Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T02:27:16.915Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

THE GHOST IN THE CLINIC: GOTHIC MEDICINE AND CURIOUS FICTION IN SAMUEL WARREN'S DIARY OF A LATE PHYSICIAN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2004

Meegan Kennedy
Affiliation:
Harvard University

Extract

IN 1856, WHEN MANY VICTORIAN PHYSICIANS WERE STRUGGLING TO DEFINE A MODEL OF CLINICAL MEDICINE, the reviewer of one collection of case histories voiced his dismay at the physician-author's preference for “dreadful incidents” and “cases exceptional and strange” (“Works” 473). Indeed, although physicians of the clinical era did not disguise their efforts to achieve a new kind of discourse, productive of a “realist” vision, few acknowledge how often the “clinical” case history of the nineteenth century also shares the romantic discourse of the Gothic, especially its interest in the supernatural and the unexplainable and its narrative aim of arousing suspense, horror, and astonishment in the reader. Literary critics have also focused primarily on the association of medical narrative with a realist literary discourse. Nineteenth-century physicians did campaign for the formal, objective, and professional clinical discourse that serves as their contribution to a realist aesthetic, in the process explicitly rejecting eighteenth-century medicine's fascination with “the curious” and its subterranean affiliation with the unknown, the unexplainable, and the subjective. But, as I show in this article, a discourse of “the curious,” allied with a Gothic literary aesthetic, stubbornly remained a critical element of many case histories, though it often presented under the mask of the more acceptable term, “interesting.” The discourse of Gothic romance in the case history provides a narrative frame that, unlike the essentially realist clinical discourse, could make sense of the physician's curious gaze, which had become nearly unrecognizable as a specifically medical vision. Indeed, a “curious” medical discourse haunts even case histories of the high clinical era, late in the century; and it energizes the nineteenth-century Gothic novel. Samuel Warren's novel Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician–deplored in the quotation above–illuminates this tradition of “Gothic medicine” as it plays out in the nineteenth-century novel. This tradition, I argue, provides the novel with a powerful model of cultural contamination and conflict in its yoking of disparate discourses. Gothic medicine demonstrates the importance of clinical medicine to literary romance, and it cannot help but reveal the ghost of “the curious” in the clinic.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barnes Thomas. 1824 Account of William Dempster, Who Swallowed a Table-Knife Nine Inches Long with a Notice of a Similar Case in a Prussian Knife-Eater. Edinburgh: A. Constable,
Bowers Bege K. 1998Samuel Warren.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Eds. Gary Kelly and Edd Applegate. Vol. 190: British Reform Writers, 1832–1914. Detroit: Gale Research, 33438.
Brownrigg William. 1993 The Medical Casebook of William Brownrigg, M.D., F.R.S. (1712–1800) of the Town of Whitehaven in Cumberland. 1712–1800. Trans. Jean E. Ward and Joan Yell. Medical History, Supplement No. 13. Ed. Jean E. Ward and Joan Yell. London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine,
Bulwer-Lytton Edward. “The Critic–No. 11, on Art in Fiction.” Monthly Chronicle: A National Journal of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 1 (1838): 13849.
Chapple Surgeon-Major. 1875Interesting Case of Catalepsy Followed by Epilepsy in a Military Officer.” The Lancet (Jan. 9): 4243.Google Scholar
Clanny William Reid. 1841 A Faithful Record of the Miraculous Case of Mary Jobson. 2d ed Newcastle-upon-Tyne: M. A. Richardson; London: J. R. Smith,
Cox Joseph Mason. 1806 Practical Observations on Insanity; in Which Some Suggestions Are Offered Towards an Improved Mode of Treating Diseases of the Mind, and Some Rules Proposed Which It Is Hoped May Lead to a More Humane and Successful Method of Cure: To Which Are Subjoined, Remarks on Medical Jurisprudence as Connected with Diseased Intellect. London: Baldwin,
Crawford Catherine. 1991A Scientific Profession: Medical Reform and Forensic Medicine in British Periodicals of the Early Nineteenth Century.” British Medicine in an Age of Reform. Ed. Roger French and Andrew Wear. The Wellcome Institute Series in the History of medicine. London: Routledge, 20330.
Dreger Alice Domurat. 1998 Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
Duncan Ian. 1992 Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, and Dickens. Cambridge: U of Cambridge P,
Durston William. 1669An Extract of a Letter Written by the Learned Dr. William Durston, Physitian at Plimouth, to the Right Honorable the Lord Vice-Count Brouncker as President of the R. Society; concerning a very sudden and excessive Swelling of a Womans Breasts.” Philosophical Transactions 4.52 (Oct. 17): 104750.Google Scholar
Durston William. 1669An Extract of a Letter Written to the Publisher from Plymouth Novem. 2 1669, by William Durston Dr. Of Physick; Concerning the Death of the Bigg-Breasted Woman (Discoursed of in Numb. 52.) Together with What Was Thereupon Observed in Her Body.” Philosophical Transactions 4.53 (Nov. 15): 106869.Google Scholar
1850[Editorial on Homeopathy].” Lancet 2 (Aug.10): 179.
