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Medicine (Victorian Literature)

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. The 19th century saw enormous demands on the field of medical inquiry. That period saw urban development and international travel bring medicine face-to-face with new and exhausting pressures. Towns and cities may have been awash with disease, death, and primitive medical practice, but, in the period’s scientific literature, doctors perceived themselves to be meeting such pressures with inventive and ground-breaking discoveries that had wide-reaching impacts. These developments understandably had an impression on the shape and quality of the period’s fiction: many fictional productions of the Victorian era featured ideas and influences from the world of medicine. Although the history of medicine is a venerable and bewilderingly large area of research, critical combinations of medicine and literature form part of a relatively new field of interdisciplinary analysis. This entry is primarily focused on works that combine history of clinical science with literary analysis, but historical works that either touch upon literary issues and/or are central to exploring relevant avenues are also included.
  4.  
  5. General Overviews
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  7. In keeping with the period’s penchant for labeling and compartmentalizing things, Victorian medicine expanded and ramified rapidly. At the start of the 19th century general practitioners would find themselves treating a massive range of ills and disorders but by the fin de siècle, and in response to urban migration among other pressures, medical expertise had divided itself into number of “-ologies” including gynecology, psychology, neurology, cardiology, and so on. Trying to understand the history of medicine in the 19th century is a perplexing experience; there are hundreds of strands that, quite feasibly, one could spend a lifetime investigating. Caldwell 2004 offers a useful account of the similarities between medical and fictional narratives in the 19th century, but before considering an interdisciplinary study of literature and medicine, it helps to consider a number of volumes that outline the era’s major medical developments in a succinct and accessible way. A good starting point is the Brought to Life website. The best book of this nature is Porter 1997, though Porter 1996, Porter 2001, and Porter 2002 are undoubtedly helpful. Duffin 2000 and Duin and Sutcliffe 1992 also provide strong and useful introductions to the history of medicine.
  8.  
  9. Brought to Life: Exploring the History of Medicine.
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  11. An excellent starting point for new students of the history of medicine. The website is divided into themes and topics, people, objects, and techniques and technologies, and it also offers a comprehensive timeline.
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  13. Caldwell, Janis McLarren. Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Medicine: from Mary Shelley to George Eliot. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
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  15. A study that cleverly demonstrates the common methods of empiricist research utilized by 19th-century doctors and writers of fiction.
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  17. Duffin, Jacalyn, History of Medicine: A Scandalously Short Introduction. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
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  19. Arranged into studies of different forms of medical discovery, this book offers a history of clinical practice as a research discipline.
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  21. Duin, Nancy, and Jenny Sutcliffe. A History of Medicine: From Prehistory to the Year 2020. London and New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
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  23. A rather expensive, yet useful, single-volume account of the history of medicine. Duin and Sutcliffe demonstrate how many of today’s medical marvels are based on “the first fumblings for knowledge of the witch doctors and shamans of pre-history.”
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  25. Porter, Roy, ed. The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
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  27. An accessible and well-balanced collection of essays. Covering a wide range of important issues, such as disease, madness, and drugs, this book offers an excellent starting point for the historian of medicine.
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  29. Porter, Roy. “The Greatest Benefit to Mankind”: A Medical History of Humanity. London: Harper Collins, 1997.
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  31. An admirable and encyclopedic history of medicine, ranging from prehistoric times to the contemporary period. Concentrates on how medicine has responded to certain pressures (mainly devastating diseases) throughout the ages.
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  33. Porter, Roy. Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and the Doctors in Britain, 1650–1914. London: Reaktion, 2001.
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  35. In this book Porter ambitiously demonstrates how the body—as a medical subject to disease, disability or pain—has been central to human understanding of “all meaning” from 1700 to 2000.
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  37. Porter, Roy. Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine. London: Penguin, 2002.
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  39. Based largely on the contents of Porter 1997, this book offers a short and engaging introduction to the history of medicine.
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  41. Anatomy
  42.  
  43. From the 1830s onward, anatomy was one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of medical science, despite a number of controversies that damaged its reputation (see below). The 19th century saw great advances in the technology of printing, most significantly in the development of chromolithography, a process that allowed the use of full color. “These permitted an even greater diffusion of images and texts, making single books and prints available not simply at the level of the school or the professor, but also that of the classroom, student, and practitioner” (Sharp 2008). The most famous and successful contribution to the field was made by Henry Gray with Gray’s Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical (Gray 1974); Richardson 2008 offers an account of the book’s history and historical context. Two good starting points for new students are The Morbid Anatomy Blog and Sharp 2008. Good accounts of the history of anatomical drawing may be found in Kemp and Wallace 2000 and Rifkin, et al. 2006, while Maulitz 1987 offers a good interpretation of the rise of anatomical pathology.
  44.  
  45. Gray, Henry. Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical. Edited by T. Pickering Pick and Robert Howden. Philadelphia: Running Press, 1974.
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  47. Known more popularly as Gray’s Anatomy, this book has not been out of print since it was first published in London in 1858. Because it is still used to teach anatomy, it is available in a number of forms, but this version is a good facsimile of the first edition from 1858 (despite the title page’s erroneous reference to the textbook as an “American classic”).
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  49. Kemp, Martin, and Marina Wallace. Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body, from Leonardo to Now. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000.
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  51. Based on exhibitions at London’s Hayward Gallery, this book is a “315-object exhibition catalogue of anatomical drawings, wax models, medical charts, instruments, prints, photos, video stills, and … preserved body parts.”
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  53. Maulitz, Russell C. Morbid Appearances: The Anatomy of Pathology in the Early Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
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  55. Concentrates on the history of anatomical pathology in early-19th-century England and France.
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  57. The Morbid Anatomy Blog.
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  59. An excellent resource, containing news of anatomical exhibitions, advances in history of anatomy research, and links to other websites.
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  61. Richardson, Ruth. The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy: Bodies, Books, Fortune, Fame. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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  63. An engaging and accessible account of the history of Henry Gray’s famous textbook (Gray 1974). This monograph is also useful for understanding the rise of anatomical medicine in the 19th century.
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  65. Rifkin, Benjamin A., Michael J. Ackerman, and Judith Folkenberg. Human Anatomy: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006.
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  67. A comprehensive and lavishly illustrated history of anatomical drawings.
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  69. Sharp, Hal. A Brief History of Anatomical Drawing. 2008.
