Sensation fiction and the medical context (original) (raw)

2013, The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction

Sensation fiction and the medical context [T]he pleasure which we may conceive taken by the children of the coming time, in the analysis of physical corruption, guides, into fields more dangerous and desolate, the expatiation of an imaginative literature: and that the reactions of moral disease upon itself. .. have become the most valued material of modern fiction, and the most eagerly discussed texts of modern philosophy. 1 John Ruskin, that temperamental commentator on the arts of his time, was displeased with the general tendency of mid nineteenth-century literature to focus on non-ideal physical and mental states. Within this trend, sensation fiction was a genre particularly connected to current understandings of physiology and medicine. Its madwomen and nerve-wracked men existed in a cultural context of acute interest in the body's relation to the mind and soul, in which antisocial actions earlier attributed to evil and sin began to be explained in terms of degenerate constitutions and maniacal obsessions. This chapter will outline some of the background of medical history in the period, and its specific resonance in sensation fiction, including the presence of medical men as heroes and villains. A detailed reading of Wilkie Collins's Armadale (1866) offers an example of the centrality of such themes to a novel that, at first glance, might seem less clearly tied to medical history than many other novels that have been so read. Medical history and fictional form The mid-Victorian period saw the rise of the modern medical profession. In the early part of the century, there was a dramatic increase in the production of medical knowledge, bringing a substantial break from earlier models of medicine dating back at least to the Renaissance. The advent of morbid pathology revolutionised surgery, as did the development of anaesthesia in the mid-century. New instruments and optics expanded the range of physiological investigation in living tissue. Statistical technologies of health demographics, such as morbidity and mortality statistics in the public health arena, and risk tables in the life assurance (insurance) industry shifted interest from