Meegan Kennedy. Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1116-8. Price: US$39.95 Tabitha Sparks. The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. ISBN: 987-0-7546-6802-2. Price: US$99.95/£50.00

The intersection of medicine and literature has been a particularly fruitful site of investigation for academics in Victorian studies and beyond. With the fall of the so-called two cultures model and the rise of fields like science studies and the medical humanities, academics have begun mining a previously off-limits middle territory. The last two decades have seen a proliferation of such works especially by Victorian literary scholars. Janice Caldwell, John Gordon, Lawrence Rothfield, Jason Tougaw, and Athena Vrettos, for example, have all offered their visions of the medico-literary relationship, as have edited collections such as Lillian R. Furst’s Medical Progress and Social Reality (2000). Rita Charon has used Victorian medicine and literature as a launching pad for the burgeoning field of Narrative Medicine. Now Tabitha Sparks and Meegan Kennedy have entered the discussion, offering fresh, enlightening additions to this rich area of inquiry. In The Doctor in the Victorian Novel, Tabitha Sparks ambitiously connects the changing figure of the doctor to the Victorian marriage plot. Seeking to differentiate herself from “many recent studies of Victorian science, medicine, and literature that claim…that a novelist’s consciousness was shaped by empirical domains extrinsic to the imaginative consciousness,” she considers “the doctor-character as a representation of and metonym for the decline of the marriage-plot novel” (10-11). Sparks is clear: she interrogates what the figure of the doctor reveals about the changing marriage plot and not “the influences of, for instance, physiology, cellular theory, or evolutionary biology” (11). The Doctor in the Victorian Novel argues that “over the course of the Victorian period, the medical profession’s rise to power (here represented by the doctor) and the associated scientization of medical and lay culture gradually displaces emotional and romantic intuition as the guiding ethos of the novel, and as it is principally rendered through the marriage plot” (161). Sparks quite thoroughly pursues her argument across the nineteenth century through a variety of texts that range from highly canonical to obscure. Her method is close reading, and, as she moves through various novels, the depth and breadth of her examination go a long way toward convincing her reader of the trajectory she charts. Keeping with the relationship between the doctor and the marriage plot, she explores subsidiary angles such as the power of the text to heal, Victorian marriage debates (considered as “malpractice”), and the relationship between medicine and contemporary legislation over marriage and sexuality. Examining the Romantic and early Victorian periods, Sparks asks “[h]ow were doctors imagined in fiction before the great Victorian medicalization of culture?” through representations in Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2) (12). Martineau’s Deerbrook, Sparks avers, offers the perfect “pre-scientific age” picture of a physician: a “deft amalgamation of the identities of doctor and husband” (26). Conversely, Eliot’s classic demonstrates that Lydgate’s “scientific perspective…leads him to misjudge his marital fortunes” (26). Sparks sees this movement over the century as emblematic of the arc of her argument. Rising scientism transforms the doctor from a social servant primed for “civil and cooperative union” into a “scientific explorer” whose commitment to empirical inquiry rendered him ill fit for marriage (44). This split exemplifies the two novelistic strains she will explore over the course of The Doctor in the Victorian Novel. After her discussion of Martineau and Eliot, she moves on to writers like Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Elizabeth Gaskell; Sparks finds “conflicted unions between professional doctors and their unfulfilled, romantic wives” which she reads as a “normalized” pairing in the 1860s that telegraphed “marital crisis” (63). Furthermore, Sparks argues (in ways that anticipate Kennedy’s discussions of genre), “the doctor’s …