Medicine, Crime and Realism in Ouida’s ‘Toxin’ (1895)

In 1895, Ouida published a short story called ‘Toxin’ in the Illustrated London News which prompted an outraged response from the British medical establishment. In their words, this tale of an English surgeon who decides to murder his patient depicts ‘the search after scientific truth as naturally leading to crime’. The British Medical Journal considered Ouida’s story ‘an attack [...] on the medical profession’. This article analyses the story and the BMJ’s response, considering it in relation to crime fiction and realism. It further looks at reports of medical crimes in the late-nineteenth century, and considers Ouida’s deployment of diphtheria, a virulent epidemic of its time, through reports of the recently discovered cure in medical journals and the popular press. I argue that the reason the BMJ felt so threatened by her depiction of a murderous doctor is in great part due to Ouida’s attention to medical realism: the threat of fiction’s entanglement with the real

Biology · Criminology · Epistemology · Realism · Sociology · Toxin · Decadence, Literature, and Society · Philosophy · Microbiology