Sari Altschuler - The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States

THE MEDICAL
IMAGINATION

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES
Series editors:
Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown,
Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial,
revolutionary, and early national history and culture,
Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes
and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character,
and with a special emphasis on the period from about
1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with
the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.

LITERATURE AND HEALTH
IN THE EARLY UNITED STATES

SARI ALTSCHULER

Publication of this volume was aided by the C. Dallett Hemphill Publication Fund.

Copyright 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Altschuler, Sari, author.

Title: The medical imagination: literature and health in the early United States / Sari Altschuler.

Other titles: Early American studies.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: Early American studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017028650 | ISBN 9780812249866 (hardcover: alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Literature and medicineUnited StatesHistory18th century. | Literature and medicineUnited StatesHistory19th century. | MedicineUnited StatesHistory18th century. | MedicineUnited StatesHistory18th century. | MedicinePhilosophyHistory18th century. | MedicinePhilosophyHistory19th century. | Medical literatureUnited StatesHistory18th century. | Medical literatureUnited StatesHistory19th century. | American literature17831850History and criticism. | Diseases in literature.

Classification: LCC PS217.M44 A45 2018 | DDC 810.9/356109033dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028650

For my family, Donna, Alan, Daniel, and Chris, with love

You are at sea about poetry and scienceneither is the other, but in science there are times when, starting from facts, imagination is on the wing. It casts its treasure at the feet of reason.

S. Weir Mitchell to Amelia Gere Mason (March 24, 1912)

I imagined poetry might, if given the chance, even heal medicine itself.

Rafael Campo, The Art of Healing: A Doctors Black Bag of Poetry (2003)

EXPERIMENT, Experimentum; same etymon. (F.) Exprience. A trial, made on the bodies of men or animals, for the purpose of detecting the effect of a remedy, or of becoming better acquainted with their structure, functions, or peculiarities. In a more general sense, it means any trial instituted with the intent of becoming better acquainted with any thing.

Robley Dunglison (The Father of American Physiology), Medical Lexicon (1839)

In the fall of 1841, physician and novelist Dr. Robert Montgomery Bird (18061854) stood before a group of new medical students and delivered what must have been a dispiriting talk. In The Difficulties of Medical Science, Bird explained that medicine faced many challenges. Every science, he told his students, was, and of a necessity must be, imperfect, but the difficulties of medicine were greater and more numerous.

Invoking Momus, the classical figure who teased Hephaestus for making the body without a window through which to see the human heart, Bird

Throughout his life as in his lecture, Birds literary and medical interests intersected. He used the classics, quoted verse, and invoked Shakespeare in his medical writings.).

It may have been physically impossible to know certain aspects of health, but, like many doctors of his era, Bird also used imagination and literary form to explore challenging questions in medicine. Bird was a physician who understood that genres were strategies; their different forms allowed writers to examine different facets of health. This was especially true in his novels. He used fiction to investigate aspects of health that were difficultif not impossibleto test physically, as well as those that were better pursued through humanistic methods. Like the eponymous narrator of his 1836 novel Sheppard Lee: Written by Himself, Bird hoped readers would have a more liberal understanding of the subjects of knowledge.

Robert Montgomery Bird offers a particularly illuminating, but by no means unique, window onto the medical work of literature; in fact, medicine and literature had a long, entangled history in the Atlantic world. Richard Blackmore (16551729), Samuel Garth (16611719), John Armstrong (17091779), Mark Akenside (17211770), and John Keats (17951821) were just some of Britains notable physician-poets during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and doctors like Tobias Smollett (17211771) and Oliver Goldsmith

Figure 1. Robert Montgomery Bird works on materia medica (left) and his novel The Infidel (1835) (right). The back of this page is blank. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Founding Father and famed physician Benjamin Rush (17461813), the most famous American doctor for nearly a century, explained why: Exactly the same thing takes place in the act of judgment in selecting and combining related ideas and rejecting such as are not related, as takes place in selecting and combining words, in writing poetry and rhyme. The ear combines related words, or such asto use a common phrasedo not jangle with each other; and rejects such as are not related.

From the earliest days of health care in the United States doctors turned heroic couplets toward the ends of heroic medicine. Samuel Latham Mitchill (17641831) used poetry in 1797 to make his case about the geography of human health, as did Joseph Young when he quoted Alexander Popes verse in the pages of the New York journal the Medical Repository to defend the use of analogy in place of observation in science. Emphasizing Darwins history as a country doctor, Caldwell pushed his counterparts in the United States to consider the physician-poet path for themselves.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, doctors wrote poetry that was formally strict; constrained meter and rhyme organized their theories and observations. Ordered poetic form kept a tight rein on doctors imaginations. Although doctors poetry filled the pages of American journals and magazines well into the nineteenth century, their work has gone largely unnoticed because much of the versehighly structured and widely practiced Its form was, however, largely the point, and the practice of writing this kind of poetry was valuable training for the medical mind.