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  71. A short, engaging, and well-illustrated account of the history of anatomical drawings. Ranges from Aristotle to 20th century wall charts.
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  73. Bodies in Literature
  74.  
  75. Interdisciplinary research into the connections between the history of anatomy and literature is a relatively new area of analysis that is attracting increasing amounts of attention. The best study of medicine and realism is Rothfield 1994; on the other side of the coin Talairach-Vielmas 2009 demonstrates the links between gothicism, sensation fiction, and clinical discourse. Thomas 2000, meanwhile, explores the fascinating links between forensic science and detective fiction, and Allard 2007 and Blair 2006 offer excellent readings of Victorian poetry through the lens of medical contextualization. Klaver 2009 and Mangham 2010 are studies that combine the history of “viewing bodies” with literary criticism. The most comprehensive and varied of these is Klaver 2009, which extends to other forms of art as well.
  76.  
  77. Allard, James Robert. Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.
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  79. This book actually concentrates on the “Romantic Century” (1750–1850) and aims to study shared understandings of medicine and poetry.
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  81. Blair, Kirstie. Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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  83. A study of Victorian poetry within the context of contemporaneous developments in cardiology. Innovatively argued and energetically written.
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  85. Klaver, Elizabeth, ed. The Body in Medical Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009.
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  87. Wide-ranging and fascinating collection of essays on the links between art and medicine.
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  89. Mangham, Andrew. “The Science of an Ending: Pickwick’s Interpolated Tales and the Examination of Suicide.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 10 (2010).
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  91. Concentrating on Dickens, this essay considers the value of literary analysis when linked to phenomenological and historicist approaches to 19th-century anatomy.
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  93. Rothfield, Lawrence. Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
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  95. A convincing linking of medical epistemology with the realism of a range of authors including George Eliot and Arthur Conan Doyle.
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  97. Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. Wilkie Collins, Medicine, and the Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009.
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  99. A study of the anatomical context of Wilkie Collins’s novels from Basil to The Legacy of Cain.
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  101. Thomas, Ronald R. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  103. A book about the links between the rise of the detective genre and its links to concurrent developments in the world of forensic medicine. Covers a range of authors including Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
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  105. Doctors and Surgeons
  106.  
  107. When Queen Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837, practitioners of medicine were enjoying new prestige and dominance. As urban population figures soared, so too did the demand for skilled therapeutic care. Society invested greater meaning and significance onto the medical professional but it also remained ambivalent about some of his more experimental practices. The year 1865 saw the qualification of England’s first female doctor, Elizabeth Garrett (later Garrett Anderson). Shorter 1991 supplies the best historical account of the rise of the modern medical professional while Poovey 1988 offers an excellent reading of the ideological significance of professionalizing medicine. Sparks 2009 provides an analysis of the representation of the doctor in Victorian fiction. For biographies of Garrett and the history of female medics, Manton 1987 and Fancourt 1965 are recommended.
  108.  
  109. Fancourt, M. St. John. They Dared to Be Doctors: Elizabeth Blackwell and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. London: Longman, 1965.
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  111. In 1859 Elizabeth Garrett met the first American female doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell, and decided to follow her footsteps to become the first British female practitioner of medicine. This book offers the story of both women’s battle to become accepted by the medical community.
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  113. Manton, Jo. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. London: Methuen, 1987.
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  115. The best available biography of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.
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  117. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
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  119. Not entirely confined to medicine, this superb, inspiring study has chapters on nursing and on the introduction of anesthetics in the mid-Victorian era.
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  121. Shorter, Edward. Doctors and their Patients: A Social History. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1991.
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  123. A thorough and valuable account of the history of the doctor. Gives specific emphasis to the demands of the patient/doctor relationship.
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  125. Sparks, Tabitha. The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009.
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  127. A study of how the representation of doctors in the Victorian novel impacted on the portrayal of families in a wide range of genres.
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  129. Nursing
  130.  
  131. Alongside the prestige of the medical professions, nurses and midwives developed new prominence and expertise as the 19th century progressed. The most famous, of course, was Florence Nightingale, who rose to prominence during the Crimean War, but the lesser-known Mary Seacole also succeeded in nursing soldiers through the same conflict. Prior to Nightingale’s interventions and the publication of her landmark Notes on Nursing in 1859, nurses were viewed as rather dubious creatures, as is exemplified in Charles Dickens’s portrait of the drunken Sarah Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844). For strong histories of nursing, see Hawkins 2010, Judd 1998, Lane 2001, and Moore 1988. Good resources may also be found on the UK Centre for the History of Nursing and Midwifery website. Robinson 2005 gives a solid account of the life of Mary Seacole, as does Seacole herself in her autobiography (Seacole 2005).
  132.  
  133. Hawkins, Sue. Nursing and Women’s Labour in the Nineteenth Century. London: Routledge, 2010.
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  135. Dissenting from scholarly preoccupations with Florence Nightingale, this book concentrates on female nursing as manual labor practiced by working-class women.
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  137. Judd, Catherine. Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1840–1880. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.
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  139. This text explores the image, icon, and cultural significance of the nurse in mid-Victorian literature and history. It illustrates how perceptions of the nurse allowed people to open discussions into broader issues such as class, gender, and race.
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  141. Lane, Joan. A Social History of Medicine: Health, Healing, and Disease in England, 1750–1950. London: Routledge, 2001.
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  143. Covers medicine in general from the Enlightenment to the formation and running of the British National Health System. Chapter 7 focuses specifically and convincingly on the history of nursing and midwifery.
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  145. Moore, Judith. A Zeal for Responsibility: Struggle for Professional Nursing in Victorian England, 1868–1883. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988.
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  147. This monograph concentrates on the professionalization of medicine in the 19th century, paying particular attention to the links and disagreements with predominantly-male disciplines such as surgery.
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  149. Robinson, Jane. Mary Seacole: The Charismatic Black Nurse Who Became a Heroine of the Crimea. London: Constable, 2005.
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  151. An account of the heroic nurse whose story has been somewhat overshadowed by Florence Nightingale.
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  153. Seacole, Mary. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. Edited by Sara Salih. London: Penguin, 2005.
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  155. Originally written in 1857, this is Seacole’s own account of her nursing “adventures.” Unlike Florence Nightingale, Seacole died in obscurity, even after winning a medal for her brave and tireless work in the Crimea. This is an excellent annotated edition of her autobiography.
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  157. The UK Centre for the History of Nursing and Midwifery.
