Mary Wilson Carpenter. Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-27598-952-1. Price: US$44.95/£31.95

Nothing, perhaps, says more about the current state of an academic discipline than its textbooks. Historians and literary scholars are less familiar, certainly less comfortable, with the idea of a textbook than their colleagues in the social and physical sciences. The humanities are generally too intellectually pluralistic to admit of such codification. And yet a textbook, or a primer, is probably the best way to think about Mary Wilson Carpenter’s Health, Medicine and Society in Victorian England. It is, in her own words, “intended for general readers who … [are] newcomers in the complex universe of health and disease, practitioners and patients, and medicine and society in nineteenth-century England” (3). Not so many years ago when I was a master’s student at the now soon-to-be-defunct Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, we too had our textbooks of sorts: the multi-authored Western Medical Tradition (1995) or W. F. Bynum’s Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (1994). Written by social historians who sought to move beyond the traditional internalist and hagiographic accounts of great men and medical progress they provided a whole generation of students with a grounding in what was, even then, a relatively new and exciting field of historical study. And yet despite their apparent revisionism and occasional concession to Roy Porter’s patient history, they generally remained wedded to a top-down approach to the subject which prioritized brain-work and discovery over the quotidian realities of bodily health or the contestations and compromises of grass-roots medical practice. Building on that scholarship, a new generation of historians, myself included, attempted to construct more politically and socially nuanced accounts by drawing upon the methodologies and sensibilities of the cultural history. But these days the history of medicine is no longer the sole preserve of social or cultural historians. Rather, it has become increasingly attractive to literary scholars who, against the background of an ever-widening conception of the text, have begun to look beyond the conventional literary sources of Middlemarch (1871-72) or Madame Bovary (1856) to explore specialist medical and scientific writings that were not previously part of their discipline’s intellectual purview. At the same time, funding bodies such as the Wellcome Trust have begun to promote the interdisciplinary study of Medical Humanities in place of conventional history, while some medical historians, myself included, have found themselves increasingly drawn to literary texts and methodologies. In fact, these days I spend as much of my time talking with literary scholars as I do with historians and find myself writing reviews for journals, such as this, whose readership is drawn predominantly from outside my own academic discipline. All this contextualization is relevant in approaching Carpenter’s book, not simply by way of establishing my own intellectual proclivities, useful though that may be, but because her book is, as far as I am aware, the first real attempt by a literary scholar to write a general history of nineteenth-century British medicine. Carpenter has no formal background in the history of medicine but is, in her own words, “trained in the field of literary studies, particularly Victorian literature, cultural studies, and feminist criticism” (3). At the same time, however, her work promises a level of intellectual synthesis, for she asserts that it is also a “cultural history of Victorian medicine” (3). Some historians might be skeptical of someone from literary studies proposing to write such a broad historical survey but I, for one, welcome it, not least because the absence of such disciplinary ties can be intellectually liberating, permitting a fresh and distinctive approach to familiar …