Anne Stiles (ed.), Neurology and literature, 1860–1920, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. x, 229, £45.00 (hardback 978-0-230-52094-3).

Abstract

The editor of this collection maintains in her Introduction that, between 1860 and 1920, scientists and artists were “paying very close attention to one another”. Indeed, a “mutually responsive” dialogue occurred during this period that was founded upon a set of shared concerns. Stiles maintains that, whatever differences might have divided them, intellectuals engaged in different disciplines shared a common ambivalence about “the philosophical ramifications of scientific materialism and physiological reductionism” (p. 2). These are sweeping claims. None the less, it is the case that the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth did see an exceptional level of interaction between the scientific and literary worlds. This was, as Stiles points out, no one-way traffic, with science influencing literature or vice versa. There was rather a set of “two-way conversations between disciplines” (p. 13). This invites the kind of interdisciplinary enquiry that the essays in the present volume attempt, one that seeks to detail the complex interactions between medicine, biology, and literature around the turn of the twentieth century. Stiles claims that the present is a particularly auspicious moment for such an exercise because of what she alleges are strong similarities between the early twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries' approaches to the issues surrounding mental disease. The eight papers that make up the volume are neatly divided into four sections. ‘Catalysts’ deals with key events that drew the attention of literary figures to aspects of neurology. Thus Laura Otis discusses how H G Wells and Wilkie Collins “retried” David Ferrier in their novels The island of Dr. Moreau and Heart and science. She maintains that these works of fiction “offer critiques of science far more complex and insightful than those of Ferrier's prosecutors”. (p. 28) Her analysis is interesting and insightful. But her assertion that “Ferrier's researches aroused the public for the same reason that audiences shuddered [sic] at The Matrix” (p. 31) seems a little far-fetched. Part II—‘Diagnostic categories’—deals with the emergence of new clinical entities and with how these found representation in works of fiction. Andrew Mangham seeks the origins of the contemporary diagnostic category of Body Dysmorphic Disorder in the psychiatric thought of the late nineteenth century. He maintains, moreover, that the emergence of the category of “dysmorphophobia” owed much to earlier fictional narratives. By 1891, “psychiatry had a backlog of works, both literary and scientific, on which it could draw in order to identify and label the concept of a looks-related neurosis” (p. 87). Presumably, some such critical mass of exemplary material must accumulate before a term for condition can emerge. In a third part on ‘Sex and the brain’ Randall Knoper maintains that in his novel, A mortal antipathy, Oliver Wendell Holmes made the connection between childhood trauma and sexual inversion at least a decade before the publication of Freud and Breuer's studies in hysteria. This might seem at first glance a variation on the theme of establishing priority of discovery that preoccupied medical historians of yore. However, Knoper's paper does problematize the conventional distinction between fictional and scientific writing in stimulating ways. In a final section on ‘The traumatized brain’, Jill Matus attempts to historicize the emergence in the nineteenth century of the notion of psychic shock through a study of a range of both fictional and non-fictional texts. Her contention is that the literary work should be viewed not only as “an index of cultural reactions to scientific concepts, but also as an agent in developing discourses of the mind and body” (p. 165). Mark Micale gives a more straightforward account of the (largely unrecognized) existence of psychological trauma among many of those who fought in the American Civil War. The fact that Silas Weir Mitchell, the most prominent American neurologist of the epoch, was also a successful novelist provides a somewhat tenuous link to the main themes of the volume.