were intensive mining and manufacturing. Photography was flourishing, and telegraphy had further collapsed distances . When we look at medicine, however, we see a painful world hardly yet removed from the medieval. In the early 1840s, even Queen Victoria had to do without anesthetics in childbirth. Before Jean-Martin Charcot, the mentally ill were still treated as curiosities to be dumped into dilapidated holding institutions, if cared for at all and not hidden away (as in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre). Hospitals for the bodily ill were often still Rabelaisian and insanitary, and nursing remained one of the lower professions . Antisepsis, even in its most primitive state, hardly existed. No wonder, then, that medical matters, as they emerge in contemporary writing, seem anachronistic, at odds with the visible triumphs of early Victorian technology. To allay pain, one resorted to harsh drugs or strong drink, or, as Shelley wrote in "The Magnetic Lady to Her Patient" (1821), to mesmerism: "Sleep, sleep on! forget thy pain; My hand is on thy brow, Literature and Medicine 10 (1991) 86-97 © 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Stanley Weintraub 87 My spirit on thy brain; My pity on thy heart, poor friend; And from my fingers flow The powers of life, and like a sign, Seal thee from thine hour of woe; And brood on thee, but may not blend With thine."2 In no way was SheUey basing his verses upon readings in pseudomedical Uterature. In agony from nephritic spasms—he was suffering from "the stone"—he underwent hypnotism, and accepted its effects as evidence of the separation of mind from body, and of the immortaUty of the soul. "What would cure me would kill me," he told a friend about what was then caUed lithotomy, the dangerous procedure of cutting out stones from the bladder in an age without anesthesia or antisepsis. After a male hypnotist put him into an eyes-open somnambulistic state at Pisa in 1821, he tried a female "magnétiser," a relationship between therapist and patient that appealed to him enough to write his grateful lines. But between treatments, when he suffered renewed spasms, and his wife "magnetised" him, he once sleepwalked suicidally to the window, and she gave the practice up. Only his accidental death by drowning in the Bay of Lerici next year, a month before his thirtieth birthday, put an end to his increasing invaUdism.3 Kate Nickleby consoles the unhappy Madame MantaUni that "bodily illness is more easy to bear, than mental,"4 but in Dickens's novels both are horrific experiences. Self-destruction, as Barbara T. Gates writes in "Not Choosing Not To Be: Victorian Literary Responses to Suicide," underwent a transformation in public attitude by the beginning of Victoria's reign.5 Coroner's juries widely began to use the small loophole in the law that permitted the finding of "temporarily insane," a humane device to prevent legal forfeiture of the goods and chattels of a suicide, which "selfmurder " required until 1870. The way out for the bankrupt, the mortally ill, the victim consumed by a myriad of miseries, it became more accessible thereby in Ufe than in art. The example of the sensitive, melanchoUc Werther of Goethe's 1774 novel had been much admired by sentimentalists, but in practice his problems, at least...