Pathologies of Travel (review)

Richard Wrigley and George Revill, eds. Pathologies of Travel. Clio Medica, vol. 56. Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2000. v + 338 pp. Ill. $88.50 (cloth), $27.50 (paperbound); Hfl. 160.00 (cloth), 50.00 (paperbound); £48.00 (cloth, 90-420-0608-0), £15.00 (paperbound, 90-420-0598-X).

Richard Wrigley and George Revill have edited an interesting collection of essays designed to meet at the complex intersections of travel and danger. Their contributors discuss dangerous places and healthy places, dangerous and curative travel, travelers who are dangerous themselves, and the dangerous Other that travelers face. Eight of the ten essays deal with British sources, subjects, and travelers, and most of the experiences they treat cluster between the mid-eighteenth century and the late nineteenth. In some of the essays (more relevant to readers of the Bulletin) the body confronts danger or experiences relief; in others, it is the soul.

Some authors directly relate travel and "pathology" (in its nonspecific sense), and almost all raise the recurrent theme of ambiguity. Jonathan Andrews, in the longest and most richly textured essay, explores the ambiguous relations of travel and mental disorder in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British opinion. Conclusions are difficult to draw, for travel could both banish the pathological (with fresh air, for example) and lead to further pathology (through stress and shock). Was travel as a remedy a threat to the dominance of medical expertise in more confined settings? Did medical practitioners advocate travel to "absorb and nullify non-asylum alternatives" (p. 72)? Who controlled the terms of therapeutic travel--patients, their families, practitioners? Andrews is certain of one point: that the different responses to travel took shape "within the context of private, consultative practice upon the moneyed classes" (p. 73); welfare schemes for the lower orders did not come into it.

Other essays on the dangers of travel are slighter. Jonathan Lamb argues that Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner pictures a ship's crew in the grip of scurvy. Much of his essay hinges on the assertion that scurvy was an etiologic (and hence symbolic) mystery in the eighteenth century. But was scurvy really a "mystery," or is it more accurate to portray it as a topic hotly debated by people who had definite opinions about its cause? Lamb takes little account of the strengths of eighteenth-century environmentalism and pneumatic chemistry in the formation of opinion. Ralph Harrington's discussion of railway journeys and modern neuroses adds interesting points to a field already well discussed by other scholars.

Some authors are concerned less with the journey than with the destination, again suggesting the ambiguities of place as therapy. Matthew Craske, focusing on Richard Jago's Edgehill, suggests that landscapes could be therapeutic if they reflected the good government provided by a Tory squire, but could be contaminated by footpads and other knavish disorder. Chloe Chard similarly uses a literary source (and a published diary) to analyze the 1820s constructions of the therapeutic and/or dangerous aspects of sojourns in Italy. Harriet Deacon, in a well-argued essay, shows how "moral and political overtones" shaped the changing perceptions of the salubrity of the Cape of Good Hope. Visions of urban "danger" moved therapy to the suburbs, while the provincial character of the Cape, without the "civilization" of the Mediterranean (or even of Bath), suggested physical degeneracy.

Travelers themselves, and those inhabiting distant places, also receive attention. Tim Cresswell, in the only essay devoted to a North American topic, attempts to connect the completion of the transcontinental railroad in the United States with eugenic beliefs and the resulting demonization of tramps, but the chronological distance between much of his eugenic evidence and the Golden Spike weakens his argument. More convincing is Russell West's discussion of André Gide's conceptions of health, sickness, and Africa, conceptions that evolved with his experiences. Gide moved from his inherited image of dangerously fetid Africa...