Abstract
One of the myriad ways in which Roy Porter broadened our historical understanding of early modern Europe was by emphasizing how science, medicine, philosophy and the arts continually intersected. Porter showed that the leading figures in these cultural domains did not just engage one another personally; rather, they continually participated in a shared medico-literary milieu of ideas, theories, texts and images. Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was exceptionally rich in these cross-fertilizations: Robert Burton, the Oxford divine, drew on a mass of scientific learning to produce his encyclopaedic Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621. John Locke, the pre-eminent psychologist, epistemologist and political philosopher of the late Stuart era, was schooled in medicine and associated with Sydenham. Bernard de Mandeville, physician, philosopher and social satirist, showcased a long fictional dialogue between a doctor, patient and family members in his Treatise on the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases (1711). The Scottish novelist, playwright and historian Tobias Smollett doubled as a London surgeon. And the leading English literary intellectual of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, styled Dr Johnson, was so well versed in classical and modern medical texts that he contributed learned entries on the subject to his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). The entire eighteenth-century culture of sensibility was simultaneously literary, moral, psychological, theological and physiological.
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Notes
From a large offering, see Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000), ch. 6;
Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), ch. 10;
Marie Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter, eds, Literature and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1993);
Roy Porter, ‘Bedlam and Parnassus: Mad People’s Writing in Georgian England’, in George Levine, ed., One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 258–84;
and Roy Porter, ‘“The Hunger of Imagination”: Approaching Samuel Johnson’s Melancholy’, in W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd, eds, The Anatomy of Madness, 3 vols. (London: Tavistock, 1985), 1: pp. 63–88.
Snow, The Two Cultures and a Second Look (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).
Snow, The Two Cultures, with an Introduction by Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. vii–lxxiii.
Thus, one scholar has recently asserted that at this historical juncture the sciences and the humanities became ‘divergent cultures of discovery and creation’. After the arrival of Romanticism, another quips ‘the dialectic was lost’ between the two endeavours, and literature in particular ‘becomes an enemy of science and medicine’. See respectively Donard R. Maxwell, Science or Literature? The Divergent Culture of Discovery and Creation (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), ch. 1;
and Michael Neve, ‘Medicine and Literature’, in W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, eds, Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, 2 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 2: pp. 1526–7.
Limon, The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University, 1990), ch. 1;
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 2nd edition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
See also Richer’s L’Art et la médecine (Paris: Gaultier, Magnier, et Cie, 1901); and Anatomie artistique, 2 vols., avec 110 planches (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1890).
The text of the play may be found in André de Lorde, Théâtre d’epouvante (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1909), pp. 1–81.
Aragon and Breton, ‘Le cinquantenaire de l’hystérie (1878–1928)’, in Maurice Nadeau, ed., Histoire du surréalisme: Documents surréalistes (Paris: Seuil, 1948), p. 125.
Kockerbeck, Ernst Haeckels ‘Kunstformen der Natur’ und ihr Einfluss auf die deutsche bildende Kunst der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1986), esp. pp. 43–71.
Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 47–54.
Including, according to Daniel Gasman, those drawn to Nazi Volkisch ideology. See Gasman’s Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology (New York: P. Lang, 1998).
William R. Everdell, The First Modems: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 104, 353.
Beaunis, Théâtre composite (Cannes: Imprimerie Guiglion, 1911), which reprints nine plays by Beaunis.
Kraepelin, Werden — Sein — Vergehen: Gedichte von Emil Kraepelin (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns. 1928).
Meynert, Gedichte (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1905).
Just as novels become more ‘psychological’. See Leon Edel, The Psychological Novel, 1900–1950 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1955).
Another fin-de-siècle medical initiative that was deeply informed by literary precedents is sexology, especially in France and Austria, as Vernon Rosario and Harry Oosterhuis have recently emphasized. See Rosario, ‘Inversion’s Histories/History’s Inversions: Novelizing Fin-de-siècle Homosexuality’, in Rosario, ed., Science and Homosexualities (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 89–107;
and Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 26, 49–50, 175–9, 231–7.
Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
Carroy, Les personnalités doubles et multiples. Entre science et fiction (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993).
Peter Gay, Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815–1914 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), ch. 1.
Jan Fontijn, Trots Verbrijzeld: Het leven van Frederik van Eeden vanof 1901 (Amsterdam: Querido, 1996);
Jan Fontijn, Tweespalt: Het leven van Frederik van Eeden tot 1901 (Amsterdam: Querido, 1999).
Van Eeden, The Bride of Dreams, transl. Mellie von Auw (New York and London: M. Kennerley, 1913);
Van Eeden, Gedichten: Een bloemlezing (Amsterdam: Wereld biblioteck, 1949);
and Van Eeden, Studies, 5 vols. (Amsterdam: W. Versluys, 1894–190[?]), which includes essays on Dante, Hals, Rembrandt, Thoreau, Ruskin and Van Gogh. The predominance among these examples of doctors in dynamic psychiatry might suggest that this type of psychology, with its overt humanistic content, was especially congenial to cross-cultural contact. Conversely, we might expect scientists such as Wilhelm Wundt, with his programme of laboratory experimental psychology, and Ivan Pavlov, with his embrace of physiological reflexology, to have shunned the ideas, methods and insights of the humanities. But the artistic activities cited above of Charcot, Beaunis, Binet, Meynert, Kraepelin and Ramón y Cajal, who all worked in anatomical, physiological or histological traditions, calls this generalization into question.
It is well to recall that the most widely read literary work authored by a psychologist in the twentieth century was B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948).
Carroy, ‘Playing with Signatures: The Young Charles Richet’, in Mark S. Micale, ed., The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), ch. 7.
Janik, Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2001), pp. 189–90.
Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Knopf, 1958), ch. 2.
Roy Porter, ‘“The Whole Secret of Health”: Mind, Body, and Medicine in Tristram Shandy’, in John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth, eds, Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), ch. 3;
Roy Porter, ‘Against the Spleen’, in Valerie Grosvenor Myer, ed., Laurence Sterne: Riddles of Mysteries (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1984), ch. 6;
and Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), ch. 17.
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© 2007 Mark S. Micale
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Micale, M.S. (2007). Two Cultures Revisited: The Case of the Fin de Siècle . In: Bivins, R., Pickstone, J.V. (eds) Medicine, Madness and Social History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235359_18
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