The Body Inside the Skin:
The Medical Model of Character
in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Juliet McMaster
M
ost men know when they are ill, but very few when they are well,'"
said the eminent eighteenth-century physician George Cheyne. We
are most aware of the body when it is mdfunctioning; but likewise we
are least able to understand it. That is when an interpreter is called for.
And as interpreters of their bodies, people in life, characters in fiction,
and the authors who create characters in fiction turn to the physician.
The doctor becomes the interpreter; or, if he is not present, his lore, as
gleaned from his visits and his writings, is applied by amateurs. People
in the eighteenth century were used to doctoring themselves and each
other.2 The doctor, and the medical writing he purveyed, provided the
model for what was going on inside the opaque skin.
The skin is a significant organ in eighteenth-century literature, and
recognized in various contexts as an important boundary. The fully exposed skin is the body naked, the body revealeVwith d l the pride of
T h i paper was originally composed and delivered as the Lahey k t u n at C m n d i a University
in Montreal, in March 1991. The author is grateful to her host. on that occasion for pomission
to publish this version.
1 The Lcners of D a r Ccorgc Ckeyne a SomuelRichnrdrmt (1733-1743). cd. Charles F. Mullett
(Columbia: University d Mismuri Ress, 1943). p. 7n. Rdsrsnaa ere to thir edition.
2 See h l h y and Roy Poner in "Sclf-Medicaim." chap. 3 of Tke Padem's Pmgrcs.~:Dorrorr
and Dorronnl( an Dghwmrh-Century England (Cambridge: Polity h s . 1989). pp. 3 M 2 .
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION. Volume 4, Number 4. July 1992
278 EIOHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
ornament cast off," as the lubricious critic Tickletext gloats over the
exposed charms of Pamela.' Glimpses of the bare white skin of Joseph
Andrews and of Humphry Clinker cause flutters of sexual excitement
in Mrs Slipslop and Tabitha Bramble, the elderly women who perceive
the young men as sex objects. Gulliver hides his skin from his master
the Houyhnhnm, because he knows very well that it will betray him
as a Yahoo. Being without a skin, on the other hand, is a condition
vividly imagined by more than one writer of fiction. Steme's Yorick, in
A Sentimental Journey, talks of Smelfungus (or Smollett) of having "been
flea'd alive, and bedevil'd, and used worse than St. bar tho lo me^"^ during
his travels. Smollen seems to have taken this analogue of the skinned
saint to heart: was it in reference to Steme that Matthew Bramble in
Humphry Clinker, who is hypersensitive to human and environmental
corruption, is said to be "as tender as a man without a skin"?' The
figure of the dcorchd may be said to have haunted the eighteenth-century
consciousness. We all remember Swift's narrator's comment, "Last Week
I saw a Woman flay'd and you will hardly believe, how it altered her
Person for the worse.'" The body inside the skin is not always a congenial
entity; and the passage from the inside to the outside of the skin is
fraught with danger. It was often the physician's business to promote
and supervise that passage.
Eighteenth-century medicine was not distinguished for its advances. Between Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood in the seventeenth century, and Jenner's development of vaccination for smallpox
late in the eighteenth, the medical profession was highly conservativeaccording to some, even regressive.' Hippocratic medicine was still the
3 Henry Fielding, S k l o (1741). in Joseph Andnws d S k l o , ed. MaRin C. B ~ ~ e s t i n .
Riverside edition (Boston: Houghton MiWin, 1961). p. 305.
4 Laurence Stemc, A ScntintcnrolJourney (1768), ed. Ian Jack (London: Oxford University Ress,
1968). p. 29. Refmnew are UI this edition.
5 Tobias Srnollen, The Expedition @ H u m p h Clinker (1771), ed. Jams L. T h a n (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1983), p. 46. Refennccs are to this edition.
6 Jonathan Swift. The Talc of a Tub in Gullivcr's Travels and Other Wrifings, ed. Ricardo Quinlana
(New YorX:Modem Library, 1958), p. 343. References are Io this edition.
7 Albert S. Lyons. Medicine An lIlumotedH,rtory (New Ynk: Abrams. 1978). p. 4678. The great
srirnufic d i m v a i e s of Harvey and of Robert Hmke (Micrugrupbo. 1665) in the even tee nth
century did not have an immediak impact in medical w m c c . "Hmke laid out a path fur m d m l
T H E MEDICAL MODEL O F CHARACTER 279
norm. In 1758 a doctor, James Mackenzie, published The History of
Health, and the Art of Preserving It.' Today's equivalent of such a book,
especially if written by a doctor, would be full of indignant reference
to outdated practices and former benighted times. But Mackenzie's History is also intended as a current "family doctor" volume. He collects
the doctrines of Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna and company as principles of treatment still viable. He pays tribute to "the immortal Harvey" (p.
