Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (review)

Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics, by Laura Otis; pp. x + 210. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, $45.00, £35.00.

Laura Otis's valuable study of medical and literary conceptions of identity proceeds from the intriguing thesis that developments in nineteenth-century cytology and bacteriology both reinforced and were reinforced by concomitant developments in philosophy, psychology, and political theory. The membranes understood as bounding the cell were homologously understood to bound the self, and the nation, ensuring internal integrity and repelling external invasion. Noting that cell membranes were first definitively perceived at the same moment that "the bourgeois ideal of the free, responsible, 'self-contained' individual" became the "model of good health," Otis's book "explores nineteenth-century cell theory and germ theory as a culturally-motivated enclosure movement in scientific, literary, and political writing" (9). This argument is pursued principally through insightful readings of the works of four nineteenth-century "physician authors": American S. Weir Mitchell, Spaniard Santiago Ramotivated enclosure Arthur Conan Doyle, and Austrian Arthur Schnitzler. Grounding these readings in the context of the central currents of Victorian medical discourse, particularly that of bacteriology, Otis's monograph promises to be an influential contribution to the boom industry analyzing the intersection of medicine and culture. Drawing on a wealth of primary source material from her four central figures, including many of her own translations of autobiographical, literary, and medical texts by Cajal and Schnitzler, Otis offers a fascinating window into the lives and works of these authors. Perhaps as a result of this abundance of material on and from the individual authors, however, some connections to broader cultural and political contexts remain less fully explored.

Like Otis's fine earlier study, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1994), Membranes works at the intersection of the history of medicine and literary analysis. Otis lays the ground for this dual focus with an opening chapter reviewing developments in cell biology over the nineteenth century, situating it in the larger context of the age-old debate between germ theory (contagionism) and miasma theory (anti-contagionism), as explanations for the origin and spread of diseases. The chapter focuses particularly on the scientific and political careers of public hygiene campaigner Rudolf Virchow at mid-century, and "microbe hunter" Robert Koch at century's end, to argue convincingly that "[i]n Germany, imperialism and bacteriology coincide to a remarkable degree" (31).

The first "physician author" to come under Otis's lens is S. Weir Mitchell, perhaps best remembered today for the horrific effects of his "rest cure" on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Otis reveals the rigid conceptions of identity and individuality that undergirded both Mitchell's medical theories and his (now largely forgotten) fiction, arguing that "[s]elfhood for Mitchell means fighting despotism, fighting for freedom and for self-control" against corrupting forces both internal and external (55). An insightful reading of Mitchell's use of "unruly mobs and uncontrolled riots to depict the play of unchecked emotions" (56) might have had increased cultural or political purchase by reference either to the mobs that maraud through nineteenth-century fiction, from Barnaby Rudge (1841) to Huckleberry Finn (1884) and beyond, or to the mass migrations and race riots of the Reconstruction American South.

Like Mitchell, Spanish neurobiologist Cajal wrote fictions that "impart his vision of free, independent cells and people, always in communication yet always with boundaries that defined them as individuals" (65). Also like Mitchell, Cajal bases personal identity on an ability to fend off not only biological but also psychological invasion, repeatedly linking "infectious bacteria" with "dangerous suggestions that oppose the voice of reason: philosophical pessimism, religious mysticism, intense emotion, and uncontrolled sexual desire" (74). But writing from the perspective of an empire in decline (particularly following the Spanish-American War), and in the wake of Koch's imperial microbe-hunting, Cajal...