Abstract
As Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) put it in 1888, the nineteenth century possessed a ‘Scientific Spirit’ which characterised every walk of life from agriculture to dress-making.1 So pervasive was this ‘Spirit’ that where once people bowed their heads in religious contemplation, now they worshipped Science alone. For Power Cobbe, experience and common sense had been usurped by a desire always to approach matters ‘Scientifically’. Public reading rooms had been invaded by those willing to overlook ‘more attractive literature’ for the once forbidden fruits of medical periodicals such as the Lancet (1823—) or the British Medical Journal (1840—). Young men and women would sit at the same table to snatch and pore over ‘hideous diagrams and revolting details of disease and monstrosity’, including the ‘thrice abominable records of “gynaecology”’.2 General instruction had been replaced by the medical, according to Power Cobbe; scientific smatterings were invoked and debated by all. Whereas many would have seen scientific and medical developments as key to Victorian progress, Frances Power Cobbe felt that an obsession with facts, stripping everything to its skin and bones, was indecent, improper, and had led to a corresponding loss of wonder, art, and spirituality.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Frances Power Cobbe, The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and Discussions (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1888), p. 3.
For a detailed biography of Power Cobbe, see Sally Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004).
Frances Power Cobbe, Science in Excelsis: A New Vision of Judgement (London: Victoria Street Society, [1875]).
Frances Power Cobbe, ‘The Medical Profession and its Morality’, Modern Review, 2 (1881), pp. 296–326.
See, for example, praise for Elizabeth Garrett-Anderson and Frances Hoggan in verse form, in The Life of Frances Power Cobbe As Told by Herself(London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1904), pp. 467–68.
For more on the background of these writers, see Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularisers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007). On Marcet, see Elizabeth J. Morse, ‘Marcet, Jane Haldimand’, ODNB: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/18029 [accessed 9 January 2018].
E. W. P., ‘Facts for “Keepers at Home”’, British Mothers’ Magazine (1 October 1848), pp. 222–3; p. 223.
Preface to Rosina M. Zornlin, Recreations in Geology (London: John W. Parker, 1839), pp. iii–vi; p. iii.
See, for example, Mary Creese, (2004), ‘Zornlin, Rosina Maria’, in Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists, vol. 4, ed. by Bernard Lightman (Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), pp. 2230–1.
Preface to Mrs Loudon, The Ladies’ Companion to the Flower Garden (London: William Smith, 1841).
Mrs Marcet, Conversations on Chemistry: Vol. 2, 16th ed. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853), p. 353.
See Aileen Fyfe, Introduction to Conversations on Chemistry: Vol. 2, of Science Writing by Women (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2004).
H. B. Jones, The Life and Letters of Faraday: Vol. 2 (London: Longmans. Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1870), pp. 130–1.
Her first publication was Mary Somerville, ‘On the Magnetising Power of the More Refrangible Solar Rays’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 116 (1 January 1826), pp. 132p–9.
For a full list of the others, see Claire Brock, ‘The Public Worth of Mary Somerville’, British Journal for the History of Science, 39.2 (June 1996), pp. 255–72; p. 258; n. 13.
Mary Somerville, ‘Dedication’, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (London: John Murray, 1834).
Frances Power Cobbe, ‘The Education of Women’, in Essays on the Pursuit of Women. Reprinted from Fraser’s and Macmillan’s Magazine (London: Emily Faithfull, 1868), pp. 222–3.
Queen of Science. Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville, ed. by Dorothy Macmillan (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001), p. 127.
Richard Anthony Proctor, ‘Mrs Somerville’, in Light Science for Leisure Hours (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1873), pp. 1–14; p. 10.
‘The Most Learned Lady Alive’, Kind Words: A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls, 148 (29 October 1868), p. 350.
[Charles Buller], ‘Review of Mechanism of the Heavens’, Athenaeum, 221 (1832), pp. 43–4.
John Stuart Mill, On the Subjection of Women (1869), ed. by Susan M. Okin (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988), pp. 74–5.
For the mathematician Augustus de Morgan, Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace had more mathematical genius than Somerville, but not what Mill would categorise as her ‘masculine’ application. See Elizabeth Chambers Patterson, Mary Somerville and the Cultivation of Science 1815–1840 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), p. 150.
For more on Lovelace, see Alison Winter, ‘A Calculus of Suffering: Ada Lovelace and the Corporeal Constraints on Women’s Knowledge in Victorian England’, in Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, ed. by Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), pp. 202–39.
Mary Ann Elston, ‘Women Doctors in the British Health Services: A Sociological Study of their Careers and Opportunities’, University of Leeds: unpublished PhD thesis, 1986, p. 57.
Louisa Garrett Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson1836–1917 (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), p. 50.
Elizabeth Blackwell and Emily Blackwell, Medicine as a Profession for Women (New York, NY: Printed for the Trustees of the New York Infirmary for Women, 1860), p. 4.
Sophia Jex-Blake, Medical Women: Two Essays: I. Medicine as a Profession for Women. II. Medical Education of Women (Edinburgh: William Oliphant & Co., and London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1872), especially pp. 12–70.
Margaret Todd, The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake (London: Macmillan and Co., 1918), pp. 118, 173.
Elizabeth Blackwell, Pioneering Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1895), p. 27.
Elizabeth Blackwell, The Laws of Life, With Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls (New York, NY: George P. Putnam, 1852), pp. 28, 33.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, ‘Sex in Mind and Education: A Reply’, Fortnightly Review, 15 (May 1874), 582–94 (p. 590). Anderson was responding to Henry Maudsley, ‘Sex in Mind and Education’, in the same periodical (April 1874), pp. 466–83.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, ‘A Special Chapter for Ladies Who Propose to Study Medicine’, in Charles Bell Keetley, A Student’s Guide to the Medical Profession (London: Macmillan, 1878), pp. 42–8.
See, for example, Justina’s (Josephine Butler’s) letters, ‘The Contagious Diseases Acts’ and ‘Miss Garrett on the Contagious Diseases Acts’, Pall Mall Gazette, 1577 (3 March 1870), p. 3, and 1590 (18 March 1870), p. 6.
Elizabeth Garrett, ‘The Contagious Diseases Act’, Pall Mall Gazette, 1545 (25 January 1870), p. 6.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brock, C. (2018). Scientific and Medical Genres. In: Hartley, L. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1830–1880. History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58465-6_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58465-6_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-58464-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-58465-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)