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  159. This website features a number of online articles about the history of nursing and midwifery.
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  161. Florence Nightingale
  162.  
  163. The most famous of all nurses, Nightingale, the proverbial “Lady with the Lamp” became a distinguished figure during and after her own lifetime. She entered the public eye following her tireless campaigns for cleanliness, order, and compassion during the Crimean War and almost single-handedly revolutionized the nursing profession. Nightingale founded a nursing school at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London in 1860, and she wrote the seminal textbook Notes on Nursing (originally published in 1859; see Nightingale 2010). The best biography of Nightingale is Bostridge 2009, while other readable and valuable accounts may be found in McDonald 2010 and Small 1999. A good starting point for all new scholars in the area is the Florence Nightingale Museum website.
  164.  
  165. Bostridge, Mark. Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend. London: Penguin, 2009.
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  167. The most in-depth of Nightingale biographies. This book concentrates on the nurse’s life and career before and after the Crimean War. Bostridge makes a convincing case for appreciating Nightingale as an intellectual and as a powerful presence in British history.
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  169. Florence Nightingale Museum.
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  171. Good starting point for all new scholars interested in the story and achievements of Nightingale. The website includes sections on the Crimea, Mary Seacole, and a broader overview of the Victorians.
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  173. McDonald, Lynn. Florence Nightingale at First Hand. London: Continuum, 2010.
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  175. A succinct and compelling account of the biography of Nightingale based on the nurse’s own correspondence.
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  177. Nightingale, Florence. Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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  179. This is an excellent edition of one of the most important texts in nursing history, first published in 1859. Nightingale’s book will disappoint any reader consulting it for impassioned moments of proto-feminism, but it will, nonetheless, highlight Nightingale’s commitment to the subject and her well-judged preoccupation with hospital sanitation.
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  181. Small, Hugh. Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel. London: Constable, 1999.
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  183. An account of the actions of Nightingale during the Crimea and the nurse’s larger commitments to sanitation and the nursing profession.
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  185. Illness
  186.  
  187. Illness was an important aspect of 19th-century living. Despite the perceived success of medical professionals, relatively little could be done to alleviate many debilitating disorders and, worse still, devastating epidemics. Kiple 1993 offers the most detailed account of the history of disease in the 19th century (among other periods). Gilbert 2008 and Sontag 1979, best read together because the former is a historicist approach while the latter is a work of cultural philosophy, analyze the wider sociological implications of disease as concept and metaphor. Because illness was so central to British identity in the Victorian period, disease and other forms of sickness loom large in its novels. Bailin 1994, Cox 2008, Gilbert 1997, Lawlor 2006, and Vrettos 1995 all discuss the centrality of sickness in fiction.
  188.  
  189. Bailin, Miriam. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
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  191. Excellent introduction to the theme of sickness in Viction fiction. Bailin argues that the sickroom functions as “an imagined retreat from conflicts in Victorian society, and that fictional representations of illness serve to resolve both social conflict and aesthetic tension.”
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  193. Cox, Jessica. “A Touch of In’nard Fever: Illness and Moral Decline in Elster’s Folly.” Women’s Writing, 15.2 (2008): 232–243.
  194. DOI: 10.1080/09699080802173764Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  195. This article concentrates on a novel by Ellen Wood and argues that the author’s unique brand of sensationalism used illness as a means of “undermining conventional morality.”
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  197. Gilbert, Pamela K. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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  199. Important book in which it is argued that the popular fiction of the mid-Victorian period became associated with women and pathology.
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  201. Gilbert, Pamela K. Cholera and Nation: Doctoring the Victorian Social Body. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008.
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  203. An engaging and wide-ranging book that explains how cholera epidemics affected Victorian perceptions of the body and the nation.
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  205. Lawlor, Clark. Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
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  207. A discussion of the cultural appropriation of tuberculosis as complex symbol of literary identity. Lawlor’s book has a wide scope; Part 3 concentrates on Romantic and Victorian representations of consumption.
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  209. Kiple, Kenneth F., ed. The Cambridge World History of Human Disease. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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  211. Encyclopedic and useful but a prohibitively expensive history of disease.
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  213. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. London: Allen Lane, 1979.
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  215. A short and beautifully-written account of the cultural and philosophical importance of disease as powerful metaphor.
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  217. Vrettos, Athena. Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
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  219. This book focuses on the centrality of illness—particularly psychosomatic illness—as an imaginative construct in Victorian culture. Vrettos concentrates on a variety of literary authors including Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Henry James, and H. Rider Haggard.
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  221. Anesthesia
  222.  
  223. The invention of anesthesia is one of the greatest moments in the history of medicine. Before such pain relief was widely adopted in the 1840s, surgery was a painful, lurid, and dangerous affair. Surgeons prided themselves on their speedy ability to perform certain operations—a confidence that often led to fatal mistakes. Using chemicals such as ether and chloroform allowed practitioners to take their time, and patients were much less likely to go into shock when not suffering unendurable agonies. The pioneers of anesthetic medicine were the American William Morton, who first used ether in Boston in 1846, and Edinburgh professor James Simpson, who introduced the more effective chemical chloroform in 1847. Queen Victoria was among the first people to take chloroform during childbirth, delivering Prince Leopold with no complications in 1853. Snow 2008 is the best general introduction to the history of anesthesia, while Stratmann 2003 focuses more specifically on chloroform. Sykes and Bunker 2007 offers a much-needed account of the intersections between British and American clinicism during the introduction of chemical pain relief.
  224.  
  225. Snow, Stephanie J. Blessed Days of Anaesthesia: How Anaesthetics Changed the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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  227. A thorough account of the history of pain relief in medicine. Snow considers the invention of anesthesia to be one of the most important developments in the Western world.
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  229. Stratmann, Linda. Chloroform: The Quest for Oblivion. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2003.
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  231. A history of the use of chloroform in medicine and clinical testing. Concentrates on early-19th-century experiments up to more recent uses of the same in DNA profiling methods.
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  233. Sykes, Keith, and John P. Bunker. Anaesthesia and the Practice of Medicine: Historical Perspectives. London: Royal Society of Medicine Press, 2007.
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  235. A solid account of how the development of anesthetic use was a transatlantic story. Sykes and Bunker, both anesthesiologists, highlight that the first regularizations of chemical pain relief took place simultaneously at Massachusetts General Hospital and at University College London.
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  237. Injury and Pain
  238.  
