"I was named Doctor": Fancy about Medicine in Dickens's Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions

Abstract

"I was named Doctor":Fancy about Medicine in Dickens's Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions Shu-Fang Lai (bio) It is well acknowledged that Dickens's novels and journalism have formed a canon of realistic reflections on Victorian lives containing people, ideas, and events related to medicine, among other subject matter. Doctors attending to patients in sick-rooms, elaborated death-bed scenes, and portrayals of the mentally ill in his novels have intrigued many critics to explore Dickens's fiction in relation to the medical profession.1 Among Dickens's works is a novel entitled Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions that features a "doctor" in the most quaint and metaphorical sense that parallels other fictional narratives centred on medical practitioners such as George Eliot's Middlemarch, Harriet Martineau's Deerbrook, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife, Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science, Anthony Trollope's Doctor Thorne, and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In this work, I intend to explore Dickens's representations of health-related issues and heredity in this story, his fictional use of the medical profession in a refreshingly uncanny way, and his understanding of emotions and evolution as intertwined with his literary imagination. "Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions" is originally among the selection of tales written by Dickens and his contributors published anonymously as the extra Christmas special issue of his family magazine All the Year Round in 1865 and then in a single volume published by Chapman and Hall (both forms sold at fourpence). By this time, Dickens had already established himself as the mouthpiece of Christmas festival celebrations due to A Christmas Carol, Christmas books, and all the extra Christmas special issues of the two weekly magazines he edited. Seasonal special issues promised better circulation than regular ones, so Dickens readily kept up this ritual of collaborating with other contributors to write the extra Christmas special issues until he died in 1870.2 He considers something affecting like Harriet Martineau's "The Deaf Playmate's Story" for the 1852 extra Christmas Number was "precisely what his readers wanted in short fiction" (Allingham 148, 150). Even if the sale of the weekly (with the early serialized parts of Our Mutual Friend) declined in 1864, the sales of [End Page 39] the Christmas issue of 1865 surged and "reached 200,200 copies by early January and eventually topped a quarter of a million" (Grass 82). The cover of the special issue displays a table of contents written as prescriptions. The medication guidance is clearly endowed with philosophical connotations: I. To be Taken Immediately II. Not to be Taken at Dinner Time III. To be Taken at Dinner Time IV. Not to be Taken for Granted V. To be Taken in Water VI. To be Taken with a Grain of Salt VII. To be Taken and Tried VIII. To be Taken for Life Of these "philosophical prescriptions" (to borrow Andrew Mangham's phrase in The Science of Starving, 155)3 or what may also be called "social prescriptions," three are by Dickens's hand. The beginning and end (named "To be Taken Immediately" and "To be Taken for Life") make up the chapters of "Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions."4 The other story by Dickens is the prescription of "To Take Something with a Grain of Salt," which bears origin in the ancient prescription of a grain of salt as the antidote for poison noted in Pliny the Elder's translation of The Natural History. The phrase "To Take Something with a Grain of Salt" is an idiomatic expression of a skeptical attitude, meaning "(to accept a statement) with a certain amount of reserve," according to the OED. This piece is embedded with Dickens's criticism of the Victorian justice system and was later reprinted with other ghost stories, retitled "The Trial for Murder." The Victorian period is known to be a time when drugs such as opium and laudanum could be bought and taken without doctors' prescriptions; for example, opiates were sold to anyone who could afford them. In his fictional narrative, Dickens exploits the image of the prescription, namely, a doctor's written Click for larger view View full...