UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Immune Response: Romanticism and the Radical Literary History of Smallpox Inoculation Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/76f6m3bt Author Wang, Fuson Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California University of California Los Angeles The Immune Response: Romanticism and the Radical Literary History of Smallpox Inoculation A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Fuson Wang 2014 Abstract of the Dissertation The Immune Response: Romanticism and the Radical Literary History of Smallpox Inoculation By Fuson Wang Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 Professor Saree Makdisi and Professor Anne K. Mellor, Co-Chairs My dissertation untangles the oxymoron of Romantic medicine. The literary history of inoculation, I contend, reveals that smallpox eradication was as much a triumph of the literary imagination as it was an achievement of Enlightenment science. Underlying this argument is the larger disciplinary question: who counts as a producer of scientific knowledge? My project uncovers a surprisingly literary history of medicine that includes poetry and imaginative fiction in the discovery, propagation, and implementation of Edward Jenner’s controversial discovery of the smallpox vaccine in 1796. Our own anti-vaccination campaigns recapitulate many of these same controversies. Most famously, Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s bogus 1998 study linking MMR to autism compelled thousands of parents to deny their children this important vaccine. These biopolitical issues have only intensified in the globalized twenty-first century, and the debates about the large-scale management of disease depend on our literary-historical memory of the first vaccine scares and our attention to the narratives of those who lived through the alternatives of disfigurement, disease, and death. ii My approach places metaphor and medical reality in the balance. I track the uses of inoculation from its botanical origins, to controversies about safety, to its potential to manage global plague, and finally to its nineteenth-century contraction into clinical propaganda. The first section handles inoculation’s early history via John Milton’s concept of virtuous trial in Comus, Areopagitica, and Paradise Lost. While John Dryden and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s smallpox poems employ metaphor as mere euphemism and concealment, Erasmus Darwin and William Blake begin to imagine Milton’s tested virtue more explicitly as a kind of salubrious inoculation against the corruptions of disease. In my second section on Romantic-era poetry and prose, I argue that, for Blake, John Keats, and Mary Shelley, the metaphor of inoculation models both a revolutionary politics and a cosmopolitan ethics, materializing abstract theories of reform into a medically reproducible practice. I close with a third section on the Victorian endpoint of this radical discourse of inoculation and the consolidation of medical authority into the figure of the all-seeing detective in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Inoculation’s long historical reach and unassailable record for saving lives demand that we continue to recover and to scrutinize these medical, literary, and political origins. iii The dissertation of Fuson Wang is approved. Helen E. Deutsch Margaret C. Jacob Saree Makdisi, Co-Chair Anne K. Mellor, Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2014 iv Table of Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii Vita ix Introduction—Romanticism, Radicalism, and Inoculation Romanticism 1 Radicalism 2 Inoculation 14 Notes 25 Chapter 1—Mutant Strains: Erasmus Darwin and the Origin of Botanical Inoculation The Architectures of Romantic Botany 27 The Prison-House of Botany 29 Mansion of Twenty-Four Apartments 39 The Temple of Nature 57 Notes 63 Chapter 2—Trial by Caprification: William Blake and the Science of Violence Darwin and Blake 66 Blakean Botany and Miltonic Trial 71 Violence and Forgiveness 75 Two Marys 83 The Sick Rose 95 Notes 101 Chapter 3—Unacknowledged Physicians: John Keats and the End of Disease v Beyond Consumption 103 Vital Letters 108 Romantic Disease Discourse 117 The End of Disease 130 Romantic Biopolitics 144 Notes 154 Chapter 4—We Must Live Elsewhere: Mary Shelley and Immunity Biopolitics by Induction 156 Genealogy 158 Gender and Agency 163 Race and Species 170 The Scale of Nature 178 Toward a Romantic Politics and Poetics 187 Notes 192 Chapter 5—The Curious Case of Sherlock Holmes The Case Study 196 Holmes’s Bulldog 204 Victorian Disease Discourse? 