Bodily and Narrative Forms: The Influence of Medicine on American Literature, 1845-1915 (review)

Cynthia J. Davis. Bodily and Narrative Forms: The Influence of Medicine on American Literature, 1845-1915. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. viii + 272 pp. Clothbound, $49.50.

Cynthia J. Davis's Bodily and Narrative Forms: The Influence of Medicine on American Literature is an exciting book and an important contribution to the field of literature and medicine. Offering nuanced, informed readings of novels by a wide range of authors, Davis's study is important both for its fresh, original commentary on individual U.S. authors and for the larger questions about form--human and literary--that it examines. As Davis explains in her introduction, during the second half of the nineteenth century, a variety of "medical and scientific constructions of embodied identity were put forward" (p. 1). Her goal, and she achieves it, is to limn how these constructs have been translated and transformed in literature.

In considering the relationship between literary forms and medical discourse, Davis's project is akin to two important works in the field--Lawrence Rothfield's Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1992) and T. Hugh Crawford's Modernism, Medicine, and William Carlos Williams (1993). Rothfield's study examines the relationship between realism and clinical medicine, suggesting that realism's unified subject is grounded in clinical medicine's notion of the physical body as a bounded, coherent, organic whole, and that clinical exactitude served as a model for realist mimesis. Crawford's study of William Carlos Williams finds the tropes of early twentieth-century medicine in the poet's modernist concern with clarity and cleanliness, two ideals that became central in medical discourse with the acceptance of germ theory and the increased use of microscopes. The formal experiments of modernism were also responsive to developments in pathology, in which bits and pieces, disease and disorder seem more telling than orderly narratives and whole, healthy bodies.

Davis's contribution to the history of literary form and medicine lies in her astute analysis of sentimentalism. As she notes, although sympathy was defined as a feminine art and science and realism as masculine endeavors, the boundary between science and sentiment was more porous than is commonly recognized. Although women wrote most of the sentimental literature of the day, and women physicians touted their talent for sympathy, some female physicians boldly embraced science, and many male physicians valued sympathy. As John Harley Warner has shown, physicians were wary of being viewed as mad clinicians more inclined to observe and dissect than heal, and those who studied in Paris insisted that although they learned much in the clinics, their primary concern was bedside care. The role of sympathy is also evident, according to Davis, in the American Medical Association's first code of ethics. Here, a youthful profession announces its commitment to "tenderness and firmness," to balancing authority with offerings of "hope and comfort" (pp. 22-23). The physician must, according to the code, be prepared to "smooth the bed" and "counteract the depressing influence" of illness (p. 23).

Sympathy also plays a role in Oliver Wendell Holmes's "medicated" novel Elsie Venner. For the most part, the novel champions a disembodied, masculine medicine that has the power and authority necessary to tame a dangerous, snakelike young woman. But, as Davis points out, the physician's "formidable" visual power is not only a cold gaze. He also looks kindly into the eyes of Elsie and other "unsought women" who are "oppressed with the burden of an inner life unshared" (p. 41). Given Holmes's dabbling in the elements of sentimentalism, one might expect a romance to develop between the wild young woman and the young physician in town. Certainly other writers have exploited the latent intimacy in the doctor-patient relationship. But in Holmes's novel, sympathy serves science and not romance or melodrama. A doctor may cry (as one does at the end of the novel...