July 2005    

Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: from Mary Shelley to George Eliot Author: Janis McLarren Caldwell Publisher: Cambridge University Press $75.00 Cloth (201 P.) ISBN: 0521843340 B&T         YBP Reviewed by Cathy Boylan, Marketing Manager, Europe Caldwell's book examines the nature of the relationship between literature and medicine in Britain in the nineteenth century. Although clinical and romantic are seen now as more or less antithetical terms, she argues that the romantic literature of the period was an expression of the same cultural foundations that underlay then-contemporary medicine. In the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, by which she means 1800-1859, before the publication of The Origin of Species, writers of fiction were producing powerful stories in which the natural world collided with supernatural forces. Meanwhile, doctors worked with a dual approach to medical examination, considering objective physical symptoms alongside the patient's own story of illness. Surveying fiction by Shelley, Carlyle, the Brontes, and George Eliot, along with medical and scientific literature of the time, Caldwell examines the relationship between the two ways of understanding the world: personal or imaginative experience and scientific observation. She argues that the fiction of her chosen writers constitutes a Romantic materialism, blending eighteenth century materialist thinking with the imaginative world of the Romantic poets. And she suggests that Darwin himself had a similar approach to science, quoting his son as saying that his father's rich imagination was fortunately equalled by his sober judgment of thought and fact. In the book's most interesting chapter, she traces the eventual triumph of the scientific over the imaginative style in Darwin's writing, describing his Autobiography which, from a beginning rich with stories, develops into bare factual notes on publication dates. This, she writes, prefigured the increasingly "thin" style of medical writing that developed over the next century. Rather too heavy on jargon, this work -- one in the series Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture -- is nonetheless an interesting contribution to interdisciplinary studies of the writings of the time and has much in it to interest students and academics. Published by YBP Library Services 999 Maple St., Contoocook, NH 03229 USA v: 800.258.3774   f: 603.746.5628 w: www.ybp.com   e: academia@ybp.com All rights reserved.