Bloomsbury’s Vocations: Philanthropic Medicine and Iatrophobic Fiction

Ingleby, Matthew

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-54600-5_4

Bloomsbury’s Vocations: Philanthropic Medicine and Iatrophobic Fiction

Matthew Ingleby³

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First Online: 06 November 2018

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

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Notes

1.
George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Getting Married, and The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (New York: Bretano’s, 1911), 4.
2.
Richard Barnett, Anatomy of the City: A Guide to Medical London (London: Wellcome Trust, 2008), 92 and 55. Elsewhere, Barnett discusses how in modern Britain, the medical establishment has managed to exploit the scientific benefits and ethical capital produced by the hospital system while retaining the material benefits of private practice, thus keeping a foot both in parts of Victorian London’s socio-medical map: “By moving into the hospitals, by embracing both the practical and the symbolic power of laboratory science, and by persuading successive governments to enshrine their professional eminence in law, orthodox practitioners acquired both a near-monopoly over public medicine and the freedom to retain their private clientele. As London became the social, legislative and cultural heart of the nation, so its doctors and their representatives began to demand a controlling stake in clinical practice across Britain and the British Empire. It is a mark of their success that we see medicine today as something higher than mere commerce, but Harley Street and the hospitals are still two sides of the same gold coin.” Barnett, Sick City: Two Thousand Years of Life and Death in London (London: Wellcome Trust, 2008), 31.
3.
Nick Black, Walking London’s Medical History (London: Royal Society of Medicine Press, 2006), 71–72.
4.
John Cordy Jeaffreson, Olive Blake’s Good Work (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1862), 96.
5.
See Jules Kosky, Mutual Friends: Charles Dickens and Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989).
6.
Katharina Boehm, Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood: Popular Medicine, Child Health and Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 90.
7.
Charles Dickens and Henry Morley, “Drooping Buds” (3 April 1852), in The Uncollected Writings of Charles Dickens: Household Words, 1850–1859, ed. Harry Stone, 2 vols. (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 2:402.
8.
Dickens and Morley, “Drooping Buds,” 407–08.
9.
Walter Besant and G. E. Mitton, The Fascination of London: Holborn and Bloomsbury (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1903), 82.
10.
See Pamela Gilbert, Mapping the Victorian Social Body (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 83–108. See also Douglas Jerrold, St Giles and St James (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1851).
11.
Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 161.
12.
Rothfield, Vital Signs, 161.
13.
Tabitha Sparks, The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 8.
14.
Mary Donaldson-Evans, Medical Examinations: Dissecting the Doctor in French Narrative Prose 1857–1894 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 15.
15.
Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 1–26.
16.
As Michael Brown has recently argued, the idea of the “good doctor” was also a social product, actively constructed, by the medical profession themselves in this period, who were leveraging up their position within the culture by emphasizing their “gentility” and “progressive” qualities. The depiction of doctors found in the literary representations analysed here needs to be understood in dynamic relation to the medicine’s own “professional performances” of altruism, vocation, and pecuniary disinterest. Thanks to Agnes Arnold-Forster for helping formulate my understanding of this dynamic inter-professional relation. See Brown, Performing Medicine: Medical Culture and Identity in Provincial England, c.1780–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).
17.
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1865; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 328.
18.
Jeaffreson, Olive Blake’s Good Work 96.
19.
Jeaffreson, Olive Blake’s Good Work, 98.
20.
Jeaffreson, Olive Blake’s Good Work, 100 and 105.
21.
Jeaffreson, Olive Blake’s Good Work, 105.
22.
“Police Intelligence,” Daily News, January 16, 1862, 6.
23.
“Law Intelligence,” Daily News, October 19, 1866, 6.
24.
“Advertisements & Notices,” Pall Mall Gazette, 1 August 1866: 12.
25.
“From the London Gazette,” Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 26 November 1865: 7.
26.
For an attentive reading of the spatial dynamics of Birds of Prey and some other novels, see Beth Palmer, “Sensationalising the City in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Belgravia Magazine,” Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 6 (2008), http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/march2008/palmer.html
27.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Birds of Prey: A Novel, 3 vols. (London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler, 1867), 1:1.
28.
Braddon, Birds of Prey, 1:7.
29.
Braddon, Birds of Prey, 1:41–42.
30.
Nicki Buscemi, “‘The disease, which had hitherto been nameless’: M. E. Braddon’s Challenge to Medical Authority in Birds of Prey and Charlotte’s Inheritance,” Victorian Literature and Culture 38 (2010): 151–63. Buscemi argues that Braddon gives prominence to the Lancet in order to challenge the masculinist power dynamics the medical journal embodied, a reading that underplays the overt radicalism of Wakley’s periodical, and also fails to account for the sharply differentiated range of (male) doctors in the novel.
31.
Braddon, Birds of Prey, 1:104.
32.
Braddon, Birds of Prey, 1:105.
33.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charlotte’s Inheritance: A Novel (London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler, 1868), 310.
34.
Braddon, Charlotte’s Inheritance, 283.
35.
Braddon, Birds of Prey, i.117.
36.
Mrs. [Margaret] Oliphant, A House in Bloomsbury (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1894), 52.
37.
Oliphant, A House in Bloomsbury, 58.
38.
Oliphant, A House in Bloomsbury, 59.
39.
Oliphant, A House in Bloomsbury, 60.
40.
Oliphant, A House in Bloomsbury, 53.
41.
Oliphant, A House in Bloomsbury, 51.
42.
My reading of Dr. Roland contrasts with that of Elisabeth Jay, who casts him as an eccentric possessed by an idée fixe, in order to demonstrate “Mrs. Oliphant’s habit of using conventionally plotted novels to explore the eccentric positions to which ‘elaborate self-discussions’ might lead’.” Jay , Mrs. Oliphant: “A Fiction to Herself” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 234.
