Author |
Kennedy, Meegan |
Year |
2010 |
Publisher |
Columbus: Ohio State UP |
Number of pages |
261 |
ISBN |
9780814211168 |
Keywords |
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Abstract
Amazon (2013):
Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and
the Novel, by Meegan Kennedy, surveys hundreds of primary sources in a provocative
new argument about visual knowledge. Kennedy argues that Victorian novelists and physicians
jointly fret over “seeing and stating”: how to observe the world and how to record
it. She shows how the clinical gaze and voice, never uncontested, function in medical
texts and novels within a range of possible modes of vision and narration.
Critics have examined how novelists borrow from other genres—newspapers, legal cases,
autobiographies. Medical writing likewise enriches the novel’s uniquely flexible and
wide-ranging presentation of Victorian culture. In turn, the novel shapes medical
narrative even as clinical science idealizes methodological rigor. Revising the Clinic
shows how the wealth of scientific material in mainstream Victorian periodicals creates
a productive literary “commons” where novelists and physicians can encounter each
others’ strategies for seeing and stating. Novelists adapt physicians’ techniques
to nonmedical scenes, and physicians echo the sentimental or sensational novel to
gain sympathy or rhetorical force when medical knowledge falters.
Kennedy traces the development of the Victorian novel and the case history from eighteenth-century
curious observation and curious sights through nineteenth-century clinical observation,
mechanical observation, and speculation, to Freud’s labyrinthine mapping and speculative
insight. These make new sense, read within the literary tradition of the case history.
The lens of Kennedy’s argument clarifies and illuminates the preoccupation with genre
and visuality that is common to Victorian medicine and the novel.