Surgical Injury and Narrative Cure in Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch and Heart and Science

Abstract

Surgical Injury and Narrative Cure in Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch and Heart and Science Tabitha Sparks The increased use of surgical medicine in the mid-to-late Victorian period acquainted English culture with a host of disquieting images, and a literary survey of the rise of the surgical field evinces great anxiety over this form of medicine. Surgery's management of the body's innermost recesses contrasted sharply with pharmaceutical medicine's less invasive approach, and the literature of this era often depicts the surgeon as immoderately attempting to correct nature. Wilkie Collins focuses in Poor Miss Finch (1872) and Heart and Science (1883) upon two of the period's most violent operations, optical surgery and vivisection. In these fictions, the surgical procedures uncomfortably impinge upon realms of character and nature that technically reach beyond the surgeon's scalpel, but are in danger of its transformations nonetheless. As the medical plots of Poor Miss Finch and Heart and Science demonstrate, the project of estranging the part from the whole, or the organ from the self, threatens to destruct the love story at the center of these novels by harming the patient, in both cases a young woman. In Poor Miss Finch, the heroine, Lucilla Finch, undergoes a corrective surgery to regain her vision. But in the process of her recuperation, her personal life and relationship with her fiancé fall apart. Similarly, in Heart and Science, Carmina Greywell is suspended, during a protracted illness, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 32.1 (Winter 2002): 1-31. Copyright © 2002 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 2 fNT between the prospect of death and a post-mortem examination by the novel's vivisectionist, or survival and marriage to her doctor-fiancé. In both novels, surgery or its prospect stands to nullify the privileged romantic relationship that motivates the plot, and promises to secure the heroine from the designs of sinister company, or death. Because the surgical procedure in these two novels thus dismantles the domestic relationships upon which the fictions structurally and ideologically depend, Collins represents surgery as a destructive practice. The mid-century expansion of scientific knowledge, and the "Scientific Revolution" in Victorian medicine (Cornfield 140), at once marginalized and elevated the work of the doctor, conferring a considerable power that, as the century progressed, would often be interpreted as suspicious and even sinister.l An example of the way that the doctor benefited from science at the same time that he became associated with arcane knowledge is seen in his increased access to medical technology. The microscope, for instance, commonly used by the 1860s (Shortt 71), became a new symbol of the doctor's scientific faculties, and added to his prestige by introducing him to provinces beyond the sight of the layperson. The rise of scientific medicine greatly altered the system of medical education in Britain in the second half of the century, and following Germany 's lead, British medical schools hastened to include laboratory and clinical training in their curriculums. In 1870 the Royal College of Surgeons , quickly followed by the University of London, required all students to attend a practical course of general anatomy and physiology, with emphasis upon laboratory experimentation (Alter 29)—which to a great extent meant science based on animal experimentation (Lawrence 72). Medical historian AJ. Youngson argues that "most doctors before 1850, and many as late as 1870 . . . simply did not observe or think scientifically" (17). But the scientifically informed transformation of medical thinking around 1870 was not, as I have suggested, an unqualified gain. For instance , the development of cult sciences in the late-nineteenth century like phrenology and mesmerism inspired public suspicion of those academic sciences that were considered more legitimate (Shortt 59). Among doctors , the modern surgeon was especially associated with esoteric knowledge as well as a crude ambitiousness that marks the class-rise of this professional .2 Surgeons were socially inferior to physicians until the second half of the nineteenth century, when the rise of experimental surgery ele- Surgical Injury and Narrative Cure 3 vated their profile by signifying their potentially unlimited capacity to cure or eradicate disease (Porter 597). Roy Porter writes that "fame and fortune awaited the surgical...