43.
Oliphant, A House in Bloomsbury, 53. For a discussion of another hagiographical portrait of a doctor in a novel by Oliphant, The Rector and the Doctor’s Family (1863), see Meegan Kennedy, “Diagnosis or Detour? The Uses of Medical Realism in the Victorian Novel,” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 49 (2008): 5–7, doi: https://doi.org/10.7202/017858ar
44.
Oliphant, A House in Bloomsbury, 54.
45.
For a full reading of the various doctors in Collins’s novel, which I address from a different angle in Chap. 5 (that of the representation of the female pedestrian), see Tabitha Sparks, The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 87–110.
46.
Oliphant, The Autobiography of Mrs. Oliphant, ed. Mrs Harry Coghill (1899; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 18–19.
47.
See Winnie Chan, “The Linked Excitements of L. T. Meade and the Strand magazine,” in Scribbling Women and the Short Story Form: Approaches by American and British Women Writers, ed. Ellen Burton Harrington (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), 60–73. Chan addresses Meade’s “enormous popularity” via the specific form of short fiction in the publishing context of the mass-market magazine.
48.
L. T. Meade, The Medicine Lady, 3 vols. (London: Cassells, 1892), 1:200.
49.
Meade, The Medicine Lady, 1:253.
50.
Meade, The Medicine Lady, 2:33.
51.
Meade, The Medicine Lady, 3.255.
52.
If instead of peddling her deceased husband’s dangerous cure clandestinely in an impoverished part of Bloomsbury, Cecilia Digby of Meade’s The Medicine Lady had pursued her medical vocation legitimately, and she could have enrolled at the London School of Medicine for Women, which had opened nearby in Handel Street in 1874. The 1891 census registered 101 female doctors, the bulk of whom would have studied in that pioneering institution. The female physician appears to have been more prominent in cultural representation than in actuality at this point in history, as Carol-Ann Farkas has explored in “Fictional Medical Women and Moral Therapy in the Late-Nineteenth Century: Daughters of Aesculapius, Mothers to All,” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 54 (2011): 139–64. See also Kristine Swenson, Medical Women and Victorian Fiction (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005) and Patricia Murphy, In Science’s Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006). Chapter 5 addresses substantively the treatment in fiction of the independent, professional woman in Bloomsbury.
53.
Meade, The Medicine Lady, 3:252.
54.
Meade, The Medicine Lady, 3:253.
55.
Meade, The Medicine Lady, 3:249
56.
Mrs. Humphry Ward, Marcella (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1894), 339.
57.
Ward, Marcella, 340.
58.
Ward, Marcella, 341.
59.
Ward, Marcella, 341.
60.
Ward, Marcella, 341.
61.
Ward, Marcella, 341 and 342.
62.
C. F. Keary, Bloomsbury (London: David Nutt, 1905), 92.
63.
Keary, Bloomsbury, 84–85.
64.
Keary, Bloomsbury, 90.
65.
Keary, Bloomsbury, 423.
66.
Keary, Bloomsbury, 528.
67.
Keary, Bloomsbury, 532–33.
68.
Keary, Bloomsbury, 552.
69.
Jane de Gay, Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 67.
70.
For a revisionist portrayal of Woolf as half-rebelling and being half-rooted in the Victorian world, see Steve Ellis, Virginia Woolf and the Victorians (2007). For a study which situates Woolf’s writing in relation to figures like Oliphant and Ward , whom she publicly and privately derided, but also clearly learnt much from, see Emily Blair, Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel (2007).
71.
Susan M. Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 94 and 120.
72.
Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 155.
73.
Sara Blair, “Local Modernity, Global Modernism: Bloomsbury and the Places of the Literary,” English Literary History 71 (2004): 827.
74.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, ed. Stella McNichol (1925; London: Penguin, 1996), 98.
75.
Humbert Wolfe, “The Streets behind the Tottenham Court Road,” in London Sonnets (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1920), 14.
76.
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 101.
77.
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 101.
78.
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 104.
79.
Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 150.
80.
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 164.
81.
Woolf, Letter to Gwen Raverat (1 May 1925), in The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume III, 1923–1928, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 180–81.
82.
“As Dr. Bradshaw approaches, Septimus literally has no room, so he hurls himself out the window to reality: death, Evans, Mrs. Filmer’s area railings piercing him through.” George Ella Lyon, “Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Body,” in Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg and Laura Moss Gottlieb (Albany: Whitston Publishing Company, 1983), 119.
83.
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 166.
84.
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 166–67.
85.
Black, Walking London’s Medical History, 103.
86.
Braddon, Charlotte’s Inheritance, 411.
87.
Mrs. Humphry Ward, A Writer’s Recollections, 2 vols. (London: Harper & Brothers, 1918), 2:12.
88.
Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), 222–24. For an in-depth account of Woolf’s work at Morley College, see Clara Jones, Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
89.
“The point is not that this social conscience is unreal; it is very real indeed. But it is the precise formulation of a particular social position, in what a fraction of an upper class, breaking from its dominant majority, relates to a lower class as a matter of conscience; not in solidarity, nor in affiliation, but as an extension of what are still felt as personal or small-group obligations, at once against the cruelty and stupidity of the system and towards its otherwise helpless victims.” Williams, “The Bloomsbury Fraction,” 155.

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Department of English, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
Matthew Ingleby

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Ingleby, M. (2018). Bloomsbury’s Vocations: Philanthropic Medicine and Iatrophobic Fiction. In: Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Production of Bloomsbury. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54600-5_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54600-5_4
Published: 06 November 2018
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