Medicine in Fiction
The British Medical Journal, under this title, discusses entertainingly the crudities of the conception of the novelist and poet of the action of medicines and the effects of disease.
We laughed when Mark Twain proposed to deliver a course of lectures upon chemistry before the Royal Society, adding that he was "in a position to do this with greater freedom, because he knew nothing whatever about the science," but the public do not laugh at, but take in all seriousness, the medical incidents and opinions scattered up and down the pages of the novels and poems which so commonly deal with medical matters. What with the medical books which everybody nowadays feels it his duty to peruse, and the quack advertisements which force themselves upon his attention wherever he turns, it is impossible to avoid collecting a curious amount of medical information of a sort which is certain to find its way sooner or later from the end of a pen of the ready writer. This is perhaps not to be wondered at, considering how large a place ailments and modes of treatment occupy in our thoughts and interests. The freedom with which the novelist discusses these questions is of course due to the principle which led to Mark Twain's droll suggestion, though it is not acknowledged with such charming naiveti. As every man is expected to be a fool or a physician at 40, a novelist can hardly be blamed for assuming the latter character, and he usually does assume it with startling confidence.
One of the strange medical things in "Monte Cristo" is the way in which the old revolutionist, Noirtier, manages to live on, paralyzed in every part of his body except his eyelids, which he winks freely. Yet the old fellow reasons acutely, and finds no difficulty whatever in swallowing food or drink. Dumas seemed absolutely unaware that such a paralytic condition as he describes in Noirtier's cases involved of necessity brain damage of the most serious kind. Elsewhere Dumas made a guillotined head speak and weep. In one of his tales in the volume, "Les mille et un Fantomes," there is a story of a man engaged in making experiments on heads fresh from the guillotine in the Reign of Terror. The doctor is shut up with a sack of fresh heads in a little mortuary chapel, when a voice from one of the heads call him by his name—Albert. "It was the head of Solange; I thought I was going mad. I cried three times: Solange, Solange, Solange! At the third time the eyes opened, looked at me, let two tears fall, and darting forth a dim light as if the soul were escaping, they closed, never to open more." Then there was Krook, the "Lord Chancellor," in "Bleak House," who went off the earthly stage by spontaneous combustion. Dickens might well be excused for falling into an error which was at that time commonly believed in by people who ought to know better. Bulwer Lytton went in for medical marvels in Zanoni, but as he was a student of mystic lore, and actually learned magic from a professed thaumaturgist, the Abbe Constant, his wonders were attributable not so much to his ignorance of medical science as to his belief in the elixir of life and the transmutation of metals.
In "Called Back," we have the blindness and subsequent cure of the hero, and the mental aberration and subsequent recovery of the heroine. There really was some medical knowledge displayed in both these "cases." The peculiar blanching of the heroine's skin after her shock was not at all badly conceived; her partial loss of contact with the outer world was not an ill-contrived symptom, though the facility with which she moved about, and posed like a sane person before her lover, quite lifted her case out of the region of the actual medical world as known to physicians.
It is not surprising that even George Eliot, with all her knowledge of the innermost workings of the human mind, should have lost her way when dealing with the morbid changes of mind and brain. Tito's father, Baldassare, had been a great scholar, but after a long illness his memory upon recovery became a perfect blank; he could recall nothing of his scholarship, though he had not forgotten who he was; with all this Baldassare is not represented as having lost his reason; he remembers his past life, but he can no longer read or write or recall any of his scholarship, for which he had been so distinguished. It was not amnesia nor agraphia with which he was afflicted; it was a form of cerebral disease known only to the eminent novelist.
Wilkie Collins made a specialty of his medical knowledge, and it was upon this account that he was induced to undertake an anti-vivisection novel, which he published under the name of "Heart and Science." The work was equally unsatisfactory both to the persons who inspired it and to the general public. The vivisector may be clearly enough conceived in the novelist's mind, and if his laboratory were the only stage upon which he acted the drama of life would be easily dealt with; but the vivisector in the ordinary relations of life—more especially as the family physician—is another character altogether, and cannot readily be made to fit the circumstances necessary to make a good sensational novel. Wilkie Collins' effort in this direction was a complete failure, and his medical men and wonderful drugs could never have existed outside his own imagination.
In Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities," where Sydney Carton substitutes himself for the condemned Evremonde, we have premonitions of the chloroform which was to be discovered fifty years later—the chloroform of popular imagination, however, and by no means the CHCI3 of the Pharmacopoeia. The poets are, if possible, even worse offenders in the matter of their death scenes than the novelists. A man pulls a 2-drachm phial of some poison from his breast, swallows the contents, proceeds to make a 200-line speech without a pang or a gasp, staggers gracefully backwards to a conveniently-placed seat, drops upon it, clasps the region of the heart with both hands, and dies after a little convulsive movement of the legs. Another is run through the chest with a sword; he falls after some appropriate "business," but usually raises himself to a sitting posture and makes a speech full of the most beautiful sentiment, sighs deeply, and dies. Heart disease, too, carries off heroines in a fashion quite unknown to doctors, and, although it is of the variety known as "broken-heart," has characteristics which must not be generally associated with fracture of so important an organ.
The matter has its serious aspects, for novels occupy an important position in the literature of the day, and form almost the sole mental pabulum of half the mothers, especially amongst the well-to-do classes.
