Peter Cryle

Feminine Sexual Pathologies

Th e a i m o f t h i s s p e c i a l i s s u e is to produce a set of detailed studies of so-called feminine sexual pathologies over the course of the long nineteenth century and its immediate prehistory and to explore a range of genres and media, including literary, medical, and philosophical texts. Just what conditions or practices came to be counted as pathology is, of course, the object of critical attention throughout. The collection highlights the complex and often intermittent history of “pathologies” such as hysteria, frigidity, nymphomania, lesbianism, and erotomania as well as treating the heavily gendered discourses surrounding “perversions” such as sadism and masochism and delinquent behaviors such as murderousness. The shift in perception of “abnormalities” from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century is an underlying concern of this volume. First, the eighteenth century entertained wide discrepancies in discourse according to generic locality: medical writing often presented graphic descriptions of such distempers as nymphomania accompanied by dire warnings, while libertine fiction typically sought to present unusual sexual behaviors as diverting or amusingly eccentric matters of “taste,” able to be momentarily transformed in the course of erotic contests. The nineteenth century, by contrast, tended to produce a more narrowly convergent understanding: such behaviors were fixed into the categories of sexual perversions, as Michel Foucault famously argued in 1976. 1 Second, eighteenth-century accounts of pathology were often bound up with material understandings of human physiology as constitutionally natural (that is, based on humoral differences between bodies), whereas the nineteenth century witnessed the adoption of medical and philosophical theories of instinct and then of desire to account for these sexual behaviors. (Caroline Warman’s article lays the groundwork for a discussion

Foretelling Pathology The Poetics of Prognosis

This paper examines a number of French middle-brow novels, usually called at the time romans de murs, from the period 1880–1910. It shows how, in these stories, doctors are shown to foretell the course of narrative through the diagnosis of certain pathologies, especially psychosexual ones. These pathologies are thus represented as implacable narrative programmes. In effect, most of these novels renounce the standard fictional resources of intrigue and suspense in favour of the relentless working out of their initial prognosis. The authority of medical discourse is therefore not just confirmed and disseminated: it is elaborated as fatality in the very terms of the novel.

Charlatanism in the ‘Age of Reason’

When scholars present a collection of essays, their ‘collectedness’ depends in part on the place in which they appear.1 With that in mind, we are delighted to have the opportunity to publish together in this journal, and keen to make our own broad contribution to a ‘cultural and social history’. Our assumption is that the journal’s title is effectively a twin concept serving as a double constraint for the writing of history. Given our topic, a narrowly ‘cultural’ history of charlatanism might attend only to the language of charlatanism, to its modes of address and discursive regularities, while a ‘social’ history might well focus exclusively on the history of medicine, on the corporative and mercantile practices which defined a role for those empirics and Paracelsians who were undoubtedly the first group to be called charlatans. We can use the doubleness of cultural and social to distinguish our contribution from that of an illustrious predecessor, Roy Porter, who put his stamp on the history of medicine like few others, and is often quoted with approval in the essays that follow. In one of his books, Porter identified charlatanism as a subject for research, and observed famously that the eighteenth century was ‘the golden age of quackery’.2 But our collective path through this field often diverges from his. We are most likely to part company at those points where Porter makes distinctions that rely on apparently unproblematic criteria for scientific truth and respectability. For example, he asks to what extent early modern quacks Cultural and Social History 2006; 3: 243–249

La Mettrie and charlatanism: The dynamics of recognition and denunciation

This paper contributes to a genealogy of charlatanism by tracing two figures which eventually come to overlap: the street charlatan or operator, known for his eloquence and deceptive skill, and the comically incompetent doctor, represented classically in France in the theatre of Molière. The paper argues that eighteenth-century France gives the term ‘charlatan’ new moral weight while extending it to fields outside medicine, most notably to philosophy. Some examples of the denunciation of charlatans are examined, and it is suggested that denunciation was usually both extensible and reversible. La Mettrie appears in this regard as the very type of the denouncer denounced. He was a doctor-philosopher who vigorously decried the Paris Faculty of Medicine as a group of charlatans, even though his own medical qualifications were anything but impressive, and he was in turn reviled by Diderot as the most charlatanic and unworthy of philosophers.

Sex, Liberty and Licence in the Eighteenth Century

The Enlightenment is usually thought of as one of the great capital-letter moments in European history. In France, Germany and Britain, ‘philosophy’ came in the eighteenth century to be defined in its modern sense as the disciplined exercise of Reason. The truths of earlier times were subject to re-examination, and age-old beliefs called into question. The critical identification of ‘prejudice’ became a widespread intellectual activity and its disparagement a routine rhetorical practice. Recently, however, the Enlightenment has itself become the object of concerted critique. It is deemed by some to be a great cultural monolith, an imperial, indeed an imperialist edifice — and not without reason. From the enlightened standpoint, forms of thought that fail to conform to its own criteria can be depreciated or disqualified by being placed in more ignorant, prejudiced or primitive phases of historical development. Many contemporary philosophers have thus come to question what Gadamer calls ‘the prejudice against prejudice’ (1975), rejecting the Enlightenment habit of deprecating its others. More particularly, post-colonial thinkers have noted the condescension with which the West tends to judge other cultural traditions whose patterns of thought do not regularly conform to Enlightenment models.