  239. Alongside the burden of curing and preventing disease, medical professionals faced ever-growing pressures to deal with trauma and pain. In addition to being involved in a number of wars throughout the century, Britain built a culture that exposed its population to new levels of physical trauma: manufacturing machines, steam engines and ambitious building projects were just a few of the developments that posed new dangers for the human body. There has not been a lot of research on the significance of physical injury in the 19th century. Mangham 2008 discusses treatments of head trauma and their impact on popular fiction. Rey 1993 offers a solid introduction to the sociological history of pain, while Bending 2000 discusses the representation of pain in late-19th-century Victorian fiction.
  240.  
  241. Bending, Lucy. The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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  243. A study of the ways in which ideas of pain were articulated in a wide range of Victorian texts, including fiction, sermons, medical textbooks, and campaigning leaflets.
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  245. Mangham, Andrew. “Life After Death: Apoplexy, Medical Ethics and the Female Undead.” Women’s Writing 15.3 (2008): 282–299.
  246. DOI: 10.1080/09699080802444751Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  247. Discusses how Ellen Wood’s East Lynne and St. Martin’s Eve transforms Gothic notions of the “undead” by appropriating concurrent medical ideas on brain injury and apoplexy.
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  249. Rey, Roselyne. History of Pain. Translated by Louis Elliott Wallace, June A. Cadden, and Sam W. Cadden. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
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  251. A detailed and encyclopedic discussion of the medical treatment of pain from ancient times to the 1950s. Has one excellent chapter on the 19th century.
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  253. Psychology
  254.  
  255. One of medicine’s major success stories in the 19th century was its development of psychology as a distinct discipline. At the start of the century, it was not uncommon for a mental patient to be treated by an untrained physician and restrained by locks and chains. By the fin de siècle psychology had developed a complex and nuanced understanding of the human brain. Diagnostic labels such as “hysteria,” “neurasthenia,” and “hypochondria,” problematic though they often proved to be, meant that the black and white thinking of early psychiatry had been replaced with more sensitive approaches to mental disturbance. Thanks to the writings of men such as John Conolly, Henry Maudsley, William Carpenter, John Abercrombie, and G. H. Lewes, psychology developed greater understandings of the nature of dreams, memory and thought. For the best historical accounts of the rise of psychology, one can do no better than Oppenheim 1991, Rylance 2000, and Taylor and Shuttleworth 1998. A number of scholars have used the history of psychology as a means of studying Victorian fiction. Indeed, this area of research has dominated the surge of interest in interdisciplinary analysis. Taylor 1988, Shuttleworth 1996, and Small 1996 are the most pivotal contributions to this subject area. Leavy 1982, Shuttleworth 1993, and Wood 2001, meanwhile, are worthy additions to the field.
  256.  
  257. Leavy, Barbara Foss. “Wilkie Collins’s Cinderella: The History of Psychology and The Woman in White.” Dickens Studies Annual 10 (1982): 91–141.
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  259. An engaging analysis of the links between literature and psychology. Leavy uncovers some valuable connections between Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and renowned psychologist John Conolly.
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  261. Oppenheim, Janet. “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
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  263. An important account of the relationship between psychiatrists and their patients in the Victorian period. Oppenheim concentrates on nervous breakdown and the period’s attempt to understand, prevent, and treat it.
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  265. Rylance, Rick. Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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  267. A comprehensive and well-crafted history of psychology concentrating on the latter half of the 19th century. Rylance reads the development of the discipline through the progress of some of its main practitioners.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Shuttleworth, Sally. “‘Preaching to the Nerves’: Psychological Disorder in Sensation Fiction.” In A Question of Identity: Women, Science, and Literature. Edited by Benjamin, Miranda, 192–243. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993.
  270. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  271. An important essay that draws convincing connections between the sensation novel and medical conceptions of insanity.
  272. Find this resource:
  273. Shuttleworth, Sally. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  274. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  275. A seminal study of the links between the works of Charlotte Brontë and Victorian psychology. Shuttleworth’s book is one the founding texts in the development of interdisciplinary approaches to 19th century literature.
  276. Find this resource:
  277. Small, Helen. Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
  278. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  279. An award-winning study, concentrating on the intersections between literature and female insanity through the figure of the love-sick woman. Beautifully written and brilliantly executed, Small’s book is an important work of critical rigor.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Taylor, Jenny Bourne. In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology. London: Routledge, 1988.
  282. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  283. A groundbreaking analysis of the intersections between Wilkie Collins and 19th-century psychiatry. This monograph has been pivotal to the rise of interest in the works of Collins and the wider intersections between literature and medicine.
  284. Find this resource:
  285. Taylor, Jenny Bourne, and Sally Shuttleworth, eds. Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
  286. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  287. An impressive and extremely useful anthology. Richly annotated, this collection covers all the main areas of psychological research within the Victorian period.
  288. Find this resource:
  289. Wood, Jane. Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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  291. A well-written and thoughtful book. Comprehensive and ambitious in scope, Wood’s study offers an excellent introduction to both interdisciplinary methodology and the representation of psychosomatic illness during the 19th century.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Phrenology and Physiognomy
  294.  
  295. Phrenology and physiognomy were pseudoscientific branches of medicine that were vastly popular throughout the 19th century. It was the Swiss poet Johann Kaspar Lavater who first publicized the “art” of physiognomy, a discipline that aimed to understand character by reading facial features. Phrenology, the “science” that aimed to recognize personality traits by judging the shape, size, and contours of the head, was first developed by Austrian physician Franz Joseph Gall and popularized by Johann Spurzheim and, later, George and Andrew Combe. Cooter 2005, Stack 2008, and Van Whyle 2004 offer in-depth and thoughtful analyses of the history of these topics. In the world of literary criticism, meanwhile, physiognomy has long been a focus of interdisciplinary discussion. Graham 1961 offers a useful overview of the impact Lavater’s theories, while Hollington 1992, Jack 1970, Tytler 1994, Tytler 1998, and Tyter 1999 discuss their impact on the fiction of Dickens, the Brontës, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot.
  296.  
  297. Cooter, Roger. The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
  298. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  299. Offers a Foucauldian reading of the popularization of science in the second half of the 19th century. Cooter claims that the popularity of phrenology had particular and important meaning with regard to industrialization and urban culture.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Graham, John. “Lavater’s Physiognomy in England.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 22.4 (1961): 561–572.
