Medicine Is War

Lorenzo Servitje

Description

Medicine is most often understood through the metaphor of war. We encounter phrases such as "the war against the coronavirus," "the front lines of the Ebola crisis," "a new weapon against antibiotic resistance," or "the immune system fights cancer" without considering their assumptions, implications, and history. But there is nothing natural about this language. It does not have to be, nor has it always been, the way to understand the relationship between humans and disease.

Medicine Is War shows how this "martial metaphor" was popularized throughout the nineteenth century. Drawing on the works of Mary Shelley, Charles Kingsley, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad, Lorenzo Servitje examines how literary form reflected, reinforced, and critiqued the convergence of militarism and medicine in Victorian culture. He considers how, in migrating from military medicine to the civilian sphere, this metaphor responded to the developments and dangers of modernity: urbanization, industrialization, government intervention, imperial contact, crime, changing gender relations, and the relationship between the one and the many. While cultural and literary scholars have attributed the metaphor to late nineteenth-century germ theory or immunology, this book offers a new, more expansive history stretching from the metaphor's roots in early nineteenth-century militarism to its consolidation during the rise of early twentieth-century pharmacology. In so doing, Servitje establishes literature's pivotal role in shaping what war has made thinkable and actionable under medicine's increasing jurisdiction in our lives. Medicine Is War reveals how, in our own moment, the metaphor remains conducive to harming as much as healing, to control as much as empowerment.
Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I

1. Denaturing the Emergent Martial Metaphor in Mary Shelley's The Last Man

2. Charles Kingsley Meets Cholera Face-to-Face

PART II

3. Military Pasts and Medical Futures in Bram Stoker's Dracula

4. Arthur Conan Doyle's Imperial Armamentarium

5. Modernist Refractions of Tropical Medicine in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Collateral Damage: An Afterword

Addendum: A Surge of Epilogics in the Midst of the War against COVID-19

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Royaume-Uni
• Great Britain
• Stephen Ireland
• History of medicine
• United Kingdom
• Ireland
• Military history
• Reino Unido