Fordyce George. 1793An Attempt to Improve the Evidence of Medicine.” Transactions of a Society for the Improvement of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge. Vol. I. London: Johnson, 24393.
Gould George M., and Walter M. Pyle. 1897 Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine; Being an Encyclopedic Collection of Rare and Extraordinary Cases, and of the Most Striking Instances of Abnormality in All Branches of Medicine and Surgery, Derived from an Exhaustive Research of Medical Literature from Its Origin to the Present Day, Abstracted, Annotated, and Indexed. 1897. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders,
Greenhow H. M.Case of Concussion of the Brain, with Displacement of the Vertebrae.” Lancet 2 (1850): 392.
Holmes Oliver Wendell. 1883The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever.” Medical Essays 1842–1882. 1843. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 10372.
Hughes Winifred. 1980 The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Princeton: Princeton UP,
Kneeland Samuel Jr.On the Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever.” American Journal of Medical Sciences 11 (Jan. 1846): 4563.
Lee Robert. 1842On Puerperal Fever and Crural Phlebitis.” The History, Pathology, and Treatment of Puerperal Fever and Crural Phlebitis. Ed. Charles D. Meigs. Philadelphia: Ed. Barrington & Geo. D. Haswell, 221335.
Liston Robert. 1844A Course of Lectures on the Operations of Surgery and on Disease and Accidents Requiring Operations, Delivered at University College, London, in the Session of 1844: Part II.” Lancet 2 (Dec. 7): 30709.Google Scholar
Logan Peter Melville. 1997 Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose. Berkeley: U of California P,
M.D.[Letter to the Editor].” Lancet 2 (1830): 87879.
Millingen J. G. 1838 Curiosities of Medical Experience. Philadelphia: Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell,
Parker William Rushton. 1899A Menstruating Man: A Curious Form of Hermaphroditism.” British Medical Journal 1 (Feb. 4): 272.Google Scholar
Peterson Mr. Jeanne. 1978 The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London. Berkeley: U of California P,
Poe Edgar Allan. “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” Broadway Journal 2.1 (1845): 17.
Pye-Smith Philip Henry. 1900Medicine as a Science and Medicine as an Art.” Lancet 2 (Aug. 4): 30912.Google Scholar
Removal of a Tumour Fifty-Six Pounds in Weight, Extending from beneath the Umbilicus to the Anterior Border of the Anus.” Lancet 2 (1831): 8689.
Renwick Thomas. 1820 The Continuation of the Narrative of Miss Margaret M'avoy's Case. With General Observations Upon the Case Itself; Upon Her Peculiar Powers of Distinguishing Colours, Reading & C. Through the Medium of Her Fingers. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy,
Renwick Thomas. 1817 A Narrative of the Case of Miss Margaret McAvoy; with an Account of Some Optical Experiments Connected with It. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy,
Richter David. 1996 The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP,
Rothfield Lawrence. 1992 Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth Century Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP,
Samuel Warren.” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 122 (1877): 38190.
Samuel Warren.” Appleton's Journal of Literature, Science, and Art 4 (1870): 49294.
Sandars Joseph. 1817 Hints to Credulity! Or, an Examination of the Pretensions of Miss M. M'avoy, Occasioned by Dr. Renwick's “Narrative” of Her Case. Liverpool, England: J. & J. Smith,
Sayre Lewis Albert. 1863 Remarkable Case of Deception: A Woman Professing to Secrete Nothing but Charcoal and Stones for a Number of Years, All the Natural Functions Being Arrested, and the Deception Unmasked. Albany: Steam Press of C. Van Benthuysen,
[Seccombe Thomas]. 1899Warren, Samuel.” Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. Sidney Lee. Vol. 59. New York: Macmillan, 42326.
Small Helen. 1996 Love's Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865. Oxford: Clarendon,
Stafford Barbara Maria. 1994 Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment, and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge: MIT Press,
Stillé Alfred. 1848 Elements of General Pathology. Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston,
Warren John Harley. 1991The Idea of Science in English Medicine: The ‘Decline of Science’ and the Rhetoric of Reform, 1815–45.” British Medicine in an Age of Reform. Ed. Roger French and Andrew Wear. The Wellcome Institute Series in the History of medicine. London: Routledge, 13664.
Warren John Harley. 1986 The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820–1885. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
Warren Samuel. 1871Introduction.” Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician. 1832 Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, xixii.
Warren Samuel. 1844 Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician. 1830–37. 2 vols. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz,
Warren Samuel.” 1936 British Authors of the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Stanley J. Kunitz. Wilson Authors Series. New York: H. W. Wilson, 645.
Winslow Forbes. 1860 On Obscure Diseases of the Brain, and Disorders of the Mind: Their Incipient Symptoms, Pathology, Diagnosis, Treatment, and Prophylaxis. London: John Churchill, 1860. Philadelphia: Blanchard & Lea,
1856The Works of Samuel Warren, D.C.L., F.R.S [Review].” London Quarterly Review 5 (Jan.): 46480.