By Dr Kit Yee Wong, Postdoctoral Researcher in French Studies
How do European languages and literature intersect with the modern human body and identity? Can literature help us re-think the classification of bodies into social and racial categories? Surveying the history of medicine in Europe from the nineteenth century will assist with these questions.
The mid-1800s was the start of the ‘golden age’ of clinical medicine across Western Europe, when medical sciences became professionalised. Disciplines were created in new medical institutions, such as physiology, pathology, gynaecology, and anthropology, to name a few. People were measured and categorised on a grand scale.
But nineteenth-century medical schools did not formally admit women students until the later 1800s, and this had consequences. It was the masculine imagination that underpinned many medical theories—and so patriarchal bias was incorporated into medicine. This was obviously inadequate for properly understanding and addressing the health of women. The influential French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93) worked on the ‘illness’ of hysteria, which he believed mostly affected women. Through a series of highly sexualised photographs of his women patients experiencing hysterical convulsions, Charcot’s method of visualisation and narrativisation provided the means to construct hysteria.[1] Although the condition had been studied and known about before, Charcot seemed to create a condition through telling a convincing medical narrative. Hysteria, as Charcot formulated it, was a powerful catalyst in shaping the medical—and thus socio-cultural—idea of a woman’s mental and physical constitution.
The patriarchal bias underlying European medical disciplines created a human hierarchy that extended across the world. At the top was the white, bourgeois, male European, and positioned on lower levels were women and the working class. As debates about race grew between 1870 and 1914, the new medical fields of eugenics and ‘racial science’ dehumanised non-white populations.
How scientific was nineteenth-century science? Scientists and doctors readily integrated literary, historical, and philosophical ideas into their work, so there was cross-fertilisation between the sciences and the humanities over 150 years ago. The mixing of the literary and the medical was transnational. The French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813–78), a great influence on Émile Zola’s Naturalist theory, repeatedly cited the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832).[2] The Italian criminologist and psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) used literature to bolster his scientific data.[3] In France, literature itself was considered to be a medical document in the nineteenth century, and medical students wrote ‘medical-psychological’ theses on international men of letters based on their literary works.[4] Nineteenth-century medical theories were, then, as much a product of literature and socio-cultural bias as of science.
The history of medicine correlates with the history of literature in nineteenth-century Europe, criss-crossing national boundaries. Patriarchal medical theories spread globally, and their legacies are still with us today. The task of Modern Languages researchers is to use their manifold skills to look again at how the human has been formulated through medico-literary discourse. The study of languages (encompassing literature, linguistics, history, society, and culture) is, therefore, a natural ally with medical humanities in this endeavour. Creating a coalition of languages to pursue this work—especially European, given their pivotal link with the modern history of medicine—will help us understand how today’s conceptions of race, class, and gender were formed.
More on this subject may be found in my Introduction for the open-access journal special issue ‘The Pathological Body: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives in the Age of Modern Medicine’ (Open Library of Humanities, 2024).[5] The collection presents six articles from Italian, German, Spanish, and French literatures from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, all of which focus on socio-cultural anxieties around the human body and the sick body’s relationship with language(s) and translation. My own article focused on the political role of illness in an 1875 novel by the French Naturalist writer Émile Zola, and considered how the body and subjectivity are implicated in national and ideological struggles.[6] The Naturalist element was also taken up Katharine Murphy, who contributed to the special issue. In her article, Katharine explored the links between society, class, and gender in an 1898 novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, who was dubbed ‘el Zola español’ [‘the Spanish Zola’] for his admiration of French Naturalism.[7]
For the ‘Reading Bodies’ project, I aim to think more about how society and body interact in Zola’s Naturalism and will focus on how illness is not merely physiological but is also expressed through myth and non-Naturalistic means. This radically expands the dimensions of what illness is, both in itself and in Zola’s literary output, which (in)famously contains many kinds of ailing bodies and discourses. I am looking forward to seeing the complementary perspectives that materialise in ‘Reading Bodies’ between French and Hispanic studies, along with German, Italian, and Portuguese.
Acknowledgements: The Pathological Body website gives more information on the special issue and on the 2019 conference that began the project.[8] The conference was generously supported by the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (London, UK; previously the Institute of Modern Languages Research) and the Society for French Studies (UK). Please follow the project twitter/X account for rolling body-related news: @PathBodyLit
Kit Yee Wong is a French Studies researcher, and a contributor to Katharine Murphy’s AHRC project ‘Reading Bodies: Narrating Illness in Spanish and European Literatures and Cultures (1870s to 1960s)’. She received her PhD on the Rougon-Macquart novels of Émile Zola from Birkbeck, University of London in 2018. Through her associate research fellowship at Birkbeck (October 2018–September 2023), she organised a 2019 symposium on the representation of sickness in literature across four languages and edited the subsequent special issue (Open Library of Humanities, 2024).
[1] Elizabeth Stephens, ‘Redefining Sexual Excess as a Medical Disorder: Fin-de-siècle Representations of Hysteria and Spermatorrhoea’, in Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture, ed. by David Evans and Kate Griffiths (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 201–12 (p. 207).
[2] Gillian Beer,Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 5.
[3] Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth & Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 51.
[4] Bertrand Marquer, ‘The Spirit and the Letter: Medico-Literary Uses of Translation (Lombroso and Nordau)’, Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 3 (2020), 1–10 (n. 8, 9–10).
[5] Kit Yee Wong, ‘Introduction: The Symbiosis of Language(s), Literature, and the Medical Humanities’, Open Library of Humanities, 10 (2024), 1–22; ‘The Pathological Body: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives in the Age of Modern Medicine’, ed. by Kit Yee Wong (Open Library of Humanities, 2024).
[6] Kit Yee Wong, ‘Illness, Aesthetics, and Body Politics’, Open Library of Humanities, 7 (2021), 1–19.
[7] Katharine Anne Murphy, ‘The Contagious Effects of Rural Violence: Social Pathologies and Injured Bodies in Blasco Ibáñez’s La barraca (The Cabin)’, Open Library of Humanities, 8 (2022), 1–23.
[8] Kit Yee Wong, ‘The Pathological Body from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives’, 2019 symposium website.
Works Cited
Beer, Gillian, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Marquer, Bertrand, ‘The Spirit and the Letter: Medico-Literary Uses of Translation (Lombroso and Nordau)’, Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 3 (2020), 1–10 <https://journals.gold.ac.uk/index.php/volupte/article/view/1446> [accessed 3 February 2024]
Murphy, Katharine Anne, ‘The Contagious Effects of Rural Violence: Social Pathologies and Injured Bodies in Blasco Ibáñez’s La barraca (The Cabin)’, Open Library of Humanities, 8 (2022), 1–23 <https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.6387>
Otis, Laura, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth & Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994)
Stephens, Elizabeth, ‘Redefining Sexual Excess as a Medical Disorder: Fin-de-siècle Representations of Hysteria and Spermatorrhoea’, in David Evans and Kate Griffiths, ed., Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 201–12
Wong, Kit Yee, ‘The Pathological Body from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives’, 2019 symposium website <https://pathbodylit.wordpress.com/> [accessed 3 February 2024]
——, ‘Illness, Aesthetics, and Body Politics’, Open Library of Humanities, 7 (2021), 1–19 <https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.4724>
——, ‘Introduction: The Symbiosis of Language(s), Literature, and the Medical Humanities’, Open Library of Humanities, 10 (2024), 1–22 <https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.11644>
——, ed., The Pathological Body: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives in the Age of Modern Medicine (Open Library of Humanities, 2024) <https://olh.openlibhums.org/issue/447/info/> [accessed 3 February 2024]