  302. DOI: 10.2307/2708032Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  303. A useful and succinct general account of Lavater’s influence on English culture.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Hollington, Michael. “Physiognomy in Hard Times.” Dickens Quarterly 9.2 (1992): 58–66.
  306. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  307. An account of the influence of physiognomy on Dickens with particular reference to the novel Hard Times.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Jack, Ian. “Physiognomy, Phrenology, and Characterisation in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë.” Brontë Society Transactions 15 (1970): 377–391.
  310. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  311. An important, early interpretation of how physiognomy and phrenology became crucial to the development of character in Charlotte Brontë’s novels.
  312. Find this resource:
  313. Stack, David. Queen Victoria’s Skull: George Combe and the Mid-Victorian Mind. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2008.
  314. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  315. A biography of one of phrenology’s main exponents. Stack considers the history of phrenology through the life and work of Edinburgh practitioner George Combe.
  316. Find this resource:
  317. Tytler, Graeme. “Physiognomy in Wuthering Heights.” Brontë Society Transactions 21 (1994): 137–148.
  318. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  319. An overview of how physiognomy was important to the creation of several characters in Wuthering Heights.
  320. Find this resource:
  321. Tytler, Graeme. “‘Know How to Decipher a Countenance’: Physiognomy in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction.” Thomas Hardy Yearbook 27 (1998): 43–60.
  322. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  323. An account of the centrality of physiognomical theory in the works of Thomas Hardy.
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Tytler, Graeme, “‘The Lines and Lights of the Human Countenance’: Physiognomy in George Eliot’s Fiction.” George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies 36–37 (1999): 29–58.
  326. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  327. Succinct overview of how George Eliot was influenced by the idea of physiognomy.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Van Whyle, John. Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004.
  330. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  331. This book makes a convincing case for understanding phrenology as central to the “naturalistic movement” of the 19th century.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Moral Management and the Asylum
  334.  
  335. Central to the development of psychiatry in the 19th century was the system of “moral management,” a movement that dominated practice from the late 18th century onward. The system originated in France and was based on the nonrestraint methods of radical physician Philippe Pinel. Its fundamental principle was that patients did better when they were controlled by persuasion and trust, rather than by chains and cold baths. The Hanwell Asylum in Britain, presided over by Charles Dickens’s friend John Conolly, demonstrated that, when patients were given small responsibilities (such as gardening) and/or entertainments (such as private theatricals), they could be successfully re-habituated to “normal” social functions. Reiss 2008, Scull 1979, and Scull 1981 all provide excellent introductions to this topic. As Foucault 1989 and Porter 1987 demonstrate, however, the asylum experience was not always the utopia envisaged by its main adherents. Sensation fiction, in particular, portrayed characters wrongfully incarcerated (usually by unscrupulous relatives who want to appropriate their wealth). The establishment of the Lunacy Commission in the 19th century illustrates how much of a genuine concern this became. Foucault 1989 and Porter 1987 illustrate how asylum culture actually developed into an intricate system of wider social significance.
  336.  
  337. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. London: Routledge, 1989.
  338. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  339. Originally published in 1965, this is a seminal book on the history of madness highlighting how understandings of insanity changed to suit the development of power in the Western world.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Porter, Roy. A Social History of Madness: The World Through the Eyes of the Insane. New York: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1987.
  342. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  343. A vivid and engaging account of the history of madness through authenticated accounts of psychiatric patients.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Reiss, Benjamin. Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
  346. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  347. A brilliant and useful book on the rise of asylum culture in America through the 19th century. Reiss features a number of chapters on literary representations of the asylum, plus one chapter on psychology’s use of Shakespeare.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Scull, Andrew T. Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England. London: Allen Lane, 1979.
  350. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  351. An excellent early analysis of the links between the insane asylum and wide social movements in the 19th century.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Scull, Andrew, ed. Madhouses, Mad-doctors and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.
  354. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  355. Historical collection of essays on the rise of asylum culture in the 19th century.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Criminal Responsibility
  358.  
  359. As is demonstrated in Smith 1981, it was in the Victorian period that medicine was expected to have more of a presence in the criminal courtroom. From the 1840s onward, medico-legal intersections established the practice of having expert medical witnesses in criminal and civil trials. This was not a smooth development as doctors, lawyers, and journalists repeatedly argued over what constituted diminished responsibility. Smith 1981 is the best overview of these developments, while useful accounts are also provided by Eigen 1995 and Eigen 2003. Ainsley 2000 is a useful outline of how the insanity plea influenced popular fiction. Marland 2004, McDonagh 2003, and Quinn 2002 demonstrate how trials for infanticide were often pivotal to decisions over criminal responsibility.
  360.  
  361. Ainsley, Jill Newton. “‘Some Mysterious Agency’: Women, Violent Crime, and the Insanity Acquittal in the Victorian Courtroom.” Canadian Journal of History 35.1 (2000): 37–55.
  362. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  363. A study of the links between the insanity plea and the plot of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862).
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Eigen, Joel Peter. Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-Doctors in the English Court. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
  366. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  367. A discussion of the role of expert medical witnesses in criminal cases using the insanity plea.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Eigen, Joel Peter. Unconscious Crime: Mental Absence and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian London. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
  370. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  371. A study of how the insanity plea was used in Victorian criminal cases. Concentrates on forms of “mental absence” (an example being somnambulism) and makes use of the records from the Central Criminal Court.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Marland, Hilary. Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
  374. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  375. A study of the conception of postpartum insanity, known as puerperal madness, and how the concept became central to a number of criminal trials and 19th century culture in general.
  376. Find this resource:
  377. McDonagh, Josephine. Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
  378. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  379. An excellent book that studies the importance of the idea of child murder across a wide and impressive range of materials including popular reportage, fiction, and medical discourses.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Quinn, Cath. “Images and Impulses: Representations of Puerperal Insanity and Infanticide in Late Victorian England.” In Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550–2000. Edited by Mark Jackson, 193–215. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002.
  382. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  383. An essay that highlights how infanticide and female insanity became crucial to discussions of criminal responsibility in the 19th century.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Smith, Roger. Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981.
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  387. The best study of the construction of the insanity plea in Victorian criminal cases. Smith highlights the philosophical crisis caused by the tension between medicine’s desire to cure and the legal system’s desire to punish.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Gender and Sexuality
  390.  
