Abstract
In this chapter examines Thelwall’s and Beddoes’s descriptions of how aesthetic judgement is used in the practice of medicine, as well as their challenges to contemporaneous medical conventions that valued embodied norms over functional improvement. In his Letter to Henry Cline, for example, Thelwall censures his peers for surgically replicating structural normalcy in patients born with oral ‘deformities’—often at the expense of their ability to vocally communicate. In Hygëia, Beddoes effectively unyokes aesthetic standards from standards of ‘health’. He illustrates the constructedness of ‘beauty’, explaining how the scrofulic individual’s appearance may be praised even though it foretells a gruesome descent into illness; he likewise illustrates how those with scars from past disease are scorned despite the fact that they are in perfect functional ‘health’.
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Notes
- 1.
Like Thelwall—though not nearly to the same extent—Priestley was active in leftist political discussions, and Mike Jay usefully reads the “single-minded destruction of Priestley’s laboratory” as reflective of the contemporary belief in a “symmetry between … chemical researches and … revolutionary politics” (3).
- 2.
He offered his resignation in the summer of 1792 amidst governmental scrutiny of faculty members, although it is unclear “[w]hether politics was the cause, or a pretext, or simply one reason among many” for Beddoes’s departure from the university (Jay 52). For reasons of funding he was asked to remain for another year, but his departure was moved up to Christmas.
- 3.
Michael Scrivener, Andrew McCann, Nicholas Roe, and J. R. Allard have all argued for some sense of political continuity across Thelwall’s diverse career. For Scrivener, however, Thelwall’s elocutionary writings “are largely apolitical—or political in an allegorical way” (285); similarly, for McCann, “As an elocutionist … Thelwall had cast off politics” (223).
- 4.
As Michael Scrivener reminds us, Thelwall was “[p]rohibited from lecturing and journalism, shadowed by spies, forced to retire to a Welsh farm, discouraged by the course of the revolution in France, [and] devastated by the death of his young daughter” (4). Indeed, not only did Thelwall have to contend with a repressive governmental response to his continuing freedom, but he also faced the turning of public opinion against the more radical aspects of his political philosophies. By the commencement of his elocutionary career, early popular enthusiasm about the French Revolution had soured into skepticism that soon gave way to deep and widespread distrust in anything thought to resemble Jacobinism.
- 5.
Porter uses the phrase “histories of the medicines” in recognition of the idea that “there has never been a single, homogeneous body of theory and practice answering to the name ‘medicine’” (Popularization 1).
- 6.
The system Beddoes proposed is modeled partly on the reformed French medical system and in several regards anticipates modern medical education. Beddoes indicates that the first three years of medical education should be spent largely in academic study. But he claims the need for hands-on training: by the fourth year students should attend “clinical lectures,” as well as “[o]bservation of medical cases, and practical reading,” and the fifth and sixth years should find the student in “attendance on hospitals, with practical reading and lectures” (Letter to Banks 57–8). British medicine as a whole imported—and many would say benefited from—the medical developments of Revolutionary and Imperial France. For more on French medicine, see Weiner.
- 7.
For a detailed account of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical market, see Anne Digby’s Making a medical living: Doctors and patients in the English market for medicine, 1720–1911.
- 8.
For a detailed account of several aspects of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anatomy, as well as the procurement and use of anatomical specimens, see the edited collection Anatomical Dissection in Enlightenment England and Beyond: Autopsy, Pathology and Display, edited by Piers Mitchell.
- 9.
As Neil Vickers explains, some (including Irvine Loudon) theorize that the fact that “[p]hysicians rarely touched their patients” reflects a desire to “preserve their status as professionals,” although Susan C. Lawrence has connected this tendency to holistic theories of medicine, which would have rendered the tactile examination of specific body parts relatively useless (Coleridge and the Doctors 17).
- 10.
Beddoes’ hatred of quacks was common to professional medical men. As Roy Porter explains, “quack” was understood as a “ubiquitous swear-word”: “The quack was to the physician what the hack was to the poet, and the pretender to the king” (Health for Sale 2).
- 11.
