Research Statement:
Victorian Studies and the Case History
Meegan Kennedy
Florida State University
I study the relationship between modern literary and medical narratives because their engagement provides an ideal site from which to study Victorian literature and culture. A pantheon of critics like Kate Flint, Gillian Beer, George Levine, Peter Logan, Lawrence Rothfield, and Sally Shuttleworth have productively discussed the importance of science and medicine to the development of Victorian literature. I find that, more specifically, the genre of the case history localizes some of the most contentious questions shaping Victorian society. I look beyond "images of medicine" to focus on how nineteenth-century medical narrative techniques and scientific ideologies may have offered not just compelling characters and motifs but also a textual methodology for Victorian novels. By tracing the changes in the case history both as a literary genre and a cultural artifact, I seek to illuminate crucial concerns of Victorian culture, especially those related to the development of disciplinary identity through narrative.
Because many nineteenth-century Britons thought about their period as the opening of a new scientific era, the changing literature and culture of Victorian medicine took on new importance. With the rapid developments in scientific knowledge and methodologies, some of the period's most prominent cultural critics mounted debates over the proper role of science in culture, a concern which underlay narrative choices in many nineteenth-century novels and case histories. The famous exchange between Huxley and Arnold concerning the relations of literature and science represents only one of many discussions over the balance between art and science in general education and in medicine. Novelists from Dickens and Collins to Hardy and Eliot articulate a struggle to find the proper relationship of science to art, as I argue in an essay I hope to publish next, on George Eliot's "realist vision." And the medical case history focuses nineteenth-century debates over the nature of truth, from the discussions of a "mechanical objectivity" common to realist novels and medical texts, to the question of distinct modes of truth, as when the novel, medicine, and religion differently consider the bodily transformation we call death.
The case history also allows us to study the Victorian period's particular interest in visuality, characterized, as critics like Jonathan Crary and Kate Flint have shown, by remarkable changes in aesthetic theory, in art itself, and in how visual images are narrativized in texts. Medical narratives channel and magnify this "visual turn." Physiologists debated the mechanism of perception, complicating simple tropes of vision. Medical instruments offered new possibilities for extending sight and for representing information visually, with not just the new achromatic microscope, but also instruments like the sphygmograph, which could graph the body's rhythms, rendering them visible for the first time. The surge in using visual methods of representing information in case histories (such as the move to graphs) provides a node from which to examine the Victorian interest in finding new ways to visualize knowledge. In a conference paper I gave this fall, unrelated to my dissertation, I begin to explore the relationship between the continuous narratives of bodily sensations offered by both serial fiction and the visual technology of the instruments like the sphygmograph.
Studying the case history also traces the rise of professionalism in the Victorian period. Medicine contributes to this shift by moving away from a natural history model of science, in which amateurs contribute to the collection of knowledge, towards a centralized model of specialization and expertise. For example, Kipling sets the perceived scientific realism of the British Raj against what he sees as the romance of India. He is sympathetic to Hurree Babu's unrealistic desire to aid the British Royal Society as an amateur investigator. The episode suggests Kipling's nostalgia for a model of inquiry that, like the romantic India of his childhood memories, had been outmoded with the emergence of the modern disciplinary expert.
The case history provides a site from which to study the history of periodical publishing, as medical cases gradually disappear from general-circulation periodicals like the Gentleman's Quarterly , to surface in new professional medical journals. In Thomas Wakley's reformist Lancet , "the case," now a disciplinary unit, enables the development of forensic medicine, paralleling the rise in juridical discourse during this period. Like the lurid police "Case-Book Fiction" of the 1850s and 1860s, forensic medical cases help introduce new literary genres like detective and sensation fiction. The links between police and forensic medical cases, both precursors of detective fiction, become especially clear in novels like Collins's The Moonstone . With the mid-century drive toward standardizing and professionalizing the case history, the new respect for the case history as an analytic tool made it an important narrative model (and in novels, a trope) for the diagnosis of ills in what Mary Poovey has termed the Victorian "social body."
Rapid industrialization also becomes focalized in the rich archive of the case history, which increasingly details railway and factory accidents. Such reports record a growing interest in occupational medicine, in which labor defines the body in new ways. The case history also revisits the vexed question of class, in physicians' reports of how environment shapes the body. Older medical concerns about the decadence of the idle rich and the privations of the poor gained scientific status with the use of statistics. The case became the basic unit grounding public health initiatives once investigators like John Snow began tracking clusters of cases to understand the geography and, eventually, the etiology of diseases like cholera. I am interested in mapping what happens in medicine and fiction when narrative turns the attention from the individual to the aggregate in this way - in particular, how this allows the narrator's voice to negotiate a new kind of authority.
Finally, the history of case histories also allows us to track the developments in Victorian arguments over gender, sexuality, and race. From debates over man-midwives and chloroform for childbirth, to nursing reports from the Crimean War, and from Weir Mitchell's hysterics to Havelock Ellis's inverts, the case history offers a newly authoritative unit of knowledge from which Victorian culture attempts to construct certainty on contested questions of gender and sexual identity. In Tom Brown's Schooldays and Oakfield , as I argue in a paper I'm giving this fall, the physical weakness sanctioned by illness provides a narrative occasion for resolving the anxiety surrounding masculine responsibilities and friendships in the British empire. Similarly, the case history contains and mediates vexing questions of empire by providing a textual site for medicalizing racial and cultural differences. And, as I show in the Dickens talk I gave last year, a revised version of which is currently under review as a book article, case histories chronicle the birth of a professional imperial medicine and a growing fascination with exotic, "grotesque" diseases such as elephantiasis, hydroceles (scrotal tumors), and morbid obesity, thus locating British concerns over excessive growth and the security of national borders.
Overall, my current work on Victorian literature and the case history reflects my conviction that the case history, as a genre, provided Victorians with a powerful narrative instrument for the analysis and management of their world. Indeed, individual case histories, read closely and as a corollary to literary texts, help clarify some of the most significant questions agitating British Victorian culture. My next project will read Victorian literary and medical texts to examine how "excess sensibility" serves as a catchall diagnosis to contain cultural anxieties and reinforce stable categories of the body, in the midst of volatile debates over English identity and pervasive concerns over the borders of British culture. I anticipate that my future work on the Victorian novel will consider scientific ideologies more generally, but I will continue to focus on how novels engage with scientific narrative methodologies as a means of achieving literary and aesthetic, as well as cultural, goals.