The British Medical Journal, under this title, discusses entertainingly the crudities of the conception of the novelist and poet of the action of medicines and the effects of disease.
We laughed when Mark Twain proposed to deliver a course of lectures upon chemistry before the Royal Society, adding that he was "in a position to do this with greater freedom, because he knew nothing whatever about the science," but the public do not laugh at, but take in all seriousness, the medical incidents and opinions scattered up and down the pages of the novels and poems which so commonly deal with medical matters. What with the medical books which everybody nowadays feels it his duty to peruse, and the quack advertisements which force themselves upon his attention wherever he turns, it is impossible to avoid collecting a curious amount of medical information of a sort which is certain to find its way sooner or later from the end of a pen of the ready writer. This is perhaps not to be wondered at, considering how large a place ailments and modes of treatment occupy in our thoughts and interests. The freedom with which the novelist discusses these questions is of course due to the principle which led to Mark Twain's droll suggestion, though it is not acknowledged with such charming naiveti. As every man is expected to be a fool or a physician at 40, a novelist can hardly be blamed for assuming the latter character, and he usually does assume it with startling confidence.
One of the strange medical things in "Monte Cristo" is the way in which the old revolutionist, Noirtier, manages to live on, paralyzed in every part of his body except his eyelids, which he winks freely. Yet the old fellow reasons acutely, and finds no difficulty whatever in swallowing food or drink. Dumas seemed absolutely unaware that such a paralytic condition as he describes in Noirtier's cases involved of necessity brain damage of the most serious kind. Elsewhere Dumas made a guillotined head speak and weep. In one of his tales in the volume, "Les mille et un Fantomes," there is a story of a man engaged in making experiments on heads fresh from the guillotine in the Reign of Terror. The doctor is shut up with a sack of fresh heads in a little mortuary chapel, when a voice from one of the heads call him by his name—Albert. "It was the head of Solange; I thought I was going mad. I cried three times: Solange, Solange, Solange! At the third time the eyes opened, looked at me, let two tears fall, and darting forth a dim light as if the soul were escaping, they closed, never to open more." Then there was Krook, the "Lord Chancellor," in "Bleak House," who went off the earthly stage by spontaneous combustion. Dickens might well be excused for falling into an error which was at that time commonly believed in by people who ought to know better. Bulwer Lytton went in for medical marvels in Zanoni, but as he was a student of mystic lore, and actually learned magic from a professed thaumaturgist, the Abbe Constant, his wonders were attributable not so much to his ignorance of medical science as to his belief in the elixir of life and the transmutation of metals.
In "Called Back," we have the blindness and subsequent cure of the hero, and the mental aberration and subsequent recovery of the heroine. There really was some medical knowledge displayed in both these "cases." The peculiar blanching of the heroine's skin after her shock was not at all badly conceived; her partial loss of contact with the outer world was not an ill-contrived symptom, though the facility with which she moved about, and posed like a sane person before her lover, quite lifted her case out of the region of the actual medical world as known to physicians.
It is not surprising that even George Eliot, with all her knowledge of the innermost workings of the human mind, should have lost her way when dealing with the morbid changes of mind and brain. Tito's father, Baldassare, had been a great scholar, but after a long illness his memory upon recovery became a perfect blank; he could recall nothing of his scholarship, though he had not forgotten who he was; with all this Baldassare is not represented as having lost his reason; he remembers his past life, but he can no longer read or write or recall any of his scholarship, for which he had been so distinguished. It was not amnesia nor agraphia with which he was afflicted; it was a form of cerebral disease known only to the eminent novelist.
Wilkie Collins made a specialty of his medical knowledge, and it was upon this account that he was induced to undertake an anti-vivisection novel, which he published under the name of "Heart and Science." The work was equally unsatisfactory both to the persons who inspired it and to the general public. The vivisector may be clearly enough conceived in the novelist's mind, and if his laboratory were the only stage upon which he acted the drama of life would be easily dealt with; but the vivisector in the ordinary relations of life—more especially as the family physician—is another character altogether, and cannot readily be made to fit the circumstances necessary to make a good sensational novel. Wilkie Collins' effort in this direction was a complete failure, and his medical men and wonderful drugs could never have existed outside his own imagination.
In Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities," where Sydney Carton substitutes himself for the condemned Evremonde, we have premonitions of the chloroform which was to be discovered fifty years later—the chloroform of popular imagination, however, and by no means the CHCI3 of the Pharmacopoeia. The poets are, if possible, even worse offenders in the matter of their death scenes than the novelists. A man pulls a 2-drachm phial of some poison from his breast, swallows the contents, proceeds to make a 200-line speech without a pang or a gasp, staggers gracefully backwards to a conveniently-placed seat, drops upon it, clasps the region of the heart with both hands, and dies after a little convulsive movement of the legs. Another is run through the chest with a sword; he falls after some appropriate "business," but usually raises himself to a sitting posture and makes a speech full of the most beautiful sentiment, sighs deeply, and dies. Heart disease, too, carries off heroines in a fashion quite unknown to doctors, and, although it is of the variety known as "broken-heart," has characteristics which must not be generally associated with fracture of so important an organ.
The matter has its serious aspects, for novels occupy an important position in the literature of the day, and form almost the sole mental pabulum of half the mothers, especially amongst the well-to-do classes.
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