Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Amelia Bonea

Abstract

Reviewed by: Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Amelia Bonea et al. Susan Zieger (bio) Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Amelia Bonea, Melissa Dickson, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jennifer Wallis; pp. vii + 336. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019, $50.00. This co-authored volume emerges from the European Research Council-funded project "Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives" directed by Sally Shuttleworth, which ran from 2014 to 2019 at Oxford University. The project ventured that twenty-first-century preoccupations with stress, overwork, insomnia, and related maladies of everyday life first appeared in nineteenth-century discourses of mental strain. Taking Matthew Arnold's overtaxed heads and palsied hearts as its watchwords, the project hosted an array of postdoctoral researchers, generated a wealth of publications, and created an open-access database of over three thousand primary sources. Building the nineteenth-century history of today's quest for wellness, the project drove a variety of public-facing programming, recording a podcast, devising a light show and a card game, and producing a children's book. Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain is the centerpiece of its academic output. It is both uncanny and amusing to read medical and popular writers of the late-nineteenth century anticipating a common critique of today's social media: for example, by complaining about "over-publicity," the insidious framing of private conversations for an audience (217). Today's information overload was first mooted by writers who fretted that one month's worth of thought equaled that of a lifetime just two generations earlier. Then as now, outdoor exercise was recommended to take the edge off knowledge work. And today's platform economy resembles the precarity of proletarian labor throughout the century. Beneath the surprise of such contiguities lies the potential for a deeper critique of the ways that capital forms, deforms, and re-forms subjectivities, from the first generations to experience industrialization to our own neoliberal and globalized lifestyles. Without actually making such a case, the book places all the evidence for it in plain sight. Anxious Times is also less concerned to forge precise genealogies between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century discourses of modern illth than it is to excavate the older discourses. In the introduction, Shuttleworth lays out the book's concerns, beginning with information overload, moving briskly through the problematic central term "modernity," and pointing out the particularly British aspect of the inquiry, the extension to occupational health, which forms the subject of the first chapter (3). The subsequent five chapters deal with the medical engagement with telegraphs and telephones; medical tourism in seaside resorts; the woman drinker; overpressure in schools; and fantasies of adapting the nervous system to the modern world order. Together, they offer an overview [End Page 112] of anxiety—and ways to combat it—that will be familiar to anyone who has encountered current discourses about screen time, gut health, and self-medication. The first and second chapters, written by Amelia Bonea, deal with occupational health and telegraphic and telephonic technologies. She reveals that Victorian occupational health discourse was indebted to Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini's Diseases of Workers (1700), an inquiry into the diseases specific to certain kinds of work, exposures to noxious substances, and mechanical hazards. Victorian scientific and popular writing expanded and transformed Ramazzini's etiologies into diagnoses of new steel pens exacerbating writer's cramp; industrial laborers inhaling construction dust; sedentarism hampering clerks' digestion; and housemaids suffering from inflamed knees. Whereas one might expect a chapter on the telegraph and telephone to rehearse the familiar story of their acceleration of their users' nervous illnesses, Bonea instead demonstrates how they enabled long-distance medical care. In an experiment in "telephonic auscultation," for example, a doctor combined a stethoscope and a telephone to listen to a young lady's heartbeat at a distance (67). Recast as an "audiometer," the telephone could assist those with hearing difficulties; integrated into modernizing medical practices, hospitals, and ambulance services, it accelerated the delivery of medical care and transformed relations between doctors and patients (69). Chapter 3, which tells the story of seaside resorts, shows how the concept of traveling for...