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Victorian Studies, Volume 51, Number 3, Spring 2009, pp. 550-552 (Review)

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550

the posts of public vaccinator and registrar were often integrated. In 1882 and 1883 only
sixteen smallpox deaths were recorded, and the following year the Irish Register-General
recorded only one death from the disease.
Scotlands vaccination history was quite different. Scotland only had one vaccination act in the periodthe 1863 act that introduced compulsory vaccination.
Throughout the Victorian period, the great majority of vaccinations were performed by
private practitioners with no regulation. The procedure was open to free competition
only five percent of infants were vaccinated by the parish medical officers. Systematic
provision of free vaccination for the poor was established in Scotland in 1848 following
the 1845 Poor Law reform, yet in the 1850s smallpox continued to kill many people in
Scotland, and by the early 1860s official returns showed that less than twenty percent of
newborns were vaccinated each year, compared to sixty percent in England and Wales.
Following these disappointments, the Scottish medical colleges took the initiative in
vaccination debates, especially the RCPE, which called for compulsory vaccination but
also recommended that free vaccination be available only to paupers so that the medical
profession could remain in charge of administering vaccination to the paying public.
Following the passage of compulsory vaccination legislation in 1863 modelled on the
RCPE recommendations, Scots vaccination rates reached eighty-five percent of newborns
in 1864, and numbers remained high thereafter. The number of smallpox deaths fell to
just fifteen in 1868.
In the final three chapters of the book, Brunton successfully shows how Ireland
and Scotlands vaccination systems were distinct from those in England and Wales. After
the interesting material on Scotland and Ireland, The Politics of Vaccination has a rather anticlimactic ending; contrary to the traditional portrayal of Jenner, there were no single heroic
figures in this period in vaccination history beyond the activities of individual practitioners,
registrars, and administrators who did their best to promote vaccination (169).
Jacqueline Jenkinson
University of Stirling, Scotland

Cholera and Nation: Doctoring the Social Body in Victorian England, by Pamela K.
Gilbert; pp. viii + 231. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008, $75.00, $18.95
paper, 47.00, 9.50 paper.
Pamela Gilberts book on nineteenth-century cholera epidemics in England is conceptualized and written within the now solid tradition of scholarship that crosses literary and
historical studies and takes health and illness as its substantive object of inquiry. From Mary
Pooveys early work to recent studies such as Rod Edmonds Leprosy and Empire (2007),
scholars have fruitfully read literary works for their rendering of health, illness, and medicine, and have explored medical texts through literary tools of analysis. Nineteenth-century
cholerawhich produced so much literature as well as so much death and sufferingis an
especially rich topic through which to intertwine literary and historical methods.
Gilbert analyzes four epidemics: cholera in England in 183132, 184849,
185455, and 186667. Thus the book, and the cholera epidemics themselves, span earlyto mid-Victorian England, although the work is not structured chronologically. Rather,