It bears mention that although self-help manuals offered apparent control to the patient, they did not always live up to their advertised democratic goals: Roy Porter suggests that while “they might encourage independence of judgment, breeding that ‘health protestantism’ which fired nineteenth-century alternative medicine,” they could also “reinforce the authority of the medical elite” by publicizing their methods (Greatest Benefit 283–4). The ambiguous position of self-help manuals also demonstrates the irregularity of Romantic medicine.
- 12.
For an account of speech therapy during the era, see Rockey, “Origins.”
- 13.
Much work has recently been done on the nature of modern medical authority and the antagonistic relationship between the modern doctor and modern patient. See Freidson, Couser, and Hawkins.
- 14.
This practice marks Thelwall, and certain of his populist contemporaries (Beddoes included), as exceptional. G. Thomas Couser underscores, “discourse between patient and doctor occurs in a way that may be at odds with the root meaning of communication, the making common of information”—because of specialized discourse and because of the medical imperative to maintain authority (20–1). Also see Freidson on power and authority in medicine.
- 15.
Rockey indicates that when compared to Victorian elocutionists, whose professional attention seemed to be focused on “stuttering, lisping, and provincialisms” (“Logopaedic” 89), Thelwall’s interests were remarkably broad, suggesting his optimism and willingness to include a wide range of patients in his therapeutic project.
- 16.
See Garland-Thomson (“Cultural Logic”) and Wendell on the broad social implications of an emphasis on treating and curing disabilities. In discussing “[t]he widespread message that they [the disabled] are not good enough until they are ‘cured’,” Wendell argues that “the drive to find ‘cures’ for disabilities can be seen, by those who appreciate disabilities as differences, to be as much an attempt to wipe out difference as an effort to relieve suffering” (Rejected Body 83).
- 17.
Thelwall reveals his sympathy and even allegiance with the disabled when he pointedly asserts that they will rightly understand the value of his techniques even if “senators, barristers, and divines, may be content to whine, and croak, and scream, in feeble and exhausting discord” (Cline 27–8).
- 18.
The importance of social participation should not be underestimated. As Susan Wendell underscores, there is a fundamental connection between the exclusion of the disabled from the public world and their lack of access to—and the social and governmental dismissal of—their civil and human rights (Rejected Body40–1). This is one of many insights that leads Wendell to conclude that the devastating social consequences of “disability” may warrant an individual’s desire for a cure, even when the immutable realities of a biological difference itself may not. It is on all of these grounds that I do not wholly agree with McCann’s contention that Thelwall’s gentlemen pupils and their professional ambitions suggest that “assimilation into the institutions of bourgeois public life was the goal … indicating an urge to bring students into the ambit of official political and cultural authority, rather than an attempt to subvert its institutions” (225).
- 19.
For an account of the “consistency down the centuries in basic terminology and definitions of mental disability,” despite importantly shifting “circumstances of application,” see Peter Rushton (47). For a discussion of neuroscience and Romanticism—and of idiocy in particular—see Alan Richardson. For an overview of special education, see Winzer.
- 20.
Itard ultimately achieved some level of success with his pupil, confirming the validity of his approach in the eyes of the public and medicine. There is the strong suggestion that Itard’s goal with Victor was largely philosophical, and his therapeutic approach implies a desire to verify his beliefs about human development. This may help to explain why Thelwall criticized his educational techniques (Rockey, “Origins” 164). For more on Victor and Itard, see Patrick McDonagh and Harlan Lane. Other instances of the “wild child” captured the scientific and cultural imagination earlier in the century. For an account of Peter of Hanover, as well as Lord Monboddo’s and Daniel Defoe’s responses to him, see Bewell, “Wordsworth’s Primal Scene.”
- 21.
In their desire to suggest the improvability of “moral idiots,” Gough and Thelwall anticipated Leo Kanner’s unfortunate misunderstanding about the etiology of autism. Though Gough leaves open the possibility of natural antisocial inclinations, he also remarks on the “mischief” that “may be done to the faculties by an improper education” (Cline 110), and Thelwall more emphatically connects moral idiocy to educational failures, insisting “the parents are sometimes the disease” (Results 56). Kanner similarly “stress[ed] the contributory effects of parental lack of warmth on constitutionally predisposed children” (Wolff 204). Interestingly, Thelwall is much more forgiving of the parents of a 9-year-old moral idiot in Results of Experience: “If any thing had been wrong, it was that which almost inevitably resulted from the kind sympathies and best feelings of an amiable family” (67). It is unclear whether this represents a development in Thelwall’s attitudes or a fondness for those particular parents, though the text itself suggests both.
