Literature and Medicine: The Nineteenth Century by Andrew Mangham

Author:Andrew Mangham [Mangham, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, Medical, General, history, Internal Medicine, Public Health, Test Preparation & Review, Instruments & Supplies, Social Science, Disease & Health Issues
ISBN: 9781108420747
Google: ipgsEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: CambridgeUP
Published: 2021-06-24T00:06:08.840523+00:00

Major Edis rejects the nurse/soldier analogy and identifies nurses instead with priesthood in a curious ‘religion of the future’ that conflates aspects of Christianity, paganism, and a vague spiritualism. Edis envisions a future defined by a decadent modernity in which an urban populace rushes endlessly and seemingly mindlessly in search of ‘wealth or pleasure’. The temple in the centre of the crowded city is unheeded by the crowd; it is a ‘lonely’ citadel approached only by the sick and weary. The link between church and hospital is obvious in the description of the interior of the temple, with its rows of beds in the hushed silence, and in the wordplay on ‘service’ and ‘minister’. ‘Service’ here refers to attendance on the sick, rather than to a religious ceremony, and ‘minister’ refers to one who tends to physical needs, rather than to a member of the clergy. Ministering to the sick nevertheless takes on a religious aura in this vision, but there are almost none of the trappings of Christianity, except for the gold cross above the temple. The only overt religious reference is to Vestal Virgins, a curiously pagan association, but one that carries subtle Victorian domestic overtones, given that the Vestals were the priestesses of Vesta, goddess of the hearth. Sexual purity, implied by the comparison with the Vestals and echoed in the ministers’ ‘pure and unspotted’ white robes, combined with loving and sympathetic servitude, define the ministers’ moral character. The reverence afforded them by the deferential crowds is based solely on their service and devotion, not on religious fervour. While there is the supposition that there is a ‘High Priest’ and a ‘Holy of Holies’ in the temple, the only supreme power appears to be death and the only supreme good is Perfect Health. This oddly syncretic ‘religion of the future’ constitutes a kind of reverential secularism in which the only truly moral and respected beings are nurses. The menace of religiosity on the part of new-style nurses is negated by making them the locus of awe and respect.

Rather than being Fiedler’s ‘erotic figures of a peculiar, ambiguous kind’, the nurses in Major Edis’s dream are religious figures of a peculiar, ambiguous kind, and part of the ambiguity is the fixation on sexuality inherent in the almost obsessive insistence on purity, virginity, and unworldliness. The impossibility of such denial of the nurse’s sexuality in the real world, however, where intimate knowledge and manipulation of bodies was an integral part of her work, continued to colour perceptions of nurses. Despite increased professionalisation and growing respect in the public at large, misgivings about nurses’ motives and moral character persisted and were also registered in fictional representations. That these misgivings were patently unfair is nevertheless reflected in the fact that suspicions about nurses are almost always expressed by characters who are either unreasonable and ill-informed, or lower class (and therefore supposedly ignorant). In a novel entitled Nurse Elisia (1892), for example, the refined eponymous protagonist is employed to care for Ralph

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