Disabled Visions: Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Physical Disability, and Poetic Identity in the Later Victorian Imagination

Abstract

Disabled Visions:Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Physical Disability, and Poetic Identity in the Later Victorian Imagination Heather Tilley (bio) In the 1860s–1870s, a curious phenomenon dubbed "railway spine" exposed ruptures in the mid-Victorian male psyche. Hundreds of people claimed debilitating illnesses resulting from shock experienced in railway accidents, with the phenomenon signaling the start of the medical injury compensation era as numerous litigations were brought against railway companies. As the name suggests, the site of illness was frequently the back, with a significant proportion of people displaying symptoms of progressive forms of paralysis. Medical debate raged around whether illnesses were caused by physical damage to the spine or emotional trauma, a question that had significant implications for compensation claims. John Erichsen, in his 1866 medico-legal treatise On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System, established a highly influential framework for interpreting certain forms of degenerative diseases as resulting from concussion of the spine.1 In other words, he argued that the physical damage was real and sufferers should be compensated for their injuries. However, Erichsen was uncertain as to how railway injuries might cause longer-term damage to the spinal cord, noting only that "if the spine is badly jarred, shaken, or concussed by a blow or shock, … we find that the nervous force is to a certain extent shaken out of the man, and that he has in some way lost nervous power" (p. 95). Significantly, this illustrates how railway spine was framed as a loss of masculine vitality: it was a condition that affected professional men using the railways for work in particularly significant numbers. Erichsen described how the male sufferer of spinal injury frequently became depressed: "His friends remark, and he feels, that 'he is not the man he was.' He has lost bodily energy, mental capacity, business aptitude" (p. 97). Erichsen's theory of the physical causes of injury was used by sufferers to seek damages against railway companies, amounting to over £2 million paid [End Page 607] out in compensation for personal injuries in Britain. This led to a counteroffensive by railway companies, which engaged their own experts to investigate cases. Herbert Page, surgeon to the London and North Western Railway Company, for example, refuted the possibility that railway injuries could—other than very rarely—cause injury to the nerve elements of the spinal cord, noting instead "the temptation to exaggeration and imposture" that pecuniary compensation encouraged. He also suggested that the cases for "general nervous shock," or "functional" rather than "structural" disturbance of the nervous system, were far more numerous.2 Erichsen had robustly argued that railway spine was distinguishable from "hysteria," noting the latter's association with young women rather than "hard-headed, active, practical men of business" (p. 126). Erichsen was intent on identifying an underlying organic cause to these cases to avoid confronting the notion of a masculine self in crisis; he sought to define the loss of masculine qualities of vigor and action as a product of physiological illness rather than the cause of it. The debates that raged around railway spine illustrate anxieties generated by the intersection of masculinity with physical disability in the mid- to late Victorian period. Disability studies scholars have examined the way in which disability more widely was characterized by its relationship to the emotions in the Victorian period. Martha Stoddard Holmes's study of disability across a range of Victorian discourses—including literature, medicine, and sociology—establishes convincingly how "[t]he connection between emotion and impairment" becomes a kind of "cultural shorthand … to indicate or produce emotional excess, add [sic] disability."3 Holmes points to the ways in which Victorian discourses of disability are "melodramatic": not only do we repeatedly encounter disabled characters in that most popular of Victorian literary genres, the stage melodrama, but, more broadly, physical disability is habitually associated with emotional excess, producing a social identity for disabled people defined in emotional terms. Disabled characters and people were becoming defined by their perceived capacity for heightened sensitivity and affect, blurring traditional categories of gender. As Holmes points out, "The distinction between abled and disabled bodies in Victorian culture (and our own) was produced partly in terms of the...