victorian studies / Volume 51, no. 3

551

with the exception of a first chapter on the 183132 epidemic year, Gilbert has chosen to
treat the whole span of time in each chapter, organized under different analytic
rationalesone chapter a case study of an author, another looking at medical conceptualizations of bodies and social bodies, and still another focusing on a particular analytic
(race or gender, for example). Many historians will want an equivalent of the first chapter
for each epidemic or at least a chapter devoted to the evolving context over these decades.
And it is perhaps historians who will be most interested in this first chapter, on the remarkable years of 1831 and 1832.
The epidemic years were clearly key in English political history as well as English
medical history: cholera and revolution have long touched each other, historically and
historiographically. Gilberts arguments are certainly about the epidemics political
implications, showing their connections with Chartism, working-class politics, and the
formation of the public sphere. She is interested also in changes over these years, not least
the shift from the centrality of clerical authority to medical authority when it came to
pronouncements about the public and the social body. In this sense, this book is a
grounded and deeply researched piece of Foucauldian scholarship, a close study of the
often abstracted analytical claims about clerical-medical shifts in authority over time.
Medical historiography often does not give either adequate space or expert
enough treatment to Christianity, doctrinal implications, and religious history generally. Gilberts book shines in this respect. She shows us how critical these elements are
for most Victorian topics, but especially for historical objects of inquiry dealing with
life, death, and bodies. The early pages of Cholera and Nation are filled with the implications of disestablishmentarianism for management of the epidemic, with the politicoreligious response of fast days, and with clerical interventions in, and implications of,
large-scale illness and death. One of the most fascinating differences between the 1832
and 1848 epidemic of cholera, Gilbert shows us, concerned the clerical response.
Though a fast day was an almost automatic response in 1832, by 1848 Lord Palmerston declined the option decisively. By 1848, clearly, not the Church but the medical
profession had the authority to claim the right to diagnose both bodily and social
causes of cholera and to determine what should be done. Yet, in shaping the political
significance of the nations social body, the Church had a pre-existing place in the
state and in the public sphere: as Gilbert argues, the medical profession actively had to
shape its place in that sphere.
Another of Gilberts significant contributions is her analysis of the poors
response to the epidemics. Sometimes ridiculing and openly opposing the fast days,
the popular response was not always what might be expected. The social body analysis offered here, then, is richly diverse: the book extends well beyond the often limited
reach of medical histories into popular and social response and into Church and
doctrinal writings. It also pushes and substantiates arguments through chapters of
literary analysis: the high literature of Middlemarch (187172); the neglected, middling
literature of idiosyncratic Charles Kingsley; and the didactic novels of the Society for
the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. The last two chapters are especially informative, since their topics are comparatively less well known to both literary and historical
scholars. Here Gilberts strength as a reader of complex texts emerges. We learn just
how extensively the nation was narrated through cholera stories; through competing

Spring 2009

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inroads into the public sphere of different kinds of experts; and through cautionary
tales, object lessons in literature, and the writing of doctors and sanitarians.
Alison Bashford
University of Sydney

Neurology and Literature, 18601920, edited by Anne Stiles; pp. x + 229. Basingstoke
and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 48.00, $79.95.
The development signaled by the appearance of Neurology and Literature is a welcome
one: the rediscovery of the often rebarbative work of hard Victorian neuroscience
and the attempt to assess, through the centurys literature, the cultural impact of this
most rarified of the biological sciences. Each of the volumes eight essays tries to stay
true to this mission, although inevitably each offers a slightly different version of what
such a mission might look like in practice. The crux seems to be the titles innocuous
and, neurology and literature: what might this paratactic connection mean? At times,
as in Laura Otiss opening piece Howled out of the Country: Wilkie Collins and H. G.
Wells Retry David Farrier, the titles and seems closer to an in: Otis traces the aftereffects of Farriers 1881 trial for violation of the Cruelty to Animals Act in Collinss
Heart and Science (1883) and Wellss The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). Focusing on the
question of vivisectiona fundamental aspect of neurological science throughout the
nineteenth centuryOtis narrates a cultural episode that can then be read into latecentury fiction as the specific incitement for more general ethical concerns. The
volumes second piece, Don LaCosss Our Lady of Darkness: Decadent Arts and the
Magnetic Sleep of Magdeleine G., despite narrating a similarly unfamiliar cultural
episode, looks methodologically quite different; LaCosss story of the somnambulist
dancer Magdeleine G. investigates neurological ideas as a kind of early-twentiethcentury aesthetic, rather than a context of aesthetic work. The lack of shared agreement
about how to read the titles conjunction is as intriguing as it is troubling. Anne Stiless
introduction argues that exchanges between literary and scientific writers during
these six decades were not simply reflectivescience influencing literature or vice
versabut rather dialogic or circular, a conversation where literary and scientific
authors were mutually responsive to one another (2). This notion of circular cultural
exchanges is a capacious and wise one, and current interdisciplinary literary work has
largely taken it as a model, but in practice scholars have to make decisions that spin this
circle in particular ways, either by deciding on where to start (with an aesthetic act, or
a scientific idea?) or how broadly to pitch their investigations (with precise histories, or
general concepts?). Arguments like Stiless, in other words, act as openings for further
work rather than conclusive models. The opening she extends in this volume allows for
a variety of different approaches, even if that variety suggests some implicit debates.
The differences are most salient in the matter of scale. For interdisciplinary
scholars, this is where much will be at stake. The essays in Neurology and Literature tend
toward the historically particular, such as Mark Micales piece on the absence of trauma
as a diagnostic category in the American Civil War, or specific to certain authors, such
as Kristine Swensons article on Elizabeth Stuart Phelpss Doctor Zay (1882) or Randall

victorian studies / Volume 51, no. 3