The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices, and: Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic, and: Victorian Medicine and Social Reform: Florence Nightingale among the Novelists (review)

This is a good moment for Victorianist studies of literature and medicine, with three new books on the subject offering thorough and responsible interdisciplinary scholarship. Clearly, literature and medicine is no longer a nascent field, but a defined and recognized set of approaches, with scholars exploring the wide territory between canonical touchstones.

Some of the earliest work in literature and medicine examined the history of the fictional image of the doctor, and because of that, many have assumed that following the doctor's character in the novel was an exhausted idea. Tabitha Sparks puts the lie to that assumption, demonstrating how much there is still to learn about fictional representations of doctors, especially in lesser-read novels. The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices collects noncanonical doctor characters from authors including Harriet Martineau, George MacDonald, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen, Charles Reade, Margaret Todd, and Arthur Conan Doyle, and places them alongside the more famous Tertius Lydgate of Middlemarch (1871-72) and Alan Woodcourt of Bleak House (1852-53). Sparks argues that the doctor character antagonizes the marriage plot; as he (since he is most often male) becomes increasingly associated with scientific empiricism over the course of the century, we also see the decline of the marriage plot. Both of these developments—the rise of the scientific doctor character and the demise of the marriage plot—have been previously analyzed as byproducts of the evolution of literary realism, but Sparks sets out to show how they interact. Demonstrating an unusually wide reading, especially of popular literature, Sparks discusses no fewer than forty-four doctor characters throughout the course of the book. This feat alone makes The Doctor in the Victorian Novel a must-read for students of Victorian literature and medicine.

Sparks makes clear from the outset that her emphasis is on the characters and plots of these novels rather than on the history of medicine. Her thesis, then, rests on her analysis of the imaginative worlds of the novels, many of which, as she demonstrates, repeat the predictable formula of a scientific doctor failing at romantic love. At times, one might wonder why we need such extended demonstration of either the separate spheres ideology (in other words, the female/emotional/domestic versus the male/ rational/scientific) or the epistemological divide between romanticism and empiricism. The pleasant surprise is that Sparks's fictional landscape is more varied than her thesis implies. The Doctor in the Victorian Novel follows a roughly chronological development, with chapters grouped around early-, mid-, and late-century novels. In the early century, we meet the surgeon Mr. Hope from Martineau's Deerbrook (1839), whose success in marriage Sparks attributes to Martineau's "pre-scientific" vision (26), and physician Harry Armstrong, of MacDonald's Adela Cathcart (1864), who organizes a reading club for his depressed patient and future wife. By mid-century, Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (1866) gives us both the romantically unwise Dr. Gibson and a more successful alternative in the scientist-hero Roger Hamley, who not only courts Molly, but tutors her in naturalism. By the end of the century, we get ample evidence of a sinister view of medicine in Collins, Stoker, and Machen. Sparks also enlivens this section with a chapter on female doctor characters, including Annie S. Swan's emotionally sensitive yet professional Elizabeth Glen, M. B. (1895), and Margaret Todd's Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892), which imagines a married female doctor.

The exceptions to Sparks's thesis suggest that deviations from the old conflict between...