349); but for the most part, as a guide to healthy living and sound medical practice, he regards those regimens and treatments as best which
are tried and true. Galen, writing in the second century, says Mackenzie, "has written one of the fullest and best treatises on the preservation
of health that we have to this day" (p. 9). In medicine, we gather, not
much has changed since Hippocrates.
Body and mind were not considered separate spheres; on the contrary,
their close relation was still assumed by eighteenthtentury doctors as
by the ancients. The familiar four humours were still part of the picture,
although in some medical writings they seem to be falling out of fashion (as well they might after twenty-four centuries). The mental faculties
were therefore. still often seen as determined by the physical makeup
of the body. And passions and affections of the mind were still considered as among the six "Non-naturals," conditions beyond the body, such
as air and food, which none the less affect it. "We know by daily experience," wrote Mackenzie, "that the influence of the mind upon the body,
with respect to health, and of the body upon the mind, with respect to
the intellectual faculties, is very great. Sudden terrors have killed some,
and distracted others. Anger and grief impair health, chearfulness and
contentment promote it" (p. 359). The physician was expected to be psychiatrist and moralist too. It is his business to teach the "habit of virtue,"
for the governance of the passions is the best preservative of health (p.
365).
This very physical model of the emotional life has its parallel in a mechanical model for the body. George Cheyne described the human body
as "a machine of an infinite Number and Variety of Fluids, perpetually running ...in a constant Circle, ...to moisten, nourish, and repair the
enlightenment but physicians were slow in m d i n g it." Lesler S. King, The R w d to Medical
Enlightenmem. 165&95 (London:MacDondd, 1970). p. 176.
8 The full title is The History of HUM, ond the An ofPreserving fi, or. An Account o f d l tho1 has
been recommended by Phy~iciamand Philosophers, towords the Prescrvotion of Health, fmm
the most remote Antiquity to this Time (Edinburgh, 1758). Page references an provided in thc
lent.
THE MEDICAL MODEL OF CHARACTER 281
Expenses of Living." His rival, Richard Mead, confirms the concept.l0
In France their contemporary, the doctor-tumed-philosopherLa Mettrie,
produced the most extended argument in L'Homme Machine, in which he
proved that body and soul were co-extensive, and constituted of the same
material. "The human body is a machine which winds its own springs.
It is the living image of perpetual movement.""
What makes this machine go wrong? The fluids corrupt, often by some
intemperate action of the subject, and must be evacuated. A high proportion of diseases are the result of plethora, an over-plus of matter in the
system. And this excessive or corrupted matter must be got out. It is the
physician's business to assist nature in ejecting the corrupt humours, in
getting them outside that containing skin. "The usual practice of physick
among us," Hooker had summarized, "turns in a manner wholly upon
evacuation, either by bleeding, vomit, or some purgation."12 As John
Armstrong emphasized, in his epic in blank verse on The Art of Preserving Health (which comes complete with an invocation to Hygeia, goddess
of health, as muse), "for physic knows / How to disburden the too tumid veins."" The process of disburdening was indeed what physic knew
best.
This simple-not to say cmde-principle of extracting and discarding
infected matter pertained in an astonishing variety of cases. It was available to the merest peasant, who could readily adapt to being bled and
purged like the gentry.I4 The gentry did not always rejoice in the system themselves, however. Lord Hervey complained of physicians: "They
all jog on in one beaten track; a vomit to clear your stomach, a glister to
give you a stool, laudanum to quiet the pain, and then a purge to cleanse
your bowels, and what they call 'carry it off.'"l~ulliver's satirical description of physicians' practice to his master the healthy Houyhnh~n,
9 George Cheyne, The English Malady (London: Suahan, 1733). p. 4.
10 Mead called the body "a hydraulic machine conhived with most exquisite art, in which there
are numberless tubes properly adjusled and disposed for the conveyance of fluids of different
kinds." Medical Preceots and Courions. m l a t e d ed k Lhen bv Thomas Slack (Dublin.
1751). p. 2.
I1 Iulien affray de la Methie, Man o Machine (or L'Homme Machine, 1748), ed. and w n s . by
G e m d e Carman Bussey (La Salk, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1%1), p. 93.
