Medical Poems and the Romantic Rise of Disciplinarity
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MEDICAL POEMS AND THE ROMANTIC RISE OF DISCIPLINARITY Kathleen Béres Rogers A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English. Chapel Hill 2007 Approved By: John McGowan Robert Mitchell Jeanne Moskal Beverly Taylor Jane Thrailkill © 2007 Kathleen Béres Rogers ii ABSTRACT Kathleen Béres Rogers: Medical Poems and the Romantic Rise of Disciplinarity (Under the direction of Jeanne Moskal) Traditionally, Romanticism has been viewed as a movement at odds with early nineteenth- century scientific developments. By examining Romantic-era philosophies of literature and science through the lens of medical poetry by both canonical and unpublished British and American writers, I argue that medical poetry (poetry by medical practitioners and patients) significantly contributed to the rise of medicine. Through its emphasis on status, sympathy, clinical detachment, and patients’ agency, it laid down many of the discipline’s epistemological foundations. While critics have examined poems by well-known medical practitioners like John Keats and George Crabbe, mine is the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of this genre. iii In Loving Memory of Julius Gyula Béres iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In writing this dissertation, I have been blessed with a vibrant, supportive academic community. Jeanne Moskal, my dissertation advisor, has offered invaluable insights, remarkable knowledge, and constant support. My dissertation group encouraged me to view the subject from multiple perspectives, as did Ruth Salvaggio, Jane Thrailkill, John McGowan, Beverly Taylor, and Robert Mitchell. I am most especially grateful to my husband, Benjamin Rogers, the Rogers family, and my mother, Katalin Béres, for their patience, support, and encouragement. v TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures...................................................................................................................... vii Introduction......................................................................................................................... viii Chapter I. The Rhetoric of the Gentleman Physician..............................................................1 II. Genre Troubles: Poetry, Science, and the Case of George Crabbe....................40 III. “A Kind Of Necessary Inhumanity”: Cultivating Negative Capability Through The Clinical Gaze........................................................................................72 IV. Disciplining Medicine: Poetic Responses ......................................................108 Coda: Soft or Hard Data? Modern Medical Poems..............................................145 Works Cited ........................................................................................................................150 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. C. Laverie and Martin (author uncertain), wood engraving .................................15 2. Thomas Gainsborough, Portrait of Dr. Ralph Schomberg....................................18 3. Frontisplate, George Crabbe, The Poetical Works of the Rev. George Crabbe ..................................................30 4. J. Thompson after an original painting by H.W. Pickersgill ................................31 5. Philip Thicknesse, “A View of the Poor House of Datchworth”..........................48 6. “Suicidal Melancholy,” 1856 Medical Times and Gazette ...................................59 7. Modern Medical Education: Actual Practice, after W. Heath, 1825. Photographed by the author, courtesy of the Old Operating Theater and Herb Garrett, London...........................................................................................77 8. The Absolute Cure for the Ingrowing Toenail......................................................78 9. Photograph, Modern-Day re-creation of St. Thomas’s Operating Theater ..........80 10. Architectural Blueprint of the University of Virginia’s former Anatomy Theater............................................................................................81 11. From William Hogarth, The Four Stages of Cruelty ..........................................82 12. Subclavian and Axillary Vessels: Dissection .....................................................85 13. Two Dissected Male Figures, one seated, the other standing behind, with viscera on the floor in the foreground................................................................86 14. Laurie and Whittle, “Dr. Jeremy Snob” ..........................................................113 15. Woodward and Rowlandson, “A Visit to the Doctor”.....................................115 vii INTRODUCTION THE POET AND THE MAN OF SCIENCE: DISCIPLINING ROMANTICISM The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of Science is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow- beings. The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. - William Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads Standard accounts of Romanticism often devote significant attention to poetry as a “habitual and direct sympathy,” the “breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.” This critical focus on “sympathy” and “spirit” has, in turn, engendered the familiar tale of a monolithic movement working in reaction to Enlightenment empiricism. According to René Wellek, a founder of the Romantic model that dominated twentieth-century criticism, “all [great Romantic poets] share a common objection to the mechanistic universe of the eighteenth century . all Romantic poets conceived of nature as an organic whole, or the analogue of man rather than a concourse of atoms.” 1 The (still) most influential readings of Romanticism posit nature as “organic,” holistic, an “analogue of man,” something akin to the “soul.” This terminology, in turn, imbues Romanticism with a sort of religiosity or, at the very least, spirituality. Arthur Lovejoy, in his 1924 “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” argues for a disparate set of “Romanticisms” but nonetheless assumes a 1 René Wellek, “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History,” Romanticism: Points of View , ed. Robert F Gleckner and Gerald E. Enscoe (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1975), 120. viii parallel between German Romanticism and the Christian body-soul duality. 2 The “soul” or “spirit” has been read as Romanticism’s domain, nowhere more memorably than in M. H. Abrams’ classic, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953). As Abrams puts it, “the paramount cause of poetry is . the compulsion of the ‘creative’ imagination which, like God the creator, has its internal source of motion.” 3 While present-day literary critics would no doubt flinch at this blunt elision between God and poet, these critical paradigms have long informed both teachers and scholars of Romanticism. While it is somewhat possible to posit what Wellek called the “great poets” as a spiritual, inward-thinking, imagination-based group, what are we to do with the Romantic-era growth of medical poetry—most often didactic poetry by doctors and, later, patients? Wellek bluntly dismisses any overlaps between poetry and medicine, stating that “Keats, possibly because he was a doctor, was least affected by the romantic conception of nature.” 4 Wellek’s classic critique has long been superceded, at least officially; recent critics have probed the intersections between science and Romanticism, arguing that Romantic-era poets utilized scientific “facts” to more fully understand their sublime world. For instance, Robert Mitchell’s reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Queen Mab” locates poetry as a necessary complement to science. According to Mitchell’s reading, science, for Shelley, requires the “dreams of poets” to enable a linear progress toward a utopian society where 2 Arthur Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” Romanticism: Points of View. 3 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, qtd. in Aidan Day, Romanticism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 55. 4 Wellek, 200. ix “reason and passion cease to combat.” 5 In Shelley’s poem, poetry infuses science with a vital spark, something akin to the human spirit. Along similar lines, Eric Wilson’s 2003 The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination argues that scientific discoveries concerning crystallography pointed out the incredible complexity of ice and frost, increasing writers’ awe and respect for the sublime. 6 Influenced by the theories of Emanuel Swedenborg, Henry David Thoreau drew a parallel between crystallization and the poetic project, each requiring the invisible to be “made visible.” If science enabled a greater understanding of nature, Wilson argues, it only served to increase the imagination’s fascination with it. What these studies have not done is question the binary opposition between science and poetry posited by earlier critics like Abrams, Wellek, and Lovejoy. Most studies place the development of modern disciplines in the Enlightenment, roughly corresponding