  391. Contemporaneous with the rise of interest in interdisciplinarity has been the ongoing fascination, in literary studies, with the representation of gender and sexuality. Hysteria has been at the forefront of many of the studies that analyze the medical context of Victorian literature. Micale 1995 is the best interpretation of this issue, and Showalter 1987 has been the most influential. The subject is also dealt with imaginatively by Wiesenthal 1995. Greenfield and Barash 1999, Mangham 2007, Showalter and Showalter 1972, and Shuttleworth 1992, demonstrate how biological aspects of womanhood, namely menstruation, adolescence, motherhood, and menopause, were central to broader definitions of gender in the 19th century. Smith 2004 and Musselman 2006, meanwhile, offer interesting looks at medical constructions of masculinity at the dawn of the industrial age and at the fin de siècle, respectively.
  392.  
  393. Greenfield, Susan C., and Carol Barash. Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650–1865. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999.
  394. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  395. A collection of essays that discusses the cultural significance of motherhood over a wide period of time. Features the contributions of scholars from a range of disciplines.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Mangham, Andrew. Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine, and Victorian Popular Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
  398. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  399. An analysis of the intersections between medical constructions of womanhood, criminal cases, and Sensation Fiction.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. Micale, Mark S. Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
  402. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  403. A rigorous and comprehensive analysis of hysteria as a diagnostic label. The author surveys the range of past and present readings of hysteria by historians; scholars in gender studies, art history, and literature; plus psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and neurologists.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Musselman, Elizabeth Green. Nervous Conditions: Science and the Body Politic in Early Industrial Britain. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.
  406. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  407. A useful study of the impact that industrial culture had on Britain’s masculine ideals.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Showalter, Elaine, and English Showalter. “Victorian Women and Menstruation.” In Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Edited by Martha Vicinus, 38–44. London: Macmillan, 1972.
  410. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  411. A useful overview of the sense of shame and secrecy that surrounded the understanding of menstruation in the Victorian period.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980. London: Virago, 1987.
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  415. A seminal study of the links between the marginalization of women and their treatment at the hands of the medical profession. Showalter gestures toward some literary readings.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Shuttleworth, Sally. “Demonic Mothers: Ideologies of Bourgeois Motherhood in the Mid-Victorian Era.” In Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History, and the Politics of Gender. Edited by Linda M. Shires, 31–51. London: Routledge, 1992.
  418. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  419. A fascinating reading of bourgeois ideas of motherhood and how these influenced the writings of sensation novelist Ellen Wood.
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Smith, Andrew. Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004.
  422. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  423. An engaging study of how medicine impacted on constructions of masculinity in a range of materials including late-Victorian gothic stories, reports of the Whitechapel murders, and the story of “Elephant Man” John Merrick.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Wiesenthal, Chris S. “From Charcot to Plato: The History of Hysteria in Heart and Science.” Wilkie Collins to the Forefront: Some Reassessments. Edited by Nelson C. Smith, and Reginald Charles Terry, 257–268. New York: AMS Press, 1995.
  426. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  427. Wiesenthal provides an analysis of Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science through a historicist reconstruction of the fundamental principles of contemporaneous psychiatric thought, especially as it relates to the construction of “hysteria” as a diagnostic label.
  428. Find this resource:
  429. Neurology
  430.  
  431. Following the controversial theories of William Lawrence (discussed in Jacyna 1983), Victorian psychologists developed a model of human consciousness that suggested all thoughts and character traits were contained within the dense nerve fibers of the brain. It was believed that thought patterns literally left “pathways” through the brain and that this is what led to understanding, obsession, and habit. Pedlar 2003 and Taylor 1997 offer an account of how these developments influenced Victorian fiction, while Styles 2007 and Davis 2008 are books that seek, in varying ways, to link literary form with embryonic ideas in neuroscience.
  432.  
  433. Davis, Michael. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008.
  434. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  435. A detailed monograph about George Eliot’s appropriation and transformation of psychological ideas. It identifies which scientific and philosophical thinkers had an impact on Eliot’s writing, while acknowledging the author’s contribution to the history of psychiatry.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Jacyna, L. S. “Immanence or Transcendence: Theories of Life and Organization in Britain, 1790–1835.” Isis 74.3 (1983): 310–329.
  438. DOI: 10.1086/353301Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  439. A discussion of the work of William Lawrence, which posited that the human mind could be traced within the organic matter of the brain, and how this was opposed by the more traditional opinions of John Abernethy, who believed instead that man’s sophisticated mind formed a spiritual link with God.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Pedlar, Valerie. “Experimentation or Exploitation? The Investigations of David Ferrier, Dr Benjulia, and Dr Seward.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 28.3 (2003): 169–174.
  442. DOI: 10.1179/030801803225005201Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  443. An excellent interdisciplinary essay that combines a study of Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science and Bram Stoker’s Dracula with a historical account of the work of neurosurgeon David Ferrier.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Styles, Anne, ed. Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
  446. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  447. An innovative collection of essays that aims to explore the links between literature and neuroscience in the 19th century.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Taylor, Jenny Bourne. “Obscure Recesses: Locating the Victorian Unconscious.” In Writing and Victorianism. Edited by Jenny Bourne Bullen, 137–179. New York: Longman, 1997.
  450. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451. A useful overview of Victorian writings on the unconscious and how these related to more general trends within psychological medicine.
  452. Find this resource:
  453. Obsession and Habit
  454.  
  455. Closely linked with ideas of cerebral localization was the notion of obsession. Because thoughts were believed to travel along physical pathways, like electricity, it was also suggested that the brain could develop unhealthy avenues of thought. This mind-set provided the foundations for modern views on obsessive-compulsive disorder and cognitive behavioral therapy. The 19th-century representations of obsession and habit are introduced by Hughes 2007, Mangham 2007, and Vrettos 1999–2000. Gilman 1998 extends these ideas by suggesting that obsessive ideas were central to the rise of cosmetic surgery.
  456.  
  457. Gilman, Sander L. Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
  458. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  459. A study of the links between obsession and the rise of plastic surgery. Gilman studies a number of literary texts, including Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera.
  460. Find this resource:
  461. Hughes, William. “Habituation and Incarceration: Mental Physiology and Asylum Abuse in The Woman in White and Dracula.” In Wilkie Collins: Interdisciplinary Essays. Edited by Andrew Mangham, 136–148. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2007.