12 As quoted in Johnson's Dictionary under "evacuation."
13
11, linen 221-23. The Poetical Worb ofArmtrong. Dyer. andGreen, ed. George Cilfillan (Edinburgh: Nichol, 1858). The An of Pnserving Health was fmt published in 1744.
14 Dorothy and Roy Porter, p. 170.
IS John. Lord Hervcy, "An Account of my own Constitution and Illness, with Same Rules for the
282 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
then, is hardly exaggerated: "Their Fundamental is, that all Diseases
arise from Repletion; from whence they conclude, that a great Evacuation of the Body is necessary, either through the natural Passage, or
upwards at the Mouth."16
Purges, vomits, and blood-letting were the primary remedies applied
in a huge range of diseases; and sometimes they were employed when
nothing was wrong, just by way of a healthy regimen. But evacuations
procured by these means were not the only ones deemed beneficial.
Urine, sweat, pus, and phlegm were all much sought after. Spitting of
blood was considered a healthy sign in tubercular patients.17 The fluid in
a blister was likewise a means of drawing infected matter out through the
skin, so that physicians worked with vesicatories, agents that painfully
raised blisters, in order to cure certain maladies. Under the verb "to
blister" Johnson in his Dictionary quotes Richard Wisernan, physician to
Charles n, whose Chirurgical Treatises was the main medical reference
work for Smollett's young doctor, Roderick Random.ls Wiseman wrote
of one case: "I blistered the legs and thighs; but was too late: he died
howling."a
Phlebotomy, or blood-letting, was in process of going out of fashion
during the eighteenth century, and a number of medical books caution
emphatically against inappropriate blood-letting. But even by the end of
the century bleeding was still considered appropriate for "all inflammatory fevers, such as pleurisies, peripneumonias, etc. It is likewise proper
for all topical inflammations, as those of the intestines, womb, bladder,
stomach, kidnies, throat, eyes, etc., as also in the asthma, sciatic pains,
coughs, headaches, rheumatisms, the apoplexy, epilepsy, and bloody flux.
After falls, blows, bruises or any violent hurt received either externally
or internally, bleeding is n e ~ e s s a r y . 'The
~ list is remarkably inclusive.
Reservation of Health; for the Use of my Children" (1731). in Some Moterids Towards Memoirs
of the Reign ofKing George n, ed. Romney Sedgwick, 3 vols (London: E y e and Spottiswde,
1931), 3:%546.
16 Swift, Gulliver's T m b ond Other Wrirlngs, p. 206.
17 See Mead, p. 40.
6
18 Tobias SrnolktI. The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748). ed. PaulCiabricl Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 31. References are to U s edition.
(Oxford:
19 As quoted in Johnson's Dictionary, s.v. "blister."
20 William Buchan, Domestic Medicine, or, A Tmotise on the Prevention and Cure of D i s e m s
(Philadelphia, 1799). As quoted by Lester S. King, The Medico1 Worldofthe Eighteenth Century
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). pp. 318-19.
THE MEDICAL MODEL O F CHARACTER 283
The complaint of Wordsworth's leech-gatherer notwithstanding, bleeding with leeches was still in practice well into the nineteenth century.
Dickens, visited by his friend the cartoonist Charles Leech, recorded that
after an accident his guest was "in bed, and had twenty of his namesakes
on his temples this moming.'?l
Cupping, which brought the blood to the surface by the application of
heated cups to the skin, was a variant of blood-letting, where the blood
would be drawn from shallow incisions over a wide area rather than from
a single incision.
Dropsical patients seem to have given doctors a degree of satisfaction,
in that evacuating their oedematous condition was relatively simple, and
produced spectacular results. You simply make a hole in the leg and
let the excess fluid drain out.22Richard Mead rejoiced in the cheerful
disposition of one dropsical woman who ordered her own epitaph:
Here lies dame Mary Page ...
She departed this life March 4 1728 in the 51st year of her age.
In 68 months she was tapped 56 times,
Had taken away 240 gallons of water,
Without ever repining her case,
Or ever fearing the operations?'
One can hear a note of moral triumph in the record: anyone who has
got rid of that much evil matter is naturally conscious of an unusually
shining virtue.
So, whether by emetics, diuretics, purges, blisters, phlebotomy, sweating, or tapping, it was the principal object of the eighteenth-century
physician to get the inside disease out. And this applied to nervous and
emotional conditions as well as to physical ones. Because of the CIUcia1 importance of evacuations, there was a parallel emphasis on vents,
the orifices by which the evacuations made their exit. The term "vent,"
both as noun and verb, maintains an amphibious status between the literal
and the metaphorical.
