Thoughts to Consider While Reading Barker’s Manuscript: Presentism, Whiggish History, and the Post Hoc Fallacy

The holistic tradition of Hippocrates and Galen ended in the nineteenth century with the arrival of disease specificity. Thus, the correction of imbalances provoked by noxious air, inappropriate behavior, the environment, air, water, food, emotions, exercise, rest, and evacuations gave way to the biomedical model, reductionist medicine, and positive scientific authority. By the late nineteenth century, medicine had incorporated Rudolf Virchow’s cellular pathology (1858), Joseph Lister’s surgical antisepsis (1865), Louis Pasteur’s bacteriology (1860s), and Robert Koch’s discovery of the tuberculosis germ (1880s). But John Harley Warner maintains that in Barker’s era, therapeutic action was an essential part of professional identity, as physicians struggled with skepticism regarding medical therapy and the relative merits of nature healing versus the need for therapeutics such as bleeding, purging, and mercurials. Charles Rosenberg emphasizes the importance to the physician–patient relationship of “exhibiting” a drug. To evaluate the validity of Barker’s knowledge and treatments, the twenty-first-century reader must avoid presentism, whiggish history, and the post hoc fallacy, and must consider confirmation bias. Was Barker using the best available evidence in 1820? Were his decisions evidence-based?

Fagged out: overwork and sleeplessness in Victorian professional life

The paper sets current concerns with insomnia in our 24/7 society in the context of nineteenth-century anxieties about the pressures of overwork and sleeplessness in professional culture. Following a case study of a sleepless prime minister, William Gladstone, it explores the early history of sleep research, including the first recordings of a brain pulse during sleep by Angelo Mosso. In parallel with current problems with addiction to sleeping pills, it explores accounts of addiction to choral, a sleeping remedy, and considers the forms of diet and regimes recommended for combatting insomnia. These are surprisingly similar to current advice, including a form of mindfulness breathing. Medical findings also anticipated recent research in arguing that sleeplessness could cause heart problems and what was termed ‘premature mental decay’. Concerns about overwork and lack of sleep were also extended to school children, with campaigns to reduce homework and examinations, in order to improve mental and bodily health. Nineteenth-century medicine offered a broad-based model for understanding the physiological, psychological and social causes of sleep problems from which we can still learn.

Darwin’s Impact on the Medical Sciences

In early nineteenth century medicine, the concepts of organic evolution and natural selection emerged in different contexts, partly anticipating Darwinian revolution. In particular, the anatomical concept of disease favored the perception that men and animals were very similar from a morphological, physiological and pathological point of view, and that this could indicate a certain degree of kinship between them. The debate around human races and human pathological heredity saw first formulations of the principle of natural selection, even if without a full appraisal of its evolutionary implications. Charles Darwin took many inspirations from these medical theories. The impact of the theory of evolution formulated by him in 1859 was only apparently slight in medicine. It is even possible to support that evolutionary concepts contributed in a significant way to the most important medical issues, debates and new discipline in the period between 1880 and 1940.

Keats's Negative Capability

In late December 1817, when attempting to name ‘what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature’, John Keats coined the term ‘negative capability’, which he glossed as ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. Since then negative capability has continued to shape assessments of and responses to Keats’s work, while also surfacing in other contexts ranging from contemporary poetry to punk rock. The essays collected in this volume, taken as a whole, account for some of the history of negative capability, and propose new models and directions for its future in scholarly and popular discourse. The book does not propose a particular understanding of negative capability from among the many options (radical empathy, annihilation of self, philosophical skepticism, celebration of ambiguity) as the final word on the topic; rather, the book accounts for the multidimensionality of negative capability. Essays treat negative capability’s relation to topics including the Christmas pantomime, psychoanalysis, Zen Buddhism, nineteenth-century medicine, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Describing the ‘poetical Character’ Keats notes that ‘it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated’. This book, too, revels in such multiplicity.

RE-ODORIZATION, DISEASE, AND EMOTION IN MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

This article argues that smell's place in nineteenth-century medicine and public health was distinctly ambiguous. Standard narratives in the history of smell argue that smell became less important in this period whilst also arguing that urban spaces were deodorized. The causal motor for the latter shift is medical theories about odour and miasma. By contrast, this article argues that sanitary practices of circulation, ventilation, and disinfection proceeded despite, not because of, medical attitudes to smell. Surgeons and physicians argued that odours were no indicator of disease causing matter and distrusted the use of smell because of its subjective qualities and resistance to linguistic definition. Yet these qualities made smell all the more powerful in sanitary literature, where it was used to generate a powerful emotional effect on readers. Histories of smell need to attend not just to deodorization but re-odorization; the disjuncture between practices of smelling and their textual or visual representation; and chronologies that track the shelving and re-deploying of ways of sensing in different times, places, and communities rather than tracking the de novo emergence of a modern Western sensorium. In mid-nineteenth-century England, smell retained its power, but that power now came from its rhetorical rather than epistemological force.

Keats, Myth, and the Science of Sympathy

This essay considers the connections between myth and sympathy in Keats's poetic theory and practice. It argues that the ‘Ode to Psyche’ exemplifies the way in which Keats uses mythological narrative, and the related trope of apostrophe, to promote a restrained form of sympathy, which preserves an objectifying distance between the poet and the feelings that his poetry examines. This model of sympathy is informed by Keats's medical training: the influential surgeon Astley Cooper and The Hospital Pupil's Guide (1816) both identify a sensitive but restrained sympathy for patients' suffering as an essential part of the scientific and professional methods of nineteenth-century medicine. However, while The Hospital Pupil's Guide claims that mythological superstition has been superseded in medicine by positivist science, Keats's ode suggests that myth retains a central role in poetry, as the foundation of a poetic method that mediates between imaginative sympathy and objective impartiality.