- 22.
Beddoes believes that Pinel’s argument may be due to his false assumption that a lesion of the brain could not cause variable effects that would sporadically come and go over an individual’s lifetime. Beddoes dispatches with this assumption by pointing out that most common physical ailments—bladder stones, “a carious tooth,” or “the disorganized heart”—do not present stable and unchanging symptoms. According to this rationale, nor should brain lesions be said to cause constant and invariable symptoms (X: 73).
- 23.
The aesthetic restructuring Beddoes advocates here anticipates the healthy disabled/unhealthy disabled divide that has proven so problematic for contemporary disability activists and scholars. Susan Wendell has written extensively on these fissures, as some disabled people seek to “distinguish themselves from those who are ill” (“Unhealthy Disabled” 18).
- 24.
Susan Wendell writes, for example,
The power of culture alone to construct a disability is revealed when we consider bodily differences—deviations from a society’s conception of a “normal” or acceptable body—that, although they cause little or no functional or physical difficulty for the person who has them, constitute major social disabilities. An important example is facial scarring, which is a disability of appearance only, a disability constructed totally by stigma and cultural meanings. (Rejected Body 44)
- 25.
The modifier “rational” is key. Susan Wendell explains that seeing disability as an exotic form of difference is not so very far from seeing it as defect. She writes:
It is not uncommon for a difference to be valued for being exotic and interesting, even as the people who embody it or are associated with it are kept on the outskirts of society (Fiedler 1984). People with disabilities are subject to this double-edged form of appreciation, which plays a role in their token cultural representation. Since their difference is what is seen to make them interesting, it is highlighted, and their similarity to people without disabilities is minimized or else commented on as amazing or amusing in order to maintain focus upon the difference. (Rejected Body 66)
Similarly, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has compellingly demonstrated in Staring: How We Look that there are many ways to look at a disabled body, many ways to be beheld as a disabled body.
- 26.
Paul Kelleher has read this passage from Smith in the context of deformity, noting, “An almost comic scene is offered in which ‘we,’ newly sensitized to the aesthetic effects of personal appearance, rush to an actual mirror after having regarded ourselves in the figurative mirror of society” (48). As Kelleher notes, “unlike the moment of self-examination in which we scrutinized our bodies, there is no mirror that can reflect back to us the image of our behaviour other than the mirror found in other people” (49)—a problem Beddoes addresses in Hygëia, as I have already discussed.
- 27.
See Lucy Newlyn’s Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader. Aside from the editions of the poem itself—of which there were, by 1800, over a hundred—the text and its lessons could be found in literature and anthologies for women and children. Paradise Lost was also “[a]bsorb[ed] … into the arena of public debate” and used by “politicians of different persuasions,” as well as “poets and essayists” (19–20).
References
Beddoes, Thomas. A Letter to Erasmus Darwin, M.D. on a New Method of Treating Pulmonary Consumption and Some other Diseases hitherto found Incurable. Bristol: Bulgin and Rosser, 1793.
———. A Letter to the Right Honourable Sir Joseph Banks, Bart. P.R.S. On the Causes and Removal of the Prevailing Discontents, Imperfections, and Abuses in Medicine. London: Richard Phillips, 1808.
Rockey, Denyse. “John Thelwall and the Origins of British Speech Therapy.” Medical History 23.2 (1979): 156–175.
———. “The Surgeon’s Warning.” Poems. Second Volume. Bristol: Biggs and Cottle, 1799. 163–173.
Thelwall, John. A Letter to Henry Cline, Esq.: On Imperfect Developments of the Faculties, Mental and Moral, as well as Constitutional and Organic; and on the Treatment of Impediments of Speech. London: Richard Taylor and Co., 1810.
———. The Vestibule of Eloquence. Original Articles, Oratorical and Poetical Intended As Exercises in Recitation, at the Institution, Bedford Place, Russell Square. London: J. McCreery, 1810.
Wolff, Sula. “The history of autism.” European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 13.4 (2004): 201–208.
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Stanback, E.B. (2016). Citizen Thelwall and Thomas Beddoes M.D.: Romantic Medicines, Disability, and “Health”. In: The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51140-9_2
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