216 Notes 221 Figures 223 Bibliography 227 vi List of Figures Figure 1 223 Gillray Vaccination Image Figure 2 223 Darwin’s Caprification Analogies Figure 3 224 Darwin’s Poisonous Plants Figure 4 224 Linnaeus’s Twenty-Four Classes of Plants Figure 5 225 Blake’s Three Floral Poems Figure 6 225 Visions of the Daughters of Albion Figure 7 226 The Sick Roses Figure 8 226 The Comus Images vii Acknowledgements From conception to completion, this project has benefited greatly from the advice, critique, and encouragement of colleagues, teachers, friends, and family. My dissertation committee’s generous interest in the project has made this whole endeavor not only possible, but also eminently bearable. I’m indebted to Professor Helen Deutsch’s patience with my slow but steady education in disability studies and to Professor Margaret Jacob for keeping me historically honest. I’m especially grateful to the co-chairs of my committee: Professor Saree Makdisi for his keen, critical eye for both hand-waving and hand-wringing prose and Professor Anne Mellor for her encyclopedic command of the material. My work has been fortunate to come in contact with UCLA’s diverse intellectual community. The Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Reading Group has been especially helpful in working through drafts, thinking about literature reviews, and tweaking interventions. I’d like to thank Julia Callander, Daniel Couch, Alex Hernandez, Amanda Hollander, Ian Newman, Michael Nicholson, Cristina Richieri-Griffin, and Taylor Walle for keeping this group alive. Special thanks go to our department’s indefatigable staff. Jeanette Gilkison, Michael Lambert, and Nora Elias made the bureaucracy of this large university seem manageable. For giving this project “world enough, and time,” I must acknowledge the consistent financial support from UCLA’s Graduate Division as well as UCHRI’s unexpected interest in funding studies in medical humanities. viii Vita Timeline 2003 B.A., English; B.S. Mathematics Stanford University Stanford, California 2006-07 Pauley Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles 2007-08 Teaching Assistant Department of English University of California, Los Angeles 2008-09 Year-long Graduate Research Mentorship University of California, Los Angeles 2009 M.A., English University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California 2009-10 Pauley Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles 2010-11 Andrew V. White Scholarship in Medical Humanities University of California Humanities Research Institute 2011-12 Departmental Dissertation Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles 2012-14 Teaching Fellow University of California, Los Angeles Publications Wang, Fuson. “Cosmopolitanism and the Radical Politics of Exile in Charlotte Smith’s Desmond.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25.1 (2012): 37-59. Print. __________. “Romantic Disease Discourse: Disability, Immunity, and Literature.” Nineteenth- Century Contexts 33.5 (2011): 467-482. Print. ix __________. “We Must Live Elsewhere: The Social Construction of Natural Immunity in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” European Romantic Review 22.2 (2011): 235-255. Print. __________. Rev. of British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World, by Adriana Craciun. Women’s Studies 40.4 (2011): 557-561. Print. Presentations Wang, Fuson. “Keats and Romantic Disease Discourse.” Paper presented at the “(In)disciplines of the Enlightenment” seminar, Berkeley, CA, July 2012. __________. “Cosmopolitan Mediations: The Politics of Character in Charlotte Smith’s Desmond.” Paper presented at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism conference, Vancouver, BC, August 2010. __________. “Edward Jenner: Romanticism, Radicalism, and Inoculation.” Paper presented at the Pacific Coast Conference for British Studies, Claremont, CA, March 2010. __________. “‘Fear ye a mortal’s hand?’: Eleanor Anne Porden and the Institutionalization of the Scientific Epic.” Paper presented at the “Romantic Disorder” conference, London, UK, June 2009. __________. “Romantic Affinities: The Institutionalization of the Scientific Epic.” Paper presented at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism conference, Durham, NC, May 2009. __________. “Mary Shelley and the Plague.” Paper presented at the “Romantic Science” conference, Cardiff, Wales, September 2008. x Introduction—Romanticism, Radicalism, and Inoculation Romanticism Recent scholarship has struggled to reconcile Romantic authors’ ostensible aversion to science with their eager participation in scientific discourse. This dissertation follows this promising line of scholarship, but also asks the larger question that underlies the methodology itself: who counts as a producer of scientific knowledge? To begin answering this question, I take as my premise that those resistances to science are