The Professions in the Nineteenth Century
While those who were measured had bodies that were different and visible, those who were authorized to measure bodies seemed free of the particularizing positivity of corporeality. As Dana Nelson suggests, the “disembodied, objective, and universalized standpoint offered by Enlightenment science” became the perspective of “white manhood” in general and professional authority in particular.22 More specifically, those who measured bodies were not part of a visible group (they were white men, for the most part), and their methods, they believed, were disinterested and rational. Of course, the U.S. doctor studying in Paris, the ethnographer cataloging skulls, the Sanitary Commission doctor measuring femurs, and the fingerprint expert collecting specimens were individuals with particular histories and perspectives. It was supposed, however, that if they were good scientists, their results would have nothing to do with them as idiosyncratic, corporeal men. By definition, in good science the measurer is immaterial and the results are reproducible. In short, bodies measured and cataloged came into view as unmediated facts, and science reproduced its authority in “captioned and ever-multiplying displays of the ‘other.’”23
In addition to being disinterested and objective, the professional man in the nineteenth century was a liberal gentleman. He was respected as a man of learning, culture, and virtue, and in some ways he was an updated version of the eighteenth-century English gentleman. The professional was neither a capitalist nor a laborer. His prestige was not derived from wealth, and yet he was not a worker because even though he was employed by others, “he worked from a position of command . . . and was therefore never wholly at the bidding of those who employed him.”24 As a group, professionals offered an implicit contract: in return for market advantages, they would guarantee the ethical use of their special knowledge. This included establishing fair fees, adopting ethical codes, forming associations dedicated to setting standards for the profession, and providing leadership in other areas. More generally, professionals promised to be the nation’s managers. As Burton Bledstein explains, the professional “excavated nature for its principles, its theoretical rules” and had “masterful command” over complex phenomena such as disease. The professional’s knowledge was by definition beyond the layperson’s grasp, and, as Bledstein notes, amateurs and clients alike simply had to trust the professional’s mastery and his integrity.25 As a result, the professional was often infused with what Max Weber identifies as the charismatic authority of experts, and his manners were as important as his scientific skills.26 An 1873 Atlantic article, for example, suggests that the doctor cures not by “drug or knife, but by means of his counsel, and, above all, by force of his manner. . . . It is the doctor cures us, not the doctor’s physic.”27
Fiction in the Nineteenth Century
At mid-century, writing, like medicine, was open to a wide variety of practitioners. The production and availability of print materials expanded rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century with the availability of cheap paper, less expensive presses, and better distribution of print materials. This expansion made it possible for publishers to pay authors, and authorship became an economically viable occupation open to anyone who could write. At the same time, writing became professionalized, and genres, magazines, and publishing houses became stratified according to class. Domestic fiction, for example, was women’s work, sensational fiction was authored by anonymous industrial hands who were expected to produce on a schedule, and highbrow literature was the work of public figures with visible careers.28
Along with class and gender identities, genres were associated with particular somatic sensibilities. Sentimental and sensational fiction, for example, offered literal representations of somatic experiences—tears, crimsoned bosoms, and throbbing pulses—and readers were expected to respond similarly.29 Maudlin death scenes were supposed to move one to tears, and seduction scenes would make a modest reader blush. Both genres, reviewers of the day warned, might agitate the body and appeal especially to female appetites for physical experiences. Dime novels aligned themselves with a masculine physicality by featuring visceral images of bodies engaged in labor and physical struggle. Realism, by contrast, shunned the body Associated with taste, refinement, and science, realism conformed to bourgeois preferences for privatizing all things bodily As Nancy Glazener notes, while reviewers linked sentimental and sensational fiction with alcohol, opiates, coffee, tea, and desserts, they suggested that realism was a healthy food, an effective antidote to excess and stimulation.30
Imagining Doctors in Nineteenth-Century America: Six Case Studies
By outlining these broad historical contexts, I do not mean to suggest that the professionalization of medicine was achieved neatly, that the limitations of scientific objectivity were never acknowledged, or that doctors never considered a patient as anything other than a material body Nor do I mean to suggest that highbrow literature was a stable, uncontested category or that literary representations of the body always followed generic dictates. History and texts are never so simple. Indeed, the texts in this study, medical and literary texts, are useful precisely because they mediate in complex ways the rise of professional authority and the emergence of the modern body.
To gain a fuller understanding of how the tension between professionalism and the nation’s democratic ideals played out in medicine, Chapter 1 focuses on a specific moment in medical history—the discovery of ether in 1846 by an enterprising dentist whose image did not conform to that of the gentleman scientist. The texts generated by the discovery of etherization and the ensuing controversies reveal the efforts of regulars to position professional medicine within and not against the egalitarian sentiments of the day. In these texts, we hear regulars presenting themselves as open to the discoveries of untutored genius, and we hear them negotiate professional medicine’s relationship to a free market. We also hear, in one leading physician’s enthusiasm for etherization, an argument for medical science and medicine’s view of the body as fundamentally egalitarian. Pain, he suggests, is something all men suffer, and medicine’s embrace of a new technology—etherization—testifies to regulars’ egalitarian effort to improve the lot of all men.
Chapters 2 and 3 focus on critiques of medicine offered by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Hawthorne borrows from the sensational and melodramatic tradition the trope of the mad medical experimenter who is driven by a dangerous mix of intellectual ambition, professional arrogance, and sexual energy. Essentially cautionary tales, both stories imagine a body that exceeds medicine’s ambitious grasp. To Aylmer, the mark on Georgiana’s cheek is a sign of pathology remediable by surgery, a diagnosis and remedy that echo contemporary thinking about lesions, perhaps the most important sign of disease in early nineteenth-century clinical medicine. But for Hawthorne, the mark is much more: indeed, it vibrates with multiple and contradictory meanings. And it cannot be erased without destroying Georgiana’s body and an entire world of heightened meanings—aesthetic, erotic, psychological, dramatic, and somatic—that Hawthorne believes literature can and must honor and imagine. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is set at the moment (sixteenth-century Padua) when medicine first began to map the body’s interior, and it examines the Renaissance notion of the body’s interior as a continent ripe for exploration and colonization, suggesting that such colonization is akin to poisoning. As sixteenth-century anatomists put their names upon the organs they discovered, so Rappaccini marks his daughter’s interior with the botanical poisons he cultivates. Significantly, Hawthorne finds medical ambition appealing as well as disturbing. Aylmer and especially Rappaccini have an intellectual interest in carnality that Hawthorne seems to have shared, and yet Hawthorne also critiques medicine’s role in somaticizing a domestic middle-class subjectivity that made women and their bodies bear the burden of the unresolved psychological, sexual, and economic tensions hidden beneath a valorization of feminine purity, piousness, and self-sacrifice.
Melville’s critique of medicine is based less on a sense of the body’s significatory excesses and more on a love of carnality and a desire to challenge a political order in which corporeality is used to define certain classes of people as uncivilized, irrational, and deeply embodied. Melville seems to have stumbled into his interest in body politics: nakedness is a