Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle

Notes

157 Notes Introduction: False Professions Epigraphs: William H. Helfand, Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera and Books (New York: Grolier, 2002), 11; “The Profession and Its Dignity,” Lancet, March 27, 1858, 318–19. 1. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York: Random House, 1943), 160 (chap. 20). 2. Richard Quain, “History and Progress of Medicine,” British Medical Journal , October 24, 1885, 775. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 776. 5. Ibid., 780. 6. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 5. 7. Ibid., 21. 8. Roger Cooter, introduction to Studies in the History of Alternative Medicine, ed. Roger Cooter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), xiv. Similarly, Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz explore nineteenth-century movements within the mainstream that celebrate a holistic approach to the body, ranging from the Arts and Crafts movement to the work of William Osler in “Medical Holism: The Context,” in Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920–1950, ed. Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4, 11. James Bradley and Marguerite Dupree describe hydropathy’s overlap with orthodoxy in its qualified practitioners and in its theoretical understanding of disease in “A Shadow of Orthodoxy? An Epistemology of British Hydropathy, 1840–1858,” Medical History 47 (2003): 173–94. 9. Lilian R. Furst, ed., Medical Progress and Social Reality: A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Medicine and Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 4, 21. Similarly, Solomon Posen reads literary doctors as scientific and prestigious “during different periods,” a role that “seem[s] unaffected by time, place or the changing social status of medical practitioners.” This figure is “usually a male, tends to be arrogant and paternalistic. He is a man of action rather than contemplations. He works hard but he is not a good family man. He is aggressively irreligious, though he has his own ethical standards.” Posen, The Doctor in Literature: Satisfaction or Resentment? (Oxford: Radcliffe, 2005), 2–3. What, then, are we to make of surgeon Carter’s situation and Quain’s complaints about medicine’s poor status and rampant quackery? 158 R Notes to Pages 5–8 10. Quain, “History and Progress,” 776–77. 11. Additionally, as Roy Porter notes, quackery is particularly difficult to identify given the widespread use of the word and our inability to evaluate competence and integrity at a distance, leaving us in danger of “becoming waylaid with superficial characteristics.” Porter, “Before the Fringe: ‘Quackery’ and the Eighteenth-Century Medical Market,” in Studies in the History of Alternative Medicine, ed. Roger Cooter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 2. 12. As Mary E. Fissell notes, there is a “tendency in cultural history toward fetishizing the marginal.” Fissell, “Making Meaning from the Margins: The New Cultural History of Medicine,” in Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meaning, ed. Frank Husman and John Harley Warner (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 364. I hope to show that quackery is not about fringe practices but central to the understanding of orthodoxy itself. 13. Edward Schiappa, Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 7. Similarly, Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Golden argue that “a disease does not exist as a social phenomenon until we agree that it does—until it is named.” Rosenberg and Golden, introduction to Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, ed. Rosenberg and Golden (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), xiii. 14. Schiappa, Defining Reality, 82. 15. Thomas F. Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1. 16. Ibid., 13. According to Gieryn, there are three types of contest: expulsion (seeking to banish an incompatible authority), expansion (seeking authority in a field in which one was not an authority previously), and autonomy (claiming science’s superiority to and independence from other activities such as commerce or politics) (Cultural Boundaries of Science, 16–18). 17. Ibid., 27. 18. Ibid., 3. W. F. Bynum examines the role of science in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and argues that science mattered a great deal, even if it sometimes was ignored by individual doctors and despite the persistence of unscientific practices. Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 219. Christopher Lawrence argues that the medical elite capitalized on science’s prestige to bring the profession “in line with the rest of the Victorian establishment...