  462. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  463. This essay discusses the representation of associationist psychology and habit in both The Woman in White and Dracula.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Mangham, Andrew. “How Do I Look?: Dysmorphophobia and Obsession at the Fin de Siècle.” In Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920. Edited by Anne Styles, 77–96. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
  466. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  467. An overview of how psychological models of habit and obsession allowed for a better understanding of looks-based neuroses in the 19th century.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Vrettos. “Defining Habits: Dickens and the Psychology of Repetition.” Victorian Studies 42.3 (1999–2000): 399–426.
  470. DOI: 10.2979/VIC.1999.42.3.399Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  471. A stimulating analysis of the links between medical ideas of habit and repetition and the representation of literary characters. Offers perhaps the most convincing reading of Dickens’s Miss Havisham.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Degeneration and Eugenics
  474.  
  475. One of the repercussions of Charles Darwin’s landmark publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 was the development of ideas on degeneration and eugenics. Driven mainly by perceived problems posed by the urban poor, Darwin’s theory of evolution was modified into a belief that if man could progress, he might also regress. Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton invented the notion that, with careful attention to breeding patterns, man could avoid degeneration and reach dizzying levels of social and political power. Richardson 2008 offers the best interpretation of this topic’s impact on literature, while shorter overviews are offered by Caleb 2007 and Maunder 2004. Interesting accounts of the cultural impact of degeneration theories may be found in Greenslade 1994, Pick 1993, and Ledger and Luckhurst 2000.
  476.  
  477. Caleb, Amanda Mordavsky. “Questioning Moral Inheritance in The Legacy of Cain.” In Wilkie Collins: Interdisciplinary Essays. Edited by Andrew Mangham, 122–135. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2007.
  478. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  479. Caleb argues that Wilkie Collins’s The Legacy of Cain, his penultimate novel, engages creatively with the eugenicist and evolutionary debates of Henry Maudsley and Edwin Ray Lankester.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880–1940. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
  482. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  483. Here Greenslade investigates the impact of degeneration theories on British culture, and he explores the trope in the work of novelists including Hardy, Woolf, and Buchan.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Ledger, Sally, and Roger Luckhurst, eds, The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
  486. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487. An important anthology that offers a contribution to the developing field of interdisciplinary studies. It features essays under the following sections: Degeneration, Outcast London, The Metropolis, The New Woman, Literary Debates, The New Imperialism, Socialism, Anarchism, Scientific Naturalism, Psychology, Psychical Research, Sexology, Anthropology, and Racial Science.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. Maunder, Andrew. “‘Stepchildren of Nature’: East Lynne and the Spectre of Female Degeneracy, 1860–1861.” In Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation. Edited by Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore, 59–71. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004.
  490. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  491. An interesting account of how degeneration ideas impacted on the sensation novel, especially with reference to its representation of family politics and divorce law.
  492. Find this resource:
  493. Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
  494. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  495. This book investigates the specific conception and descent of a language of “degeneration” from 1848 to 1918, with particular reference to France, Italy, and England. Pick indicates the wide cultural and political importance of the idea of degeneration, while showing that the notion could mean different things at different times in different places.
  496. Find this resource:
  497. Richardson, Angelique. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
  498. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  499. A study that usefully combines historical analysis and literary criticism. Focusing particularly on the links between degeneration, eugenics, and the New Woman movement, it provides a contribution to the cultural study of biological determinism and early feminism.
  500. Find this resource:
  501. Controversy
  502.  
  503. Controversy is an important tool for historians of medicine. During the 19th century, controversy allowed “unspoken” issues (such as the surgical treatment of women) to be voiced. Today, it provides the contemporary reader with some unique insights into practices that, otherwise, may have remained hidden. Controversial issues also had a massive impact on popular understandings of medicine throughout the period. Notorious among these were the grave robbing scandals, the medical (mal)treatment of women, and vivisection. Jordanova 1995 provides a useful introduction to the links between medical epistemology and controversy.
  504.  
  505. Jordanova, Ludmilla. “The Social Construction of Medical Knowledge.” Social History of Medicine 8.3 (1995) 361–381.
  506. DOI: 10.1093/shm/8.3.361Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  507. This article offers a stimulating introduction to the history of medicine as studied through major controversies.
  508. Find this resource:
  509. Grave Robbing
  510.  
  511. Because there was a shortage of cadavers for the anatomical schools to practice on in the 19th century, teachers and students became reliant upon a group of criminals known as “resurrection men.” The latter would disinter freshly buried corpses and sell them to medical schools (at a very heavy price) whose personnel displayed a convenient disinclination to ask questions. In 1828 it emerged that two such resurrection men, William Burke and William Hare, actually murdered poor people in order to make a living in this way. The case was quickly followed up, in the 1830s, with the indictment of John Bishop, Thomas Williams, and James May in London for the same offense. As is demonstrated by Burch 2008 and Richardson 1987, these scandals had a significant impact on the reputation of all forms of medical practice, and they became the basis of a number of gothic fictions.
  512.  
  513. Burch, Druin. Digging Up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon. London: Vintage, 2008.
  514. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  515. An excellent book that studies the resurrection debates through the life and times of surgeon Astley Cooper.
  516. Find this resource:
  517. Richardson, Ruth. Death, Dissection, and the Destitute. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987.
  518. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  519. The best account of the grave-robbing scandals, and analysis of how this impacted popular culture throughout the 19th century.
  520. Find this resource:
  521. Female Surgery
  522.  
  523. The history of medicine for women has been a busy and vibrant area of research for quite some time. In essence, the rise of gynecology and obstetrics, popularized and designated in the Victorian period, has always been a controversial issue. Moscucci 1993 is the best work available on this topic, while other useful and important overviews may be found in Benjamin 1993; Jacobus, et al. 1990; and Dally 1991. Depledge and Mangham 2007 discusses what influence gynecological controversies, such as the pioneering of clitoridectomy and oophorectmy, had on literary works in the second half of the 19th century.
  524.  
  525. Benjamin, Marina, ed. A Question of Identity: Women, Science, and Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993.
  526. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  527. A strong and very useful collection of essays that concentrates on the telling encounters between women, science, and literature.
  528. Find this resource:
  529. Dally, Ann G. Women under the Knife: A History of Surgery. London: Hutchinson Radius, 1991.
  530. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  531. Itself written by a controversial practitioner of medicine, Women under the Knife chronicles the development of surgery for women from the earliest operations in America, Edinburgh, Paris, and London.
  532. Find this resource:
  533. Jacobus, Mary, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, eds. Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science. London: Routledge, 1990.
