Modernism, Medicine, and William Carlos Williams

T. Hugh Crawford’s elegant study of William Carlos Williams is not really about Williams alone but about the ethos of medicine that existed in American culture during the first half of the twentieth century. Crawford’s argument uses Williams and his texts deftly, to evoke an age in which the meaning of medicine—a meaning that is now very much in question—was established. And Williams, as a physician-poet, captures (and draws into question, in his idiosyncratic way) many of the presuppositions that haunt the establishment of this modernized science.

Crawford’s preface outlines his argument and musters all of the most important sociologists of science, from Foucault to Latour, in support of his general thesis. This chapter also places Williams in the sociology of the medical world of his times, using Charles Rosenberg’s discussion of Flexner’s medical reforms. Here we have the context for Williams and his understanding of the world of medicine. We have the rationale Williams gave for beginning his study of medicine or, at least, what he (either at the time or retrospectively) thought he was doing. We can understand how he accepted the evolving new status of medicine rather than seeing himself as following in the footsteps of an older model of the family practitioner.

Chapter 1, “Authority, Honesty, and Charisma,” places the issue of the epistemology of the physician at center stage. Crawford gives us a complex picture of how the authority of the physician is established during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here the authority of the modernist poet and that of the physician intertwine, as we see Williams shaping the discourse about authority in Paterson; the ironic voice of Williams in regard to his medical authority seems quite paralleled his sense of authority of the writer. Crawford’s readings here are sure and to the point.

The next chapter, “Against Theory: The Rhetoric of Clarity,” begins with a discussion of the epistemological problems just described. The stress here is on the clarity of the physician’s vision, as paralleled to the insight of the poet. Crawford shows how Williams’s attraction to “Objectivism” grows naturally out of his concerns about clarity and authority. The critique of science, mirrored in a number of major texts, begins with “Spring and All” in 1923. Williams’s ideal of clarity, like that of the medicine of his time, with which he was often at odds, demanded precisely this type of real representation of the internal as well as the external world of the poet.

The third chapter deals with the “Theater of Proof” in the world of the physician and poet. Crawford uses the medical school with its clinical experiences in classroom and laboratory as the structure within which he places the discourse about validity (drawn into question in his preface). The use of visual sources in this chapter, specifically Thomas Eakins and Charles Sheeler, is of great interest. Crawford builds elegantly here on the earlier work done on Williams. He sees Williams in the images themselves, drawing on the vocabulary of images in the representation of the physician in his own time. The turn from the stance of the physician teacher to the discourse of the feminine (in Chapter 4), can indeed be found in Eakins’s own representation of the clinic with the nursing sisters and the patient’s mother. The problem of objectivity raised earlier is now revealed to have further and wider ideological consequences. These Crawford spins out adroitly, especially the relationship between the feminine and the act of “unveiling the truth.”

Chapter 5 is a close reading of the implications of the shift in technology that influenced the medical world during Williams’s lifetime. While this topic has been well discussed (in the works of Cecelia Tichi and Lisa M. Steinman), Crawford provides a new twist for his reading. Evoking Heidegger’s image of the constraints of technology, he argues that the utopian presence of technology in some...