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

Nervous Conditions contributes to a certain tendency in the cultural history of medicine that explores the role of the body in the life of the mind, especially as it has been lived by men of science and letters. Ever since Bruce Haley's seminal work, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (1978), historians have had few reasons to discount either the premium placed on physical and mental health in nineteenth-century Britain or difficulty many elites had in achieving it. As Musselman rightly suggests, the latter emphasis is especially important given the masculinist way in which science has been imagined in the West. By revealing how the facts of corporeal experience have continued to haunt and disrupt the projections of disembodiment that so often accompany the presumed "masculinity" of intellectual work, this scholarship helps us to understand the discontinuous nature of male identities.

By focusing on British science from the late eighteenth century through the 1860s, Musselman traces the rising status of science as society was transformed during this period. By drawing upon a wide range of natural philosophers, including Charles Babbage, John Herschel, John Dalton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Francis Galton, Musselman shows how the way these men described their relationship to their own illnesses resonated on personal, professional, and political levels. For all of them, victory over weakness invariably appeared as proof of the rational and managing mind over the unreliability of the body. Of course masculinity played a central role in these narratives, but so too did the tension between provincialism and metropolitanism, the growing tendency to imagine the private body and the body politic as machines, and the need to promote Anglicanism as a "rational faith" that avoided the eccentricities of sectarianism.

In the first two chapters, Musselman acquaints the reader with the historical circumstances and social hierarchies that inflected natural philosophy and the assumptions about the body and mind that attended it. By the Victorian era the division of labor that structured industrial production was extended to the scientific enterprise, not least because of the potential unreliability of the senses as a basis for knowledge. To the extent that too much observing often taxed the body, most natural philosophers subscribed to what Musselman calls an "inductive hierarchy" that relegated the more mundane and less prestigious tasks of fact collecting to machines and less educated people while they themselves oversaw the process and constructed theories and models. Natural philosophers thus took over the role of managers because the "foot soldiers of inductivism—the body, the observers—did not always behave as they should" (36). This, as Musselman shows, is how "natural philosophy, one of the cornerstones of modern science, rooted its power in its greatest source of vulnerability" (19).

These opening chapters are followed by three case studies examining nerve-related disorders that affected vision, which in the modern West has often been considered the noblest sense. Chapter 3 shows how color blindness, which was viewed as a result of a "coarse" sensibility, was repeatedly used as a metaphor for the very provincial attitudes that were at odds with the more metropolitan and standardizing agenda of most natural philosophers. It was even implicated in religious sects like Quakerism, which were viewed as "provincial" exceptions to the Anglican mainstream. Dalton was a key example of a natural philosopher who, at once color-blind and a Quaker, was celebrated for his ability to overcome these localized limitations through the power of his mind. His triumph became an example for some of how the nation itself might become reorganized along metropolitan lines without succumbing to purely local perspectives.

Chapter 4 shifts the focus to the nervous condition called hemiopsy, a visual disorder that posed further challenges to natural philosophers. Closely associated with mental fatigue, hemiopsy produced blind spots and geometric shapes in the visual fields of its sufferers. Musselman shows how discussions about hemiopsy were framed with reference to concerns about...