La Fibre littéraire: Le discourse médical sur la lecture au XVIIIe siècle (review)

For some time, historians have traced the outlines of a process of medicalization that, from the eighteenth century forward, established the centrality of medicine in the modern world. Alexandre Wenger enriches the study of medicalization by focusing on the role of physicians in assessing and guiding the increasingly widespread practice of reading. The work under review effects a juncture between the history of reading that has unfolded since the 1970s and the social history of medicine that has explored the efforts of Enlightenment medical men to extend their authority into new domains of social and cultural life.

Wenger's work addresses nine "ensembles of questions" about the medical discourse of reading: (1) the representation of reading in medical treatises; (2) the effects of reading, including its hygienic and prophylactic potential; (3) the concepts mobilized by physicians, especially the concept of the imagination, in assessing the effects of reading; (4) the different impact of reading on women and men; (5) the "pathologies of reading" (p. 171), including the visual and digestive ills brought on by excessive study; (6) the role of reading in creating "pathologies of civilization" (p. 205; onanism, effeminization); (7) the literary "strategies" (p. 227) medical men employed to exert a powerful effect over their readers, especially the use of frightening or seductive "tableaux" (p. 238) and "medical fictions" (p. 247); (8) the relations between medical writing and libertine texts; and (9) the boost given by the physician's guardianship of reading to the status of the profession.

Some of the material covered in this work is fairly well known, especially that concerning the presumed perils of the imagination, the medical troubles of hommes de lettres, and the connection between the reading of amorous fictions and masturbation. On the other hand, Wenger's handling of some themes is original and provocative. He builds a subtle and persuasive case for widespread concern with the physiology of reading, its corporal—as opposed to strictly intellectual or moral—effects. Similarly impressive is his examination, based on a sophisticated knowledge of rhetoric, of the literary techniques medical men used to sway their audiences. His analysis of the medical "tableau," the vivid word-picture intended to shock readers out of bad habits, gives new depth to our understanding of the faith eighteenth-century medical men put in the striking case study.

Historians of medicine may be disappointed at Wenger's somewhat superficial knowledge of medical controversies of the period. I find unsatisfying his insistence on the special importance of the discourse of "fibers," given that fibers were only one construct—in company with nerves but especially with the diffuse, unlocalized sensibility so prominent in late Enlightenment medicine—mobilized by eighteenth-century physicians to articulate the physiological effects of activities situated at the physical–moral divide. Wenger's privileging of the fibrillar is symptomatic of a larger failure to sort out competing medical perspectives and their differing sociocultural implications. "Fiber" was chiefly a mechanist construct, and although Wenger recognizes that in France mechanist physiology was largely superseded by vitalist physiology in this period, he blurs distinctions between the two. Were this purely a matter of doctrinal identification, it would cause little concern, but Wenger's inattention to the content rather than the form of medical argumentation results in some one-sided conclusions about the social and cultural impact of medical interventions on subjects such as reading and its moral effects. Wenger aligns medical men with secularizing, antimoralizing, and even subversive trends, especially in linking the physician to the libertine. Certainly the work of some medical men contributed to these currents, but that of others, especially the vitalist physicians whose importance Wenger alludes to but does not explore, was conservative, even reactionary, in impact. This was markedly true of vitalist teaching on the fixed capacities of distinct physiological "types" such as those formed...