{"id":986,"date":"2016-06-03T14:41:30","date_gmt":"2016-06-03T13:41:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/?p=986"},"modified":"2020-09-14T18:50:10","modified_gmt":"2020-09-14T17:50:10","slug":"the-reading-room-reading-for-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/2016\/06\/03\/the-reading-room-reading-for-health\/","title":{"rendered":"The Reading Room: Reading for Health"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Erika Wright. Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel<\/em> (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2016)<\/p>\n

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Reviewed by\u00a0Dr Jane Darcy,\u00a0Department of English,\u00a0University College London<\/p>\n

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Erika Wright begins Reading for Health<\/em> with a timely reminder for Victorianists, quoting Ruskin\u2019s argument about the dangerous temptation of the \u2018phenomenon of the sick-room\u2019 for weak novelists. Its lure, he writes, is that illness and dying have probably been for these writers \u2018the most impressive part of their own personal experience.\u2019 Ruskin prefers older novelists such as Scott, whose works exemplify \u2018healthy and helpful literature\u2019.<\/p>\n

Wright seeks to address this nineteenth-century preoccupation with disease, together with the broader epistemological question of what constitutes health. She sets herself an ambitious argument: to re-examine a wide range of texts by canonical writers (Austen, Charlotte Bront\u00eb, Dickens, Martineau, Gaskell) using a new theoretical framework, \u2018reading for health.\u2019 She argues that the language we use to theorise disease narratives in the traditional novel assumes a \u2018therapeutic\u2019 model, relying exclusively on \u2018a reading of crisis and recovery that imagines health as the end of beginning, as the absence of action.\u2019 We should rather, she suggests, consider such writings in terms of a \u2018hygienic\u2019 model of \u2018maintenance and prevention\u2019. This new way of reading, she argues, will \u00a0\u2018challeng[e] our sense of order and temporality, setting and metaphor, point of view and voice.\u2019<\/p>\n

It is a large and controversial claim, not least because it depends on examining, in Wright\u2019s words, \u2018narrative strategies used by novelists and medical writers when trying to preserve, promote, and define health<\/em>\u2019 [my italics]. This forces her to suggest that the nineteenth-century writers of her study are consciously subscribing to a new and, to my mind, not entirely lucid theoretical framework within which they should be read. A further problem is that in seeking to cover so broad a range of literature, the working-out of her suggested framework in practice can read at times as over-simplified and over-determined.<\/p>\n

Her first chapter, for example, is entitled \u2018Jane Austen\u2019s Plots of Prevention\u2019. Using and Thomas Beddoes\u2019 Hygeia <\/em>(1802-3) against William Buchan\u2019s popular Domestic Medicine<\/em> (1769), she argues that the former \u2018enacts a subtle but important shift from cure to prevention.\u2019 The implication that Beddoes was the first to write on the importance of the best SARMs<\/a>, diet and exercise in health maintenance, however, ignores centuries of medical writing about the significance of non-naturals (air, sleep, food and drink etc). From here her focus on Sense and Sensibility<\/em> (1811) is inevitably narrow. \u2018Austen targets negligent parents\u2019, she writes. Well, yes and no. Negligent parents are a useful jumping off point for stories, just as much as they are in fairy tales. She is right, however, to draw attention to Marianne Dashwood\u2019s dangerous cultivation of grief. But while Wright offers sensitive reading of some of the novel\u2019s language, there is no discussion of that key eighteenth-century notion, sensibility. The \u2018sense\u2019 and \u2018sensibility\u2019 of Austen\u2019s title may suggest a simple binary, but the words are of course cognates, and the novel offers a subtle exploration of the need for both sense and<\/em> sensibility (the characters who lack sensibility\u2019s gift for compassion are revealed as unpleasant materialists). Most worrying, Wright argues that \u2018All of Austen\u2019s novels have, to varying degrees, embedded narratives that function as warnings.\u2019 Mansfield Park<\/em> she later writes, is \u2018teaching us something else. She is instructing us not to improve but sustain \u2026 not to cure but prevent.\u2019 She is on thin ice here with literary scholars who will surely bridle at the suggestion that Austen is fundamentally a didactic writer.<\/p>\n

