Dying Scientifically: Gothic romance and London's Teaching Hospitals (original) (raw)

Towards the end of the novel St Bernard’s. The Romance of a Medical Student (1887) the heroine Mildred, keen to use her inheritance for good, believes that hospital reform is the right cause because patients were ‘the subject of some ghastly medical freak’ and ‘cruel torture’. Mildred’s accusation was not simply melodrama, but designed to resonant with a public wearied by appeals and regaled by antivivisectionists. Sharing a fascination about the misapplication of science with the Gothic, St Bernard’s was one of a number of novels that repackaged the horrors of vivisection for public consumption. However, although it can be dismissed as derivative, it departed from the standard tale found in other texts. As the hero struggles with the moral implications of science and reckless treatment, St Bernard’s challenges the legitimacy of the teaching hospital. Scholars have dissected St Bernard’s to draw out ideas of subjugation and scientific masculinity, but rarely has it been viewed as a whole or placed it in its literary context. Part of the problem is that St Bernard’s is in itself an act of vivisection, combining hospital reform and antivivisection with a bewildering array of social fears. In seeking to provide a more nuanced reading, this paper explores how St Bernard’s combined ‘the methods of science with the methods of romance’ to shift the antivivisection narrative into the hospital. The paper locaties the novel within antivivisectionists’ use of fiction and late-Victorian anxieties about hospital medicine, exploring its relationship with other antivivisection texts and Gothic fiction and examining what it says about scientific practices and mentalities. It shows how St Bernard’s fashioned a very different hospital from existing representations to warn readers of how brutish students and cruel doctors tortured patients to look at how the novel provided a cultural script that recast the hospitals as an uncanny place.

Wasson, Sara, ‘Useful Darkness: Intersections between Medical Humanities and Gothic Studies’, Gothic Studies 17.1 (May 2015): 1-12. ISSN 1362-7937 (print); 2050-456X (online).

Gothic studies has long been concerned with representations of the fragility of human flesh in the grip of illness, as well as bodies confined by medical and legal discourse. The direction of influence goes both ways: Gothic literary elements have arguably influenced medical writing, such as the nineteenth-century clinical case study. In this second decade of the twenty-first century, it is apt to freshly examine intersections between the two fields. The closing years of the twentieth century saw the emergence of medical humanities, an interdisciplinary blend of humanities and social science approaches under the dual goals of using arts to enhance medical education and interrogating medical practice and discourse. Analysis of period medical discourse, legal categories and medical technologies can enrich literary criticism in richly contextualising fictional works within medical practices. Such criticism can be seen as extending the drive towards historicised and localised criticism that has characterised much in Gothic studies in recent decades. Our field offers textual strategies for analysing the processes by which medical discourse, medical processes and globalised biotechnological networks can, at times, do violence to human bodies and minds – both of patient and practitioner. Cultural studies of medicine analyse and unmask this violence. This special issue explores Gothic representations of the way medical practice controls, classifies and torments the body in the service of healing.

Birthed from the Clinic: the Degenerate Medical Students of Edward Berdoe's St. Bernard's

This article reveals how Edward Berdoe's St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student (1887) critiques the evolution of medical science at the fin de siècle. Berdoe deploys the discourse of degeneracy to challenge the culture of medical education that produces monstrous medical students. St. Bernard's reflects not only the ambiguity towards scientific materialism and knowledge, which entails learning how to prolong life by encountering death, but also critiques the foundations of late Victorian medical education by articulating how the middle class was complicit in the horrors that the novel would expose, ultimately suggesting that middle-class health was built on the bodies of the poor. The text's ethical imperative to reform the medical establishment, however, derives its rhetorical power from provoking anxieties of corrupting middle-class health with working-class and pauper bodies. This reveals the novel's problematic use of degeneracy, as St. Bernard's reinscribes some of the very tenets about class that it aims to critique.

Birthed from the Clinic: The Degenerate Medical Students of Edward Berdoe's St. Bernard's

Critical Survey, 2015

This article reveals how Edward Berdoe's St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student (1887) critiques the evolution of medical science at the fin de siècle. Berdoe deploys the discourse of degeneracy to challenge the culture of medical education that produces monstrous medical students. St. Bernard's reflects not only the ambiguity towards scientific materialism and knowledge, which entails learning how to prolong life by encountering death, but also critiques the foundations of late Victorian medical education by articulating how the middle class was complicit in the horrors that the novel would expose, ultimately suggesting that middle-class health was built on the bodies of the poor. The text's ethical imperative to reform the medical establishment, however, derives its rhetorical power from provoking anxieties of corrupting middle-class health with working-class and pauper bodies. This reveals the novel's problematic use of degeneracy, as St. Bernard's reinscribes some of the very tenets about class that it aims to critique. There is something monstrous about the medical student, a trend evident in nineteenth-century texts like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1817) and Arthur Conan Doyle's 'Lot 249' (1892), continuing into the twentieth century with H.P. Lovecraft's 'Herbert West-Reanimator' (1922). While medical students train to promote life, a visceral association with death haunts their portrayal in literature. It is this association that Lewis Carroll makes when he links the medical student to the monstrous: writing in 1875, Carroll warned that medical schools would soon 'create some new and hideous Frankenstein'. 1

Degenerative Doctoring: Coercion, Experimentation and Ethics in Arthur Machen’s Gothic Horror

Victorian Popular Fictions Journal

In “The Inmost Light” and The Great God Pan Arthur Machen demonstrates a medicalised sexism through unethical human experimentation performed on women by doctors who experiment no matter the cost. In Machen’s stories, the sensationalism is meant to create a feeling of horror and disgust that hinges on the cruelty the public had begun to associate with experimental medical science. The narratives also engage with nineteenth-century perspectives on degeneration, women, and rape. Machen’s use of a sexualised rape metaphor dehumanises women and retains a gendered doctor-patient relationship. In light of this gendered relationship, this article considers Machen’s use of elements drawn from the Gothic in relation to the depiction of medicalised sexism and medical ethics in two pieces of his popular fiction.

The Pathology of Common Life: 'Domestic' Medicine as Gothic Disruption

Gothic Studies, 2015

The essay interrogates a range of critically neglected nineteenth-century anthologies, periodicals and yellowbacks to reveal the ways in which ephemeral Gothic narratives contributed revealingly and troublingly to the public understanding of medicine across the nineteenth century and not just during the fin de siècle. By addressing how narratives of everyday medical encounters and interventions were immersed in contemporary anxieties about the nature of medicine and the role of the practitioner, the authors draw attention to how the figure of the practitioner is increasingly problematized until he himself becomes a locus of pathological disturbance, creating a set of images associated with medicine, practitioners and the everyday that proved culturally enduring across nineteenth-century culture.

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