  534. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  535. An excellent collection of essays that discusses, with critical rigor, the encounters of women and science throughout the modern and contemporary periods.
  536. Find this resource:
  537. Mangham, Andrew, and Depledge, Greta. “Gynaecological Controversy and Victorian Fiction.” In (Re)creating Science in the Nineteenth-Century. Edited by Amanda Mordavsky Caleb, 146–166. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2007.
  538. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  539. This chapter concentrates on the problematic reputation of the gynecologist in mid-19th century Britain and France. It offers readings of works by Emile Zola and Ellen Wood.
  540. Find this resource:
  541. Moscucci, Ornella. The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800–1929. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
  542. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  543. The best and most comprehensive account of women’s medicine in the 19th century. This book provides the essential starting point for any new scholar interested in this topic.
  544. Find this resource:
  545. Vivisection
  546.  
  547. Vivisection and comparative anatomy had been central to the study of medicine since ancient times, but it was in the 1800s that the practice truly dominated clinical research. Increased amounts of surgery on animals responded to a growing need for subjects to experiment on—a pressure made all the more acute because human cadavers were in short supply. What is more, urban squalor and the march of certain epidemics seemed to increase the need for successful medical research. Offset against these scientific pressures was the period’s escalating sentimentality, its increased affection for animals and its new interest in ethical questions. In 1875 Frances Power Cobbe, a feminist and animal rights activist, set up the National Anti-Vivisection Society. Depledge 2007 and MacEachen 1966 demonstrate how Cobbe had sympathizers in the literary world, especially in popular novelist Wilkie Collins. Rupke 1990 provides a strong introduction to the history of vivisection, while the anonymously penned History of Antivivisection from the 1800s to the Present provides a useful and accessible overview.
  548.  
  549. Depledge, Greta. “Heart and Science and Vivisection’s Threat to Women.” In Wilkie Collins: Interdisciplinary Essays. Edited by Andrew Mangham, 149–163. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2007.
  550. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  551. Locates the subject of Wilkie Collins’s 1883 novel Heart and Science within the late 19th century’s ambivalent attitude toward medical practitioners and the threat they posed toward women.
  552. Find this resource:
  553. A History of Antivivisection from the 1800s to the Present.
  554. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  555. A useful and thorough overview of the antivivisection movement and how it involved a number of important literary figures.
  556. Find this resource:
  557. MacEachen, Dougald. “Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science and the Vivisection Controversy.” Victorian Newsletter 29 (1966): 22–25.
  558. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  559. A brief account of how Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science engaged with specific events in the antivivisection movement of the late 19th century.
  560. Find this resource:
  561. Rupke, Nicolaas A., ed. Vivisection in Historical Perspective. London: Routledge, 1990.
  562. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  563. A useful collection of essays that considers the entire history of vivisection. The book features some interesting articles on vivisection and women, plus it mentions the appropriation of vivisection—as a controversial topic—by authors of fiction.
  564. Find this resource:
  565. back to top
  566.  
  567. VICTORIAN LITERATURE
  568. About Victorian Literature »
  569. Meet the Editorial Board »
  570. JUMP TO OTHER ARTICLES:
  571. Jump To
  572. Up
  573.  
  574. Actresses
  575. Aestheticism
  576. Affect
  577. Arnold, Matthew
  578. Atheism and Secularization
  579. Autobiography
  580. Barnes, William
  581. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth
  582. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth
  583. Brontë, Anne
  584. Brontë, Charlotte
  585. Brontë, Emily
  586. Broughton, Rhoda
  587. Browning, Robert
  588. Butler, Samuel
  589. Caird, Mona
  590. Carlyle, Thomas
  591. Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism
  592. Chartism
  593. Children's Literature
  594. Christian Church, The
  595. City, The
  596. Class
  597. Clough, Arthur Hugh
  598. Collins, Wilkie
  599. Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur
  600. Conrad, Joseph
  601. Corelli, Marie
  602. Crime and Punishment
  603. Culture, Visual
  604. Darwinism
  605. Decadence
  606. Dickens, Charles
  607. Disraeli, Benjamin
  608. Domesticity
  609. Dowson, Ernest
  610. Du Maurier, George
  611. Education
  612. Eliot, George
  613. Empire
  614. Evangelicalism
  615. Feminism
  616. Fiction, Detective
  617. Fiction, Sensation
  618. Fin de Siècle
  619. Gaskell, Elizabeth
  620. Gender
  621. Gosse, Edmund
  622. Haggard, H. Rider
  623. Hardy, Thomas
  624. Historical Novel, The
  625. Homosexuality
  626. Hopkins, Gerard Manley
  627. Ireland
  628. James, Henry
  629. Journalism
  630. Keble, John
  631. Kingsley, Charles
  632. Kipling, Rudyard
  633. Lear, Edward
  634. Lee, Vernon
  635. Literacy
  636. Machines
  637. Marryat, Florence
  638. Martineau, Harriet
  639. Masculinity
  640. Material
  641. Medicine
  642. Melodrama
  643. Mill, John Stuart
  644. Mobility
  645. Monologue, Dramatic
  646. Morris, William
  647. Neo-Victorianism
  648. New Woman, The
  649. Newgate Novel, The
  650. Newman, John Henry
  651. Oliphant, Margaret
  652. Orientalism
  653. Oxford Movement, The
  654. Pantomime
  655. Pater, Walter Horatio
  656. Periodical Press, The
  657. Psychology
  658. Race
  659. Raphaelitism, Pre-
  660. Reade, Charles
  661. Realism
  662. Reynolds, G. W. M.
  663. Rossetti, Christina
  664. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
  665. Ruskin, John
  666. Satire
  667. Science
  668. Sentimentality
  669. Serialization
  670. Sexuality
  671. Silver Fork Novel (Fashionable Novel)
  672. Sincerity
  673. Social-Problem Novel
  674. Sonnet
  675. Stevenson, Robert Louis
  676. Swinburne, A.C.
  677. Symonds, John Addington
  678. Technology
  679. Tennyson, Alfred
  680. Thackeray, William Makepeace
  681. Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth
  682. Travel Writing
  683. Trollope, Anthony
  684. Trollope, Frances
  685. Unitarianism
  686. Verse, Devotional
  687. Ward, Mary
  688. Webster, Julia Augusta
  689. Wells, H. G.
  690. Wood, Ellen (Mrs. Henry Wood)
  691. Yonge, Charlotte
  692. Down
  693.  
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