Book ID: CBB755609187

Medicine Is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture (2021)

unapi

Servitje, Lorenzo (Author)


SUNY Press


Publication Date: 2021
Physical Details: 352
Language: English

Examines how literature mediated a convergence of militarism and medicine in Victorian culture that continues into the present via a widespread martial metaphor.Medicine is most often understood through the metaphor of war. We encounter phrases such as “the war against the coronavirus,” “the front lines of the Ebola crisis,” “a new weapon against antibiotic resistance,” or “the immune system fights cancer” without considering their assumptions, implications, and history. But there is nothing natural about this language. It does not have to be, nor has it always been, the way to understand the relationship between humans and disease.Medicine Is War shows how this “martial metaphor” was popularized throughout the nineteenth century. Drawing on the works of Mary Shelley, Charles Kingsley, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad, Lorenzo Servitje examines how literary form reflected, reinforced, and critiqued the convergence of militarism and medicine in Victorian culture. He considers how, in migrating from military medicine to the civilian sphere, this metaphor responded to the developments and dangers of modernity: urbanization, industrialization, government intervention, imperial contact, crime, changing gender relations, and the relationship between the one and the many. While cultural and literary scholars have attributed the metaphor to late nineteenth-century germ theory or immunology, this book offers a new, more expansive history stretching from the metaphor’s roots in early nineteenth-century militarism to its consolidation during the rise of early twentieth-century pharmacology. In so doing, Servitje establishes literature’s pivotal role in shaping what war has made thinkable and actionable under medicine’s increasing jurisdiction in our lives. Medicine Is War reveals how, in our own moment, the metaphor remains conducive to harming as much as healing, to control as much as empowerment.

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Reviewed By

Review Michael Worboys (2022) Review of "Medicine Is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture". Bulletin of the History of Medicine (pp. 272-274). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB755609187/

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Authors & Contributors
Dickson, Melissa
Shuttleworth, Sally A.
Sonja Boos
Tsay, Alice
Schlicht, Laurens
Sandra Dinter
Concepts
Medicine and culture
Medicine and literature
Disabilities; disability; accessibility
Medicine and the military; medicine in war
Disease and diseases
Metaphors; analogies
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century, early
20th century, late
17th century
Early modern
Places
Great Britain
Germany
France
England
Scotland
United States
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