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• W2024406066 abstract "Reviewed by: Cholera and Nation: Doctoring the Social Body in Victorian England James G. Hanley Pamela K. Gilbert. Cholera and Nation: Doctoring the Social Body in Victorian England. SUNY Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. viii + 231 pp. $75.00 (978-0-7914-7343-6). Pamela K. Gilbert, a professor of English at the University of Florida and author of several books on disease and Victorian society, is interested in the response to and the rhetorical use of the four English cholera epidemics (1831–32, 1848–49, 1854 –55, 1866–67), specifically the relation among cholera, the body, and the nation. She argues, drawing inspiration from Michel Foucault and from Mary Poovey’s work on the social domain, that the outbreaks promoted a gendered and racialized body central to the definition of nation. Her book thus complements new work in medical history such as Nadja Durbach’s Bodily Matters1 and is poised to build on recent reconceptualizations of the notion of citizenship and nation exemplified in Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall’s Defining the Victorian Nation.2 The book’s first section (46 pp.) deals with the response of the clergy, “medics,” the poor, and radicals to the English epidemics. Gilbert notes that the precise meaning of the epidemic varied within and between groups and over time, an important point but one that will not surprise historians of medicine. More significant to her argument is the claim that the first epidemic “made definitions of the body and its health central to imaginings of nation and representation during the first Reform Bill debates” (p. 4) and that this rhetorical link between body and nation only got stronger over time. While there is no doubt that cholera was, depending on the speaker and the time, an index of personal, political, institutional, or even national failure, Gilbert’s specific claim about the centrality of nation is not wholly convincing; she notes that medics did not use the rhetoric of nation until the end of the period, and in the case of clergy it seems to have been restricted to Anglicans and, even then, used fitfully. The chapter on the response of the poor and politically radical (14 pp., three of which are devoted to the post- 1832 outbreaks) provides insufficient material for consideration. In the second section (65 pp.), focused on medics, Gilbert develops her argument on race and gender as crucial determinants of cholera. Gilbert claims that by the time of the 1866 epidemic, there was a widespread belief that women were more susceptible than men (it is unclear whether she is referring to incidence or to case-specific mortality). Gilbert’s analysis of the form of autopsy reports in this context is intriguing, but further reference to the primary literature would have made this argument more compelling. Gilbert is on stronger ground in her claim that race mattered, although she devotes most of her attention to race in the context of India, missing an opportunity to discuss the evolving significance of race as attention shifted between Ireland and India. [End Page 404] Regular readers of the Bulletin will probably find Gilbert’s last section on Victorian fiction most illuminating. Surprisingly, cholera figures very little in Victorian fiction, at least explicitly, but Gilbert convincingly illustrates the way in which authors such as George Eliot “used medicine and disease as . . . metaphors for bad political practice” (p. 144). The last chapter, based mainly on Charles Kingsley’s novel Two Years Ago (1857), is the book’s best, and Gilbert persuasively presents Kinsley’s cholera as a marker of a particular racialized male body. In sum, Gilbert’s study is stimulating and important, although some of the arguments could be strengthened. In fairness to Gilbert, this volume is one of several projected from a larger cholera project, and two others, it seems, have already appeared. There is undoubtedly much additional empirical and argumentative material found in the other volumes. Nonetheless, this is a valuable study in its own right and well worth consideration by medical historians. James G. Hanley University of Winnipeg Footnotes 1. Nadja Durbach, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in..." @default.
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• W2024406066 title "<i>Cholera and Nation: Doctoring the Social Body in Victorian England</i> (review)" @default.
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