Again one of the difficulties of Wright\u2019s range is that she focuses exclusively on physical health, avoiding the vexed issue of the mind-body-spirit relationship. \u2018We are encouraged,\u2019 she writes, to see Mansfield<\/em>\u2019s Fanny Price \u2018as a struggling preventionist.\u2019 Apart from making Fanny sound like an unsuccessful apprehender of smugglers, this misses Austen\u2019s skill here in the extraordinarily acute psychological portrait she gives of sustained unhappiness rooted in childhood. There is a careless misreading too. Henry Crawford doesn\u2019t invite Maria Bertram to \u2018slip dangerously over the ha-ha\u2019. It is not the ha-ha \u2013 that feature of fashionable landscaping – but the symbolically loaded locked gate into the \u2018wilderness\u2019 that Crawford encourages the unhappily engaged Maria to slip round.<\/p>\n

Dickens offers plentiful examples of diseased individuals, of course. Wright in the next chapter focuses on Little Dorrit<\/em> and metaphors of quarantine. She also considers less familiar material: her subsequent exploration of Harriet Martineau\u2019s novel Deerbrook<\/em> (1839) and memoir Life in the Sick-Room<\/em> (1844) is a welcome one. Her argument, however, for \u2018the omniscience of invalidism\u2019 is flawed by an imperfect understanding of narrative theory. The invalid can indeed occupy an important place as a story\u2019s observant outsider figure, but this is far from making her an omniscient narrator. Wright is on safer ground with her discussion of the figure of the newly professionalised doctor in Gaskell\u2019s writing and references to Victorian fiction\u2019s most famous doctor \u2013 George Elliot\u2019s Lydgate in Middlemarch<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Wright teaches family health at the University of Southern California. Her medical expertise perhaps allows her to assume in her readers a full grasp of the history of medicine in the period Reading for Health<\/em> covers. It would have been helpful for non-specialists, however, had she set her discussion of preventive medicine in the wider context of evolving medical understanding across this period. There is one reference, for instance, to humoral medicine, but no mention of how that ancient model of human physiology had been comprehensively replaced by Enlightenment understanding of the nervous system. Above all, Reading for Health<\/em>, however, is about story-telling. Wright follows Rita Charon in holding great store by its therapeutic powers; indeed her afterword comes to rest almost exclusively on Charon\u2019s work. It is without doubt an appealing position, but a detailed critique of the claims for narrative medicine would have added sharpness Wright\u2019s argument.<\/p>\n

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    Erika Wright. Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2016)   Reviewed by\u00a0Dr Jane Darcy,\u00a0Department of English,\u00a0University College London   Erika Wright begins Reading for Health with a timely reminder for Victorianists, quoting Ruskin\u2019s argument about the dangerous temptation of the \u2018phenomenon of the sick-room\u2019 for […]<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":263,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2965],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Reading Room: Reading for Health - Medical Humanities<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/2016\/06\/03\/the-reading-room-reading-for-health\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Reading Room: Reading for Health - Medical Humanities\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"    Erika Wright. Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2016)   Reviewed by\u00a0Dr Jane Darcy,\u00a0Department of English,\u00a0University College London   Erika Wright begins Reading for Health with a timely reminder for Victorianists, quoting Ruskin\u2019s argument about the dangerous temptation of the \u2018phenomenon of the sick-room\u2019 for [...]Read More...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/2016\/06\/03\/the-reading-room-reading-for-health\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Medical Humanities\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-06-03T13:41:30+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2020-09-14T17:50:10+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-humanities\\\/2016\\\/06\\\/03\\\/the-reading-room-reading-for-health\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-humanities\\\/2016\\\/06\\\/03\\\/the-reading-room-reading-for-health\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"\",\"@id\":\"\"},\"headline\":\"The Reading Room: Reading for Health\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-06-03T13:41:30+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2020-09-14T17:50:10+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-humanities\\\/2016\\\/06\\\/03\\\/the-reading-room-reading-for-health\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":1007,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-humanities\\\/#organization\"},\"articleSection\":[\"Book Reviews\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-humanities\\\/2016\\\/06\\\/03\\\/the-reading-room-reading-for-health\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-humanities\\\/2016\\\/06\\\/03\\\/the-reading-room-reading-for-health\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/blogs.bmj.com\\\/medical-humanities\\\/2016\\\/06\\\/03\\\/the-reading-room-reading-for-health\\\/\",\"name\":\"The Reading Room: Reading for Health - 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