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Criticism 44.1 (2002) 77-80



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Book Review

British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind


British Romanticism and the Science of Mind by Alan Richardson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xx + 243. $55.00 cloth. [End Page 76]

 

By putting old doctrines in new ways, and using, in their exposition, more recent terms, we may deceive ourselves into the belief that we are saying something fundamentally original.

John Hughlings Jackson, Selected Writings
(New York: Basic Books, 1958), II, 7.

Richardson's is a book of so many virtues that it is difficult to know what to praise first. I would feel presumptuous in attempting to review it were it not for the fact that I have myself twice made brief forays onto similar ground, and can therefore judge, by the superiority of Richardson's achievements to my own earlier efforts, how much this author has accomplished. (See my "Contribution of Neurology to the Scepticism of Alfred de Vigny," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences IX [July, 1954], 329-48, as well as The Uncreating Word: Romanticism and the Object [Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1970], pp. 14-19). One also recognizes the scope and vigor of the work when one sets it beside another on a related topic, Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England, by Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2001). By comparison, the latter seems almost devoid of informing concepts, and lacking in any theoretical framework. Jane Wood's Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), is in some respects a complementary work to Richardson's: it attempts a survey something like Richardson's for the later nineteenth century, but it is largely concerned with gender issues, and it pays less attention to the philosophical principles underlying the medical issues than does Richardson. For the amateur in psychoneurology, perhaps the most striking feature of the book is the easy familiarity that it demonstrates with the work of major authors in modern neuroscience and cognitive linguistics: Hobson, Damasio, Flanagan, Lakoff, Pinker, Varela, among many others in a list that stretches back to Donald Hebb and beyond. Such knowledge lifts the work out of the parochial realm of period studies into that wider historical arena in which recurrent intellectual themes are seen in action, as they revise their antecedents and prepare the way for their successors.

British Romanticism and the Science of Mind is crammed with interesting background information, much of it not usually noticed by the student of literary romanticism. A profusion of odd and unusual, one might almost say delicious, details make the book fun to read, despite its density of reference: Erasmus Darwin traces the smile to the relaxation of the infant's mouth after nursing (153); Coleridge speaks of a "sort of stomach sensation attached to all my thoughts" (62); Charles Bell finds in the "expressions, attitudes, and movements of the human figure" a universal "grammar" for the fine arts (77); La Mettrie wonders how intellectual excitement was transformed into a physical "fever" (128); Franz Joseph Gall is excommunicated (69). There is a long [End Page 77] and interesting section on the powers of extra-linguistic reasoning evinced by someone born deaf and blind (James Mitchell; 154-58), a detailed account of Keats's exposure, as a medical student, to the most advanced neuroscience of his day (114-24), and the hilarious tale of (later "Sir") Humphry Davy's experiments with the mind-altering effects of nitrous oxide, in which he had one subject capering about the room, Mrs. Beddoes levitating, and Coleridge beating the ground with his feet (51-52). There is also a series of striking anatomical plates from the neurological works of the day interspersed throughout the text. Those who may be inclined to dismiss these illustrations of the brain, with their numbered areas, as obsolete curiosities, should notice that they bear a strong family resemblance to the brain map of Korbinian Brodmann (1868-1918), also with its numbered areas, which...

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