Nervous Conditions: Science and the Body Politic in Early Industrial Britain (review)

The main focus of this book is on the nervous disorders that appear to have afflicted so many natural philosophers in the early decades of the nineteenth century. It also deals more generally with the way in which men of science sought to comprehend and manage extreme and aberrant mental phenomena. Thus there are chapters on the color blindness of, inter alia, John Dalton; on those who suffered from optical spectra and hemiopsy; and on the sensory illusions and hallucinations recorded by other scientists of the period.

It is Elizabeth Musselman's contention that a study of these matters provides access to a range of issues with which early nineteenth-century natural philosophers felt obliged to wrestle. She argues, in particular, that the way in which British scientists sought to comprehend and deal with these abnormalities paralleled their ambition to present themselves as a group capable of managing the key problems of an emergent industrial society. Within this context, the body of the natural philosopher became a potent metaphor for the body politic. The scientist's ability to master his own nervous processes and to transform any abnormalities he experienced into a fruitful subject for scientific inquiry provided a model for how scientific expertise might be employed for the good of the community. Or, as the author puts it: "Cleverly, natural philosophers learned to package their nervous struggles as a kind of pilgrim's progress that imbued them with more, not less, authority to manage their nation's problems" (p. 51).

A problem that particularly exercised these philosophers was the tensions between center and periphery that beset early nineteenth-century Britain. This was a concern within the scientific community itself: how were the autonomy and special competences of the numerous provincial natural philosophical societies to be reconciled with the hegemonic authority increasingly asserted by metropolitan science? But the question was also writ large in the struggles of central government with a plethora of often obdurate and uncooperative local authorities fiercely protective of their own prerogatives. By Musselman's account, one reason that color blindness was the object of so much attention during this period was that it served as metaphor for such provincialism: it represented a partiality of vision comparable to that presented by those who failed to see how local interests needed to be integrated into and subordinated to the greater good. The success of a provincial natural philosopher such as Dalton in mastering his own color blindness and becoming a contributing member of the national scientific community limned a strategy for resolving these conflicts: if natural philosophers could manage the problems of subjectivity and localism posed by color blindness, "by extension . . . they could manage other issues as well" (p. 68).

More generally, British natural philosophers in the first half of the nineteenth century assumed a managerial pose modeled upon the assumptions and procedures of the factory boss. This strategy was exemplified by George Airy's administration of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Airy and his like no longer sought to transcend human observational imperfections; instead, they sought to manage these sources of inefficiency in an optimal fashion.

The kinds of connections between research agendas and wider social and political programs that Musselman seeks to establish are, by their nature, a matter of inference and not amenable to demonstration. Her book is, however, a stimulating contribution to a growing literature that seeks to insist on the importance of the scientific flesh—with all its attendant weaknesses—as a legitimate focus of historical enquiry.