Interrogating the work of Thomas W. Laqueur

There is no need to offer evidence of Thomas Laqueur’s standing as a historian of sexuality. His work is cited with remarkable frequency, and has been taken up in many places. Accordingly, the articles that follow are, to a considerable degree, exercises in emulation. They can be read in the first instance as tributes, but it will quickly become apparent that their engagement with Laqueur’s work is as interrogative as it is concerted. When major historians such as Laqueur – or for that matter Foucault – present a broad view of historical change, it is unsurprising that their theses should be met by objections. Nuancing and qualifying is the proper function of a scholarly community. But responding to the challenge of an ambitiously broad history calls for more than a display of reticence or ingenious quibbles at the margin.1 To accept the challenge to the full is to engage with the problems that are germane to the history offered, and to pursue the questions that it helps us to ask. That was the agenda when, in August 2008, Thomas Laqueur travelled to Brisbane, Australia, to take part in a day-long seminar around his work. The seminar was organized by the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland, and the business at hand was Laqueur’s contribution to the history of sexuality, through his books, Making Sex (1990) and Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2004). This was, as it should have been, a celebratory occasion, but it was conducted in a spirit of strenuous enquiry, as the articles grouped here will attest. These five articles have been selected and prepared from the papers given on that day. The first, by Laqueur himself, begins with some questions about the great cultural importance that always seems to attach to sexuality. Why is it, he asks, that sexuality continually claims such disproportionate significance? His broad answer is that what we now call sexuality is bound up in a foundational way with human cultures and their transformation over time. That is a reason why it almost always has to do Turning Points in the History of Sexuality

Words and Things: The Uncertain Place of Philology in Intellectual History

ABSTRACT This paper considers the ease and the difficulty of adapting the habits of philology to the exigencies of intellectual history. The title chosen by Michel Foucault for one of his major historical studies referred to ‘words and things’, but the relation between those two is not given once and for all. Foucault developed the notion of discourse, which involved articulated sets of words. Discourses he understood to be sayable propositions corresponding to thinkable things. Since the 1970s and 1980s, Foucault’s influence on the humanities and social sciences has been great, and there now exists at least one field of research that owes direct allegiance to his view of discourse: the field of intellectual history. Scholars have come to intellectual history after being trained in a range of disciplines: not just history of various kinds, but philosophy, studies in religion and literary studies. This paper will ask specifically what it can mean in practice to bring to the historical study of discourses a training in which philology has played a part. In the absence of a putative love of discourse, what might it mean to take words as objects of close historical attention?

Eugenics and the normal body: the role of visual images and intelligence testing in framing the treatment of people with disabilities in the early twentieth century

Abstract This article examines how the emergence of a statistical concept of the normal at the end of the nineteenth century led to the development of a theory of eugenics, and examines the cultural pathways by which this theory came to shape both the public perception and institutional treatment of people now understood as disabled. The statistical idea of the normal and the theory of eugenics were developed simultaneously in the work of one man: Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin and often identified as the first ‘social Darwinist.’ Beginning with an analysis of the role of composite photography in Galton’s research, this article traces the historical co-emergence of normality and eugenics along two key lines of development: the use of new visual imagining techniques in the public sphere as a means by which to popularize these ideas amongst a general audience, and their application in the institutional and legal treatment of disabled people in the first three decades of the twentieth century. In so doing, the article intends to provide a careful history of the development and application of eugenical thinking and practice in the Anglophone world over this period of emergence and influence.

Recent Developments in the Intellectual History of Medicine: A Special Issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine

The history of medicine is probably best thought of as a wide range of different types of inquiry, rather than a single, well-defined field. It can involve, among other things, the history of institutions, technologies, and outstanding individuals. The articles gathered in this special issue are offered specifically as contributions to the intellectual history of medicine. Each shows, in its own way, how a particular disorder became conceptualized or how a particular set of difficulties was made into a topic of debate. Inquiry of this kind is not quite the same thing as a history of ideas—if by the latter one understands only the study of ideas as they traverse medical writing—since our concern is not with major ideas in the field of medicine, as such. One of our working assumptions is that intellectual history ought to be no grander an enterprise than social history at its most focused, or cultural history at its most closely bounded. We will simply examine ways of thinking that prevailed at given points in history, indicating the material consequences to which they gave rise. By seeking to articulate thought, writing, and professional practice, we are responding to the challenge Michel Foucault laid down for historians. But the histories offered here are not “Foucauldian” in the manner of histories that focus primarily on articulating epistemic “rupture” and unprecedented conceptual “invention.” The point of our contributions is to examine the contexts in which new kinds of thinking emerged gradually, and often unevenly. We seek, as Foucault did at his best, to highlight the circumstantial nature of thought and the intellectually productive nature of circumstance.

Treatment 2: Psychology

We announced in the previous chapter that we were going to use the moral–physical opposition as a conceptual entree into psychological treatments of frigidity as they developed at the very end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth. We will begin that task by considering some new terms that maintained a version of the dichotomy while also reshaping and reconceiving it. The emergence of such expressions was quite a widespread discursive event, affecting at least the three languages — French, English and German — on which we are focused in these two chapters. We have already had occasion to discuss William Hammond’s use of ‘mental’ rather than ‘moral’ in certain contexts, and will soon come to consider in detail some significant terminological developments in German, but before doing so we will consider briefly the professional discourse of a later French alienist, Henri Legrand du Saulle.