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438481692
• Langue: English

Extrait

Medicine Is War
SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Pamela K. Gilbert, editor
Medicine Is War
The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture
Lorenzo Servitje
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Servitje, Lorenzo, [date]– author.
Title: Medicine is war : the martial metaphor in Victorian literature and culture / Lorenzo Servitje.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2021. | Series: SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020017342 | ISBN 9781438481678 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438481692 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. | Medicine in literature. | Diseases in literature. | War in literature. | Medicine, Military—Great Britain—History—19th century. | War—Medical aspects.
Classification: LCC PR878.M42 S47 2020 | DDC 823/.8093561—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017342
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Medicine Is War is dedicated to my wife, Mary Servitje, and my daughter, Loriana Servitje.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART 1
1. Denaturing the Emergent Martial Metaphor in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
2. Charles Kingsley Meets Cholera Face-to-Face
PART 2
3. Military Pasts and Medical Futures in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
4. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Imperial Armamentarium
5. Modernist Refractions of Tropical Medicine in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Collateral Damage: An Afterword
Addendum: A Surge of Epilogics in the Midst of the War against COVID-19
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I wish there were an adequate way to recognize the scores of people who made this work possible in the manner that they deserve. If I have learned anything, it is that knowledge production does not happen in a vacuum. It is with great pleasure (and some anxiety that I will miss someone) that I take time to recall and express thanks to the friends and colleagues who have helped make the three words that comprise the title into the monograph that follows.
I would like to express my sincere appreciation for my dissertation chair, Susan Zieger, who challenged me and encouraged my work from my first day in graduate school. Her work on addiction and nineteenth-century literature was my first introduction to the intersections of literature and medicine as an undergraduate, and it spurred my interest in graduate study. The idea for this project emerged from a single paper for her “Victorian Media” seminar. Sometime in 2013, in an office meeting to discuss the paper after she had already given extensive feedback, Susan asked me to think about how military history might play into the metaphorical construction of “medicine is war” and its literary history—blood transfusions, field hospitals, and the like. This led me down a most productive line of inquiry for the years to follow. I wince a little, now, trying to recall how many versions of the Stoker, Kingsley, and Conrad chapters she read in their various forms (be they for a seminar, for my PhD exam, my dissertation, or before I submitted one to a journal). Her guidance, feedback, and attention to countless drafts and anxious emails were instrumental in the development of this project and me as scholar.
I would like to thank Sherryl Vint for her help on much of the theoretical grounding of this project in biopolitical theory. Her consistent and extended feedback on all chapters in each of their stages has helped me expand my thinking about this project beyond the Victorian era. I am also truly grateful for all her additional help and encouragement on the various related side-projects on medical discourse more broadly that informed my methodological approaches and interests, and, in turn, helped shape this project’s revisions. For many of the ideas in the afterword, in particular, I am truly indebted to her.
Joe Childers devoted countless hours to my exam planning and dissertation, and has given me enough professional advice to comprise a substantive how-to manual on academic work. His insistence on a comprehensive understanding of Victorian literature and history has truly strengthened this project and my scholarship in countless ways. He should know where my recently identified penchant for asking students about metonymy, the Poor Law, the Corn Laws, Chadwick, and Althusser’s definition of ideology can be traced back to.
I would also like to extend special thanks to Devin Griffiths for serving as my extralocutor for this project’s defense as a dissertation. He has been incredibly supportive in many ways, but most recently, I must express my appreciation for Devin making himself available for long phone calls relating to functional antibiotic resistance genes, and citational demands in interdisciplinary work.
My colleagues at Lehigh University in the English and the Health, Medicine and Society Program have supported me in so many ways: in short conversations about ideas, reading groups, answering my varied queries from their areas of expertise, or providing helpful advice on the project itself. Perhaps even more so, just by being the most welcoming department/program that anyone could ask for. To Michael Kramp, your feedback and encouragement has made all the difference in the world.
I’d like to express an extra special thanks to my friends and colleagues who have provided invaluably specific feedback and insight into the history of medicine. Encountering Michael Brown’s work for the first time at the 2015 Military Masculinities Conference introduced me to the vast scholarship that provided some of the historical evidence for many of my hunches, inducted from fiction or from literary or cultural studies scholars. His work, if my citations do not adequately intimate, directed me to many primary sources and taught more about the specific field of medical history, and how it is researched, than I can express. Along with Michael, Stephen Casper has been so very generous with his time and expertise, providing helpful sources, frameworks, and writing advice. I owe both of them a debt of gratitude for their support at key moments in this project’s development.
There are so many other scholars at other institutions who were generous enough to take time and interest in this work. I would especially like to thank Pamela K. Gilbert, whose research inspired and helped me narrow my interest in infectious disease and whose advice and guidance over the past few years has been invaluable. I’m also grateful for the feedback and encouragement from those who have been generous in their engagement and collaboration on this work and related projects, in particular, Catherine Belling, Emilie Taylor-Pirie (née Taylor-Brown), Tabitha Sparks, Meegan Kennedy, Louise Penner, Colin Milburn, Priscilla Wald, Juliet McMullin, Nathan Hensley, Martin Willis, Hannah Landecker, and Sarita Mizin.
My friends and colleagues at UCR have heard and helped me improve countless iterations of these chapters and ideas in various forms. I must single out Anne Sullivan, Ann Garascia, Jessica Roberson, and Sarah Lozier for their insight, encouragement, and support. Among other fond memories, we will always have Chicago style, and its allowance (or demand, if you were in the Archive seminar) for discursive footnotes. I’m also grateful to Addison Palacios, Stina Attebery, and Josh Pearson, among others, who came to so many presentations and provided such thoughtful insights.
I am indebted to Gillian Andrews for her resolve in the face of esoteric research inquiries and innumerable footnotes with (my) questionable formatting. Her incisive copyediting (over and over again) was instrumental in making the manuscript presentable. If the reader judges a particular sentence in this book to be especially effective in its concision and clarity, it is very likely a product of Gill’s suggestions. Her acuity in chasing down obscure leads with periodical sources was nothing short of indefatigable. Ashlee Simon, likewise, improved this manuscript with her close attention to detail when I was doing final revisions. Her research on pre-nineteenth century humoralism, and nineteenth-century antibiotic discourse was extremely helpful. Thank you, Gill and Ashlee.
I am grateful for the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript in its early form, the time they devoted, their generous comments, and their attention to detail. Additionally, the feedback from editors and reviewers at Literature and Medicine , Victorian Studies , and the Journal of Victorian Culture has truly helped shape earlier versions of a number of chapters for the better. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the North American Victorian Association, Modern Language Association, and Society for Science Literature and the Arts, who have provided probing questions and thoughts on conference presentations. If they haven’t been named above, my thanks also goes out to the other scholars working in literary studies, medical history, Victorian studies, and medical humanities who