Boswell's Clap and Other Essays: Medical Analyses of Literary Men's Afflictions PDF
Preview Boswell's Clap and Other Essays: Medical Analyses of Literary Men's Afflictions
Boswell's Clap and Other Essays : Medical title: Analyses of Literary Men's Afflictions author: Ober, William B. publisher: Southern Illinois University Press isbn10 | asin: 0809314339 print isbn13: 9780809314331 ebook isbn13: 9780585178882 language: English Literature and medicine, Medicine--Case subject studies, Authors--Diseases and hygiene-- Case studies, Authors--Biography. publication date: 1988 lcc: R703.O23 1988eb ddc: 610.9 Literature and medicine, Medicine--Case subject: studies, Authors--Diseases and hygiene-- Case studies, Authors--Biography. Page iii Boswell's Clap and Other Essays Medical Analyses of Literary Men's Afflictions By William B. Ober, M.D. Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville Page iv Copyright © 1979 by Southern Illinois University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Designed by David Ford First paperback edition published January 1988 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ober, William B Boswell's clap and other essays. Includes bibliographical references. 1. MedicineCases, clinical reports, statistics. 2. AuthorsDiseases and hygieneCases, clinical reports, statistics. 3. AuthorsBiographyAddresses, essays, lectures. 4. Literature and medicineAd- dresses, essays, lectures. I. Title. R703.023 809 78-16018 ISBN 0-8093-1433-9 (pbk.) 91 90 89 88 4 3 2 1 Page v Contents List of Illustrations vii Preface ix Acknowledgments xv 1 1 Boswell's Clap 2 43 Swinburne's Masochism: Neuropathology and Psychopathology 3 89 Lady Chatterley's What? 4 118 Drowsed with the Fume of Poppies: Opium and John Keats 5 137 Madness and Poetry: A Note on Collins, Cowper, and Smart 6 193 Chekhov among the Doctors: The Doctor's Dilemma 7 206 William Carlos Williams, M.D.: Physician as Poet 8 233 The Earl of Rochester and Ejaculatio Praecox 9 253 Thomas Shadwell: His Exitus Revis'd 10 262 Did Socrates Die of Hemlock Poisoning? Notes 273 Page vii List of Illustrations First page of Swinburne's The Flogging-Block 45 The Willow Tree, by D. H. Lawrence 91 Manuscript of Keats's Ode to a Nightingale 139 Caius Cibber's figure of Melancholy Madness 139 Anton Chekhov in his garden at Yalta 195 William Carlos Williams' home 209 The Great Falls of the Passaic River 209 Dials and chronometer for the King's Privy Garden 235 William Oldys's copy of Langbaine's English Dramatick 255 Poets Jacques Louis David's The Death of Socrates 265 Page ix Preface These collected essays, written over the past decade, show a number of ways whereby medical information and insights can illuminate and perhaps resolve certain literary problems. This does not imply that every reader should read with a medical eye nor need any given writer be viewed as a "case." That would be presumptuous and would defeat the aims of literature. Many literary critics claim that the text itself is sufficient and extraneous biographical considerations irrelevant: I am not of this company. I am unable, perhaps unwilling, to dissociate a statement or a literary work from its context. I like to know who wrote it, when he wrote it, why he wrote it, and what audience he addresses; beyond that, something of the circumstances, immediate and remote, that gave rise to the work. Such knowledge may not be essential to enjoyment or understanding, but I find it helpful. People who find such knowledge useless or gratuitous ought not read this book. I fear that members of the antibiographical school would happily dismiss Johnson's Lives of the Poets because they place small value on "the common sense of readers uncorrupted by literary prejudices." On first blush it seems a reasonable position to claim that literature ought not be examined in the light of nonliterary events. But does literature exist as an entity entire unto itself, independent of other parts of life, untouched by any other reality? Textual and structural critics of recent decades claim this is so, that literature lives within the frame of language alone. True enough, but only up to a point, and nice molecular analysis does not help. We do not test the consecrated wine for hemoglobin content, nor would Carême's recipe for a madeleine Page x give us insight into the workings of Proust's imagination. But literature is often a transformation of experience, and it can be illuminating to find out just what the experience was and how the writer used it. No apologia has much value unless it defends against anticipated critical attacks. One cannot ward off every blow, but a few parries are obvious. Some will say that applying medical reasoning to literature is "reductive," a now fashionable word for what in my youth we called oversimplification. A medical point of view is reductive if and only if one claims that is the only way to read and stops. It is merely one way of looking at a blackbird, one form of evidence, one element to be taken into account in a final synthesis. A reader may adopt a medical stance to find out what added information it can bring to an established literary and critical corpus. Another objection might be the bland assertion that I have "psychoanalyzed" my subjects, carrying with it a pejorative tone to the very idea of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a clinical discipline to which a subject or patient comes voluntarily for a therapeutic purpose. My subjects did not come to me; I chose them and make no pretense to cure them. What's more, they are all safely dead. The cardinal technique of psychoanalysis is for the analyst to listen to the patient's free associations, and there is a continuing dialogue between doctor and patient. When associations are made in these essays, they were made by me and not my subjects, and there is no dialogue. But it is true that when I have found concepts developed by psychoanalysis and other schools useful and appropriate, I have tried to apply them. Does anyone in the eighth decade of the twentieth century deny the existence of unconscious mental processes, that dreams and fantasies reveal something about these processes, or that a writer's psyche is present in his work and examination of such work can help ideas reveal the man? Surely, by this date psychoanalytic ideas are part of
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