Abstract
Neurology and literature are disciplines that initially appear to have little, if anything, to do with one another. The first is a so-called hard science practiced by a select coterie of medical doctors and researchers, while the second is a pleasurable artistic pursuit, theoretically open to all literate individuals. But first impressions can be deceptive. The present collection of essays aims to demonstrate that, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries at least, brain science and imaginative fiction shared common philosophical concerns and rhetorical strategies.
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Notes
Anne Harrington, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 40–5.
James Strachey, “Editor’s Introduction” to volume two of Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, 24 vols (1955; London: Hogarth Press, 1981)
Peter Amacher, “Freud’s Neurological Education and its Influence on Psychoanalytic Theory”, Psychological Issues 4.4 (1965), 21–8.
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 189–90.
See C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and a Second Look (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979)
F.R. Leavis, Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962).
William James, Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1908), 3.
Stanley Finger, Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 41.
On Ferrier’s highly public trial for animal cruelty and the negative press coverage of his research, see Laura Otis in this volume, as well as Richard French, Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 200–2
Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
The conceptual beginnings of what may be termed modern (as opposed to ancient or classical) neurology are open to debate. Etymologically, however, one can determine that Thomas Willis “coined the term neurologie in the 1660s; during the subsequent century it assumed its current form and by the 1830s had spawned the term neurologist to signify someone who made nerves his special subject of inquiry.” Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 28.
Robert Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Terrier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), xxii.
William Benjamin Carpenter, “On the Doctrine of Human Automatism: Part II”, Contemporary Review 25 (1875), 941.
Ewald Hering, “Memory as a General Function of Organized Matter”, The Open Court, a Quarterly Magazine 1.6 (April 1887), IIB.
Marie Corelli, Ardath: The Story of a Dead Self (London: Methuen, 1907), 141.
Marie Corelli, Wormwood: A Drama of Paris (Chicago: M.A. Donohue, 1890), 14.
On Stoker’s Dracula as a reaction against late-Victorian neuroscientific developments, see Anne Stiles, “Cerebral Automatism, the Brain, and the Soul in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 15.2 (June 2006), 131–52.
Bram Stoker, The Snake’s Pass (Dingle, Ireland: Brandon 1990), 59.
On the similarities between Jekyll and Hyde and late-Victorian case studies, see Anne Stiles, “Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and the Double Brain”, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 46.4 (Autumn 2006), 879–900.
On the epistemological similarities between detective fiction and natural science, see Lawrence Frank, Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the fin de siècle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5–6.
Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xxiv.
For examples of recent work in cognitive literary theory, see Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky, eds. The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture and Complexity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004).
Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 12.
Edwin Clarke and L.S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 1–2.
See particularly Mark S. Micale, ed., The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)
Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science and Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)
Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Lilian R. Furst, Between Doctors and Patients: The Changing Balance of Power (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998)
Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Laura Otis, ed., Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Lilian R. Furst, ed., Medical Progress and Social Reality: A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Medicine and Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000)
Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Unsigned review of Eugène Azam, “Double Consciousness with Periodic Loss of Memory (Amnesia)”, Mind 1.3 (July 1876), 414–6
Richard Proctor, “Dual Consciousness”, The Cornhill Magazine 35 (January 1877), 86–105.
Sigmund Freud, “Fräulein Elisabeth von R.” in Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans. and ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 160.
Silas Weir Mitchell, Introduction to The Autobiography of a Quack and The Case of George Dedlow (New York: The Century, 1900), ix–x.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, ed. Katherine Linehan (New York: Norton, 2003), 48.
Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 111.
George Frederick Drinka, The Birth of Neurosis: Myth, Malady, and the Victorians (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 105.
George Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (1881; New York: Arno Press, 1972), 9, 10.
Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 171.
For more information on pre-Freudian trauma theory, see also Ruth Leys, Trauma, A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner, eds, Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (London: Henry King, 1877), 98.
Mark S. Micale and Roy Porter, eds, Discovering the History of Psychiatry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 25.
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© 2007 Anne Stiles
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Stiles, A. (2007). Introduction. In: Stiles, A. (eds) Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287884_1
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