The traffic in Victorian bodies: Medicine, literature, and history.

Abstract

Have we lost the connections between literary studies of Victorian bodies, studies of medicine and literature, and historical studies of medical ideas and practices? The boundary police of academic disciplines might be pardoned for thinking so; indeed, for believing that these projects have always been on different continents drifting in different directions. Certainly, the "body languages" of the former and the latter are often wide apart—the heavily theorized "pathology poetics" of the one being a far cry from the empirical realist narratives of the other. Much recent literary scholarship has gone into rewriting the Victorians in terms of the body's discursive fabrications, the body being taken as the culturally embedded text (often the text) for imaginative and contested readings of the self and others. As testified through the work of Mary Poovey, Catherine Gallagher, Helena [End Page 513] Michie, and Linda Shires among others, a major part of the literary turn in cultural studies has been its somatic turn. While accounts of the medical epistemology of the modern social body remain relatively obscure (and contested), 1 few historians, and even fewer cultural analysts, now doubt that the history of the body forms an important part of the conceptual history of modernity. Whether as a means of contemplating the human condition, or merely pursuing language practices and literary strategies, corporeality and pathology have become obligatory points of passage in the study of Victorian society and culture.