The Strange Case of Dr White and Mr De Quincey: Manchester, Medicine and Romantic Theories of Biological Racism

Abstract

This essay concerns the encounter between two extraordinary people, one an eighteenth-century surgeon, anatomist, obstetrician (or man-midwife), and collector, the other one of the most powerful of Romantic prose writers. In the essays collected as his ‘Autobiographic Sketches’ (1853–54), Thomas De Quincey describes how as a six-year-old he witnessed the traumatic death of his sister Elizabeth, then nine years of age. Manchester’s two leading physicians, Drs Thomas Percival and Charles White, attended Elizabeth’s death at the De Quincey family home at Greenhay. Percival was a major figure in Manchester’s cultural and scientific life; a dissenter, he was a founder and President of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society from 1782 until his death in 1804. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society at the age of twenty-five, Percival was the author of what has been described as ‘one of the greatest books on medical ethics’. Oddly, De Quincey writes very little about the presence of this important and fascinating figure in this account of the primal scene of his childhood, but is, instead, almost fixated with White. He records how White, perusing the body of his dead sister, ‘pronounced her head to be the finest in its development of any he had ever seen – an assertion which, to my own knowledge he repeated in after years, and with enthusiasm’. White’s repeated ‘enthusiasm’ for this deceased child’s skull might appear slightly troubling to contemporary readers. The nine-year-old Elizabeth De Quincey, as Grevel Lindop speculates, probably died of bacterial Meningitis, but her brother became absolutely convinced that the cause of her death was Hydrocephalus, a condition which leads to the expansion of the forehead in those who suffer from it, and which White would associate elsewhere in his work with the ideal beauty of the heads of Greek statuary. De Quincey comments that the ‘ample brow’ of his sister’s forehead gave Elizabeth an air of ‘intellectual grandeur’ and that her head ‘for its superb developments, was the astonishment of science’ (AutobiographicSketches, Volume 1 (1853), WTDQ, xix. 8). White was Manchester’s leading surgeon for almost sixty years. He was a highly accomplished surgeon and a pioneer obstetrician whose work greatly improved the conditions in which pregnant women gave birth, yet this aspect of his work, a most important legacy, is not mentioned by De Quincey. Rather he refers to White as ‘the most distinguished surgeon at that time in the