The Traffic in Victorian Bodies: Medicine, Literature, and History

The following books are under consideration in this review:

Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture, by Erin O'Connor; pp. xiii + 272. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000, $54.95, $18.95 paper, £39.00, £13.50 paper.

Reconsidering Drugs: Mapping Victorian and Modern Drug Discourses, by Lawrence Driscoll; pp. xv + 199. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2000, £37.50, $45.00.

The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century English Culture, by Lucy Bending; pp. ix + 309. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 2000, £65.00, $72.00.

Coping with Sickness: Medicine, Law and Human Rights: Historical Perspectives, edited by John Woodward and Robert Jütte; pp. xii + 211. Sheffield: European Association for the History of Medicine and Health Publications, 2000, £24.95, $40.75. Association for the History of Medicine and Health Publications, 2000, £24.95, $40.75.

Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865-1900, by Michael Worboys; pp. xvi + 327. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, £45.00, $60.00.

Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest, 1830-1926, by Ian A. Burney; pp. x + 245. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, $43.95.

Medical Progress and Social Reality: A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Medicine and Literature edited by Lilian R. Furst; pp. xiv + 314. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000, $66.50, $22.95 paper.

Have we lost the connections between literary studies of Victorian bodies, studies of medicine and literature, and historical studies of medical ideas and practices? The boundary police of academic disciplines might be pardoned for thinking so; indeed, for believing that these projects have always been on different continents drifting in different directions. Certainly, the "body languages" of the former and the latter are often wide apart—the heavily theorized "pathology poetics" of the one being a far cry from the empirical realist narratives of the other. Much recent literary scholarship has gone into rewriting the Victorians in terms of the body's discursive fabrications, the body being taken as the culturally embedded text (often the text) for imaginative and contested readings of the self and others. As testified through the work of Mary Poovey, Catherine Gallagher, Helena Michie, and Linda Shires among others, a major part of the literary turn in cultural studies has been its somatic turn. While accounts of the medical epistemology of the modern social body remain relatively obscure (and contested), ¹ few historians, and even fewer cultural analysts, now doubt that the history of the body forms an important part of the conceptual history of modernity. Whether as a means of contemplating the human condition, or merely pursuing language practices and literary strategies, corporeality and pathology have become obligatory points of passage in the study of Victorian society and culture.

Most historians of Victorian medicine, however, have had different business. The defining feature of their work over the past quarter century has been attention to the historical context of biomedical knowledge and practice. To this end, dedicated linguistic and textual exegeses have been little called for. ² Although, as in cultural studies, much attention has been paid to race, gender, and sexuality, the focus has been on describing the constructed nature and outcomes of power relations around the body and medical practices, rather than identifying the inscriptions of modernity on the body, or embodied cultural practices. There has been little swooning to reflexivity, or to constructions of identity, interiority, and other imaginative geographies. Not here the play of signifiers without referents, free actors, evocative explorations into the interrelations, reverberations, tensions, and irreducible ambiguities within and between disparate political and fictional genres. While historians of medicine may recognize that bodies embody, and even admit that bodies are both the business of medicine and "the matrix in which are written the rights a society allots to people of various genders, races, and classes" (Hamlin 17), their focus remains largely on...