Abstract
This chapter addresses the issue of civic duties with reference to the modes in which the figures of the syphilitic child and the syphilitic insane were used in discussions concerning the future of the British nation and the British Empire. Paradoxically, it argues, these figures of fear, which populated late nineteenth century novels and persistently reappeared in the European visual idiom, deflected popular attention away from the pain and suffering of syphilis victims. In contrast, documents produced by Victorian asylumdom openly addressed the suffering and care provision for syphilis patients and thus complicated the visibility of the disease and its cultural exegesis.
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Notes
- 1.
There was little unanimity as to the use of this terminology. While Fournier regarded congenital and hereditary syphilis as distinct phenomena, some practitioners were talking inclusively of ‘inherited syphilis’, others introduced additional distinctions. I am using ‘hereditary’, ‘congenital’ and ‘inherited’ interchangeably and in a generic sense to stand for all types of syphilis transmission across generations.
- 2.
I am using ‘syphilis heredity’ as an all-encompassing term, reserving ‘parasyphilis’ to indicate inherited predispositions and pathological states traceable to syphilis, such as GPI or locomotor ataxia.
- 3.
It should, however, be remembered that the impact of these phenomena varied. In her discussion of Lamarckian influence on medical debates of heredity and syphilis, for instance, Elizabeth Lomax claims that although Fournier’s notions of parasyphilis gained large following in French medical circles, British professionals were reluctant to adopt them, especially as regards the generational transmission of syphilis (1979: 34–5).
- 4.
For a critical account of the various notions of heredity activated in the debates on hereditary syphilis, see Lomax 1979.
- 5.
While some have argued that Oswald received the disease from his father, others believe that he acquired it in Paris. Others still regard him as an innocent sufferer who was infected by the use of his father’s pipe, an action that has been interpreted by some critics as a symbol of “phedofilic [sic] incest” (Johansen 2005: 101).
- 6.
For a historical overview of this cooperation and a survey of the sketches, see Templeton 2008: 39–55.
- 7.
It is important to remember that Munch visually transposes Oswald’s complicated heritage as he renders another pietà, this time with the sketch of an offsite scene in which Oswald is huddled on his father’s lap while his mother stands ominously in the door. This “burlesque pietà” references the scene in which Mr Alving gives Oswald the pipe to smoke, a disturbing scene of paternal irresponsibility and cruelty (Templeton 2008: 55), that gave rise to the aforementioned divergent interpretations.
- 8.
For further elaboration, see Claeys 2010: 111–12.
- 9.
For an interpretation of Dracula as a satire on the New Woman, see Senf 1982.
- 10.
For an overview, see Raoul 2007.
- 11.
Both Bailin and Stoddard-Holmes, for instance, reference the ways in which metaphors can be helpful in expressing pain. In the circles of narrative medicine, rhetorical tropes are crucial sites of reference in the understanding of patients’ experience, see Kleinman 1988, Charon 2006, Mattingly and Garro 2000, Mattingly 1998.
- 12.
A GPI patient, continues Mercier, can exhibit a radically opposite type of behaviour: prolonged states of dullness, reclusion and apathy (1914: 94), which are signs of the “depressed” or “melancholic” type of paralysis, in which the patient envisions himself guilty of highly exaggerated crimes, a source of putrefaction and general disgust (108). In other types of paralytic, the levels of anxiety and mental deterioration differ.
- 13.
Male Patient Casebook. 1886: 121. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 14.
Male Patient Casebook. 1886: 118. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 15.
Male Patient Casebook. 1887: 88. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 16.
Male Patient Casebook. 1900: 67. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 17.
For an account of the most common delusions in clinical notes, see G. Davis 2008: 83–124.
- 18.
“John Samuel Sankey.” Male Patient Casebook. 1886: 114. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 19.
Male Patient Casebook. 1886: 118. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 20.
Female Patient Casebook. 1892: 63. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 21.
“Notice of Death.” Male Patient Casebook. 1886: 122a. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 22.
Male Patient Casebook. 1886: 122a. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 23.
“John Stevenson.” Male Patient Casebook. 1891: 33. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 24.
Male Patient Casebook. 1891: 33. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 25.
This of course does not mean that there was no exchange between society and the asylum and that they were hermetic institutions. For the relation between institutionalized and familial care, see Mooney and Reinarz 2009.
- 26.
Female Patient Casebook. 1892: 63. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683-1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 27.
Male Patient Casebook. 1892: 31. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 28.
Male Patient Casebook. 1892: 31. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 29.
“Sydney George Smith.” Male Patient Casebook. 1887: 42. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 30.
“Notice of Death.” Female Patient Casebook. 1892: 63. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
- 31.
Female Patient Casebook. 1892: 63. Bethlem Hospital Patient Admission Registers and Casebooks 1683–1932. MS. Bethlem Museum of the Mind Archives, London.
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Pietrzak-Franger, M. (2017). (Eugenic) Utopias: National Future and Individual Suffering. In: Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49535-4_6
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