Pathological Bodies

Reviewed by: Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture by Corinna Wagner Anna Clark Corinna Wagner. Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. xii + 315 pp. Ill. $39.95 (978-1938169-08-3). This book ties together the rich but well-trodden field of political symbolism with an analysis of medical debates in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France and Britain. Trained in English literature, Wagner begins the book with an ingenious discussion of the two meanings of the word “constitution”: the British constitution and the constitution of the physical body. Wagner demonstrates that discourses of unnatural and diseased bodies served to exclude certain types of people from the body politic. Following on the work of Lynn Hunt and others, Wagner’s first example is Marie Antoinette, who was libeled as a lesbian nymphomaniac who committed incest with her son. Wagner ties these images to medical notions about nymphomania from across the eighteenth century and beyond. She follows Thomas Laqueur’s argument that the eighteenth century originated the notion that women were biologically different from men in every way. She tends to see the attacks on Marie Antoinette as part of a larger attack on women’s participation in politics in general, but a more nuanced understanding of the specific hatred of aristocratic and royal women’s participation in politics would have been helpful. While we tend to see the eighteenth century as the time of the rise of individualism, some political philosophers and medical writers were quite anxious about solitary pleasures, such as masturbation and eating alone, that were seen as antisocial. As she points out, Rousseau wanted to unite people together rather than isolating them. Furthermore, she points out that although the family was seen as private, one had to demonstrate publically that one lived a healthy, normal family life. Rousseau also encouraged middle- and upper-class women to breastfeed their children, as several scholars have pointed out. And she analyzes some less familiar images in which an empty-breasted aristocratic woman is reviled as infertile, while [End Page 337] a female sans-culotte is flat-chested and fearsomely militant. But Wagner rejects the notion that breastfeeding augmented female status when motherhood was celebrated. Similarly, she refutes the argument that Mary Wollstonecraft “fluctuates between a desire to claim ‘male’ rationality for women and a desire to give voice to a maternal or female embodied subjectivity”(p. 54). Not all women wanted to breastfeed, or be mothers, she argues. The attacks on Wollstonecraft for her feminism are also familiar, fueled by her husband William Godwin’s all too candid memoir of her life, which Wagner compares to an autopsy. More original is Wagner’s analysis of how men’s bodies were diagnosed as diseased to undermine their credibility. While Thomas Paine and Charles James Fox were denigrated as drinkers, William Pitt the Younger and William Godwin were accused of being too cold and thus unable to sympathize with others. Furthermore, “physical disease was connected to ideas about political contamination” (p. 132). Much was made about Paine’s smallpox scars, for instance. Radicals in turn accused the Prince of Wales, later George IV, of excessive indulgence in drink and food. As other scholars have also pointed out, he was mocked as the Prince of Whales. Wagner shows that doctors such as George Cheyne advocated a temperate, modest diet characteristic of the middle class, rather than aristocratic self-indulgence. Critics also accused the prince of importing foreign vices and tastes when he built the extravagant Orientalist Brighton Pavilion, with its extensive kitchens. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of George IV’s most savage critics, espoused a perfectabilist vegetarian diet in contrast to the royal indulgence in foreign foods. Wagner points out that George’s body was also denigrated when he was compared to the “Hottentot Venus.” Here she draws on the extensive scholarship on Sara Baartman, the South African woman put on display for her unusual anatomy. Unfortunately, Wagner does not cite Pam Scully and Clifton Crais’s recent biography of Sara Baartman, which helps restore her as a person, not just an image. In conclusion, Wagner’s Pathological Bodies ties together a broad understanding

Argument (complex analysis) · Body politic · Constitution · Hatred · Individualism · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Medical History and Research · Medicine · Psychology