Women write back

The cover of Heather Meek’s study sports a detail from the satirical print “A Surgeon Bleeding the Arm of a Young Woman” (1784). It is a typical Thomas Rowlandson scenario, full of erotic possibility: a nubile ingénue receives the attentions of the dashing doctor, a jet of blood streaming suggestively from her raised arm into a dish held above her lap. The image must have been chosen in a spirit of critique, given the central argument of Reimagining Illness: through six case studies, it positions women not as mute objects of male medical science, but as active agents analysing their experience of sickness and its treatment.

During the early eighteenth century, when the Galenic model continued to hold sway, the male sex was identified as the norm and the female body as an aberration. Galen, the pioneering physician of classical times, had conjectured that woman’s reproductive parts were an inverted and chillier version of man’s. It followed that femininity could be conceptualized as a disease in the social body. Alexander Pope aphorized this notion in his poem Epistle to a Lady (1735), which described women as variegated tulips whose colourful stripes are the result of a virus in the bulb, “fine by defect, and delicately weak”.

In Meek’s excellent survey, diseased women write back, laying claim to consideration as “medical thinkers” in their own right. Assumptions about illness in the Augustan age were sexist, but they were also relatively unfixed by scientific protocol and open to interventions by non-professionals. In this distinct moment of “ferment, innovation, regression, argument and exchange”, contradictory theories flourished and speculation on the cause and treatment of illness could circulate widely in literary form, authored by male medics and female intellectuals alike.

And so we find Jane Barker, a popular novelist and unlicensed medical practitioner, promulgating her own theories of nerve disorder and hysteria in a “psychologically rich” fictional form with A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723). Her unorthodox prescription was a single life of practical responsibilities and the stimulus of study and imaginative play. We also encounter Anne Finch, an authoritative commentator on the psychosomatic illness from which she suffered: “the spleen”, a variant of early modern melancholy and modern depression. Finch’s long poem of that name, published in 1701, went through multiple editions and featured in a treatise on the ailment by the physician William Stukeley to “help out” the expert’s description. Mary Wortley Montagu is best known today for introducing to English high society inoculation against smallpox, after a visit to Constantinople where it was widely practised by female healers.

The case-study format is satisfying and digestible. Meek takes the reader securely through this unfamiliar landscape of medical ideas. Orientation within chapters is provided by punchy subtitles, masterful lead sentences launching each paragraph, and compelling summary. Concerned though it is with suffering – chapters dealing with Hester Thrale Piozzi on the perils of pregnancy, childbirth and early years care, and Frances Burney on breast cancer surgery, are particularly harrowing – it is a pleasure to read.

Limitations appear in later sections, as more familiar literary figures become the focus and the constraint of examining a single author on a single form of illness poses problems. Where is the dialogue with scholars who have explored the place of ill health in literary works by contemporary female authors unmentioned in the book, such as Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth? Neither name appears in the index. There is close attention to the rhetoric of Burney’s epistolary description of undergoing a mastectomy without anaesthetic in 1812, but no reference to Edgeworth’s novel Belinda (1801), which similarly touches on disjunctions in female experience of illness and male medical knowledge when it addresses the anxieties from a misdiagnosed lesion.

The discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft centres somewhat narrowly on the place of consumption, the wasting disease of the lungs now known as tuberculosis, in the short novel Mary (1788), which served as part of Wollstonecraft’s apprenticeship as an author before the appearance in 1792 of the ground-breaking A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It seems as if Wollstonecraft’s forays into nerve theory and her extensive reflections on bodily aspects of motherhood are excluded due to coverage of those topics in chapters belonging to other authors. Nevertheless, here as elsewhere in the book, there is persuasive evidence of women’s engagement with medical discourses, and of a distinctive feminist consciousness emerging from episodes of physical and mental breakdown.

E. J. Clery is Professor of English Literature at Uppsala University and the author of Jane Austen: The banker’s sister and Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, protest and economic crisis, both 2017

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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