Blood, Guts, and Lancets: Anatomy in Nin

This seminar serves as an introduction to the historical rise of anatomy and pathology (the branches of medicine focused on the study of the human form and on the study of the diagnosis of disease, intimately connected with forensic science), by examining how medicine is represented in the prose fiction of the Romantic and Victorian periods. Together, our class will look at how anatomy became the basis of modern Western allopathic medicine, and why laboratory medicine emerged as a crucible for medico-scientific progress during the nineteenth century. As the physician’s practice turned away from concocting tinctures and remedies, medicine would now become grounded in scientific reasoning based on the mechanistic study of the human body—and its key procedure, the postmortem examination.

In the nineteenth century, a historical period that saw the first uses of the terms “autopsy” and “scientist,” literary writers were deeply engaged in the rise of anatomy, pathology, and forensics. Novels and short fiction served as a testing-ground for working out ideas about life and death in the complex sociocultural world of the Romantic and Victorian eras. In this course, as we read works by authors like Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan LeFanu, Emile Zola, H.G. Wells, R.L. Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie, we will consider the strange history of how “genre fiction” (gothic novels and detective stories) became a way of exploring the pathological in literary writing—while also containing its threats. By reading the medical writings of Humphry Davy, Matthew Baillie, Luigi Galvani, Claude Bernard, and Rudolf Virchow alongside these novels, we will see how the tropes we usually associate with literature fundamentally shaped the rise of laboratory and forensic medicine. And as we read the historical lifewriting of Robert Voorhis and Mary Seacole, we will think, too, about how the rise of anatomy in nineteenth-century medicine was tainted by the influence of (what was then called) “race science.”

Ultimately, we will consider why anatomy became a dominant motif in nineteenth-century fiction, and why genre fiction is still the “outhouse” (in Amitav Ghosh’s phrase) that keeps the pathological well apart from high realism. Along the way, a pathologist from the New York Medical Examiner’s Office will visit the class to talk about the legacies of the nineteenth century in modern