Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture ed. by Louise Penner, Tabitha Sparks (review)

Louise Penner and Tabitha Sparks’s Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture is, to my knowledge, the first collection of essays in the field of literature and medicine to focus specifically on Victorian medicine, as opposed to collections on Victorian science more broadly (though these may also include essays dealing particularly with medical science). This collection not only confines itself to Victorian medicine, which I will define as medical theory and practice, but deals exclusively with popular literature, here referring to a broad range of materials such as advertisements, popular magazines such as Household Words (1850–59), sensation fiction, and medical advice directed to the general public. None of the essays treat well-known fictional works that take medicine as a dominant interest, such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Round the Red Lamp (1894). But most importantly, in my opinion, the essays in this collection demonstrate the influence of popular culture on medicine, rather than—as the editors point out—following the dominant “emphasis on the intellectual advancements of medical science,” and the concomitant tendency to analyze the influence of medical science on popular culture (1). These carefully executed studies of moments in the history of medicine as intersecting with and shaped by popular culture and as affecting, in turn, the way non-medical Victorians understood medicine will be valuable to students and scholars alike in such interdisciplinary fields as medical humanities, literature and medicine, and narrative medicine.

All of the essays, without exception, are clearly written and well researched, and many also seem to speak directly to ongoing medico-ethical debates. The first essay in the collection, Kevin A. Morrison’s “‘Dr Locock and his Quack’: Professionalizing Medicine, Textualizing Identity in the 1840s,” is an especially good example of this. Morrison’s analysis of The Lancet (1823-present) editor Thomas Wakley’s campaign against advertisements for quack medicines such as “Locock’s pulmonic wafers,” demonstrates that Wakley fought against the appropriation of physicians’ names for these advertisements because he not only felt the practice “was one of the biggest obstacles to reforming medical practice into an organized profession,” but also believed that “professional identity, like personhood itself, could be stabilized through textualization” (10, 25). Morrison’s essay analyzes both the impact of advertising on members of the Victorian medical profession in a manner that was not to their benefit, and the difficulty of controlling its effects on the public. It figures a new twist on the prevailing anxiety today concerning collusion of the medical profession with pharmaceutical manufacturers to the financial benefit of both.

A number of the essays seem to work especially well together in pairs, like the proverbial horse and carriage, a function that is amplified by the writers’ frequent and useful reference to other essays in the collection. Penner’s “Dickens, Metropolitan Philanthropy and the London Hospitals” is followed by Meegan Kennedy’s “Cleanliness and Medicinal Cheer: Harriet Martineau, the ‘People of Bleaburn’ and the Sanitary Work of Household Words,” which describes Martineau’s story of Mary Ware, the first of over forty pieces by Martineau contributed to Charles Dickens’s popular magazine Household Words, for “a series of tales on Sanitary subjects” (42). Penner’s essay describes Dickens’s advocacy for hospitals, which he expected to benefit the poor especially. Kennedy’s essay not only demonstrates popular belief about the efficacy of cheerfulness in both the prevention and treatment of epidemic disease, but also provides a newly informed perception of the ways in which Martineau cooperated with Dickens in her production of such “tales” for Household Words.

Two essays—Jacob Steere-Williams’s “Lacteal Crises: Debates over Milk Purity in Victorian Britain,” and Julie Kraft’s “‘The Chemistry and Botany of the Kitchen’: Scientific and Domestic Attempts to Prevent Food Adulteration”—focus on, respectively, mid-century attempts to detect and regulate food adulteration, and the interestingly related campaign to enlist housewives as detectives...