2 - From John Stuart Mill to the Medical Humanities

Summary

In chapter one, I promised to address the question of how Schiller's Romantic hypothesis that aesthetic education could cure a particular form of modern alienation would become the belief that literature and its tools could heal any sort of personal fracture. The answer has a lot to do with John Stuart Mill. A Victorian critic writing at the tail end of Romanticism and through the ascendance of scientific positivism, Mill inherited Schiller's complaint that modern society's mechanistic, specialized ways threatened the healthy unity of individuals. His effort to find a solution to this problem influenced his revision of utilitarianism, which stressed the ‘need of the individual citizen to cultivate the harmonious development of his own personality’. Mill's Schillerian conclusion that education in the arts could preserve healthy individuality deeply shaped liberalism, a belief system whose tenets still motivate the contemporary academy. At the same time, Mill's personal history gave a peculiar shape to his conclusions. The bout of despair that first led Mill to question utilitarian reasoning was cured by his reading of Wordsworth's poetry. The experience convinced him of art's necessity to human wellbeing. Mill's version of liberalism was thus irrevocably coupled to a personal faith in the healing power of poetry. His understandable conflation of these two principles—art cultivates individuals and poetry heals—had profound consequences. Mill transformed Schiller's vision of art as balm for a fractured age into a working political philosophy. Moreover, his personal experiences helped position poetry, in its wider sense as ‘literature’, as the art best suited to the task of healing persons and society. With these moves, Mill gave final form to therapeutic holism. By finessing Schiller's claims about art to address poetry specifically, and by tying them to a Romantic celebration of the whole person, Mill paved the way for therapeutic holism to be recovered by twentieth-century health humanists as the discursive rationale for why medicine needs literature.

It is unknown to what extent Mill was directly familiar with Schiller; his collected works contain few clear references. However, it is clear that Mill accessed Schiller's ideas in his extensive reading of Schiller's British acolytes, Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle, and Schiller's contemporary and close friend Wilhelm von Humboldt. Carlyle's Life of Schiller came out in 1818, when Mill was 12, while Coleridge's oeuvre, with its debts to German idealism, was a touchstone for most of Mill's writing life.