21 Letter to John Fororster, 23 September 1849. The Lctrers of Charles Dickens, vol. 5, ed. Madeline
House et of. (Oxford: Clarendon Pnss, 1980, p. 612.
22 See Mead, p. 102.
23 Mead, p. 116. Roman numerals have been changed to Arabic.
284 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
Doctors mythologized the process of disease and cure, and turned it into a
narrative that had its own beginning, middle and end, its own peripeteia,
and certainly its own catharsis: (the purging metaphor goes back to
Aristotle). The cause of the disease usually has moral significance; the
progress may be hastened or retarded, according to the patient's behaviour, the crisis, or determining moment of judgment, arrives when the
patient, aided by the physician, succeeds or fails in evacuating the disease. And returning health is the fortunate conclusion, or death the tragic
one. Virtue becomes its own physical reward. The physician George
Cheyne, in his correspondence with Richardson, even adds a spiritual dimension to this myth, turning it into a kind of Pilgrim's Progress. He
urges a moderate diet and frequent purging and vomiting on the novelist, whom he sees as an alter ego, with fat physique and apoplectic
symptoms such as he used to have himself:
Your Purification must be. lighter than mine has been because you have never
been so luxurious nor hurt your Constitution so deeply. But I must not flatter
you that you will not have your Purgatory and Purification. They pass through
Death who do at Heaven arrive, says the Poet; but I think I can lead you through
the State having passed it, I hope.*
So the Patient's Progress, like the Pilgrim's, goes through the Death of
disease and the Purgatory of treatment and appropriate regimen, to the
Heaven of convalescence and eventual health. "And the trumpets sound
for him on the other side," presumably. In this scenario, the Physician
plays the role of Bunyan's Evangelist. This useful myth of the patient,
with its various suspenseful stages, appears often in fiction. As an available paradigvivid and economical version-let me use the familiar
lyric in Tennyson's "The Princess." The fact that this nineteenth-century
version echoes a similar ballad of Scott's suggests that the story line
is traditional, and would have eighteenth-century analogues. Temyson's
rendering of the medical myth is so succinct that I can quote it whole:
Home they brought her warrior dead:
She nor swoon'd, nor utter'd cry:
All her maidens, watching, said,
"She must weep a she will die."
Then they praised hi,soft and low,
Call'd him woahy to be. loved,
24 Cheyne. P. 83
T H E M E D I C A L M O D E L O F C H A R A C T E R 285
Truest friend and noblest foe;
Yet she neither spoke nor moved.
Stole a maiden from her place,
Lightly to the warrior slept,
Took the face-cloth from the face;
Yet she neither moved nor wept.
Rose a nurse of ninety years,
Set his child upon her kneeLike summer tempest came her tears"Sweet my child, I live for thee."lJ
For the moment I shall consider this lyric not as a literary critic, but as
a physician: this lady's malady is an affection of the mind, grief, one
of the "non-naturals." And it is a life-threatening condition. There are
several physicians here to intervene in the condition. All are amateur,
but skilled nonetheless. They agree on the prognosis: "She must weep or
she will die." But they differ on the treatment, the method i f procuring
evacuation. Praise of the lady's dead warrior does not do the trick, neither
does the sight of his face. It is the most experienced practitioner, the
"nurse of ninety years," whose intervention procures the crisis, the needed
evacuation: the tears let out the disease, so cleansing the mind and body,
averting death, and achieving life. The effective physician has needed to
be skilled in ministering to the mind as well as to the body.
This medical myth, with its plot that turns on the physiological
rather than the moral progress of the protagonist, is at the root of
much eighteenth-century fiction, and continued as a paradigm well after
medicine had ceased to rely on evacuation, the expelling of evil matter, as the crucial phase in curing disease. The novels of Richardson,
Sterne, Smollett, and Burney are full of incidents and episodes that are
versions of the medical myth. The most obvious are recognizably medical, and often doctors are actually in attendance. But many slide off
into moral and psychological fables that are treated in terms of malady,
treatment, healing.
Richardson's Mr B, in Pamela, suffers from a plethora of passion.
He lusts after Pamela, his lust expands into love, his love is denied,
and he has attendant passions of jealousy and anger as a result of his
frustration. He has never developed a habit of restraint, nor a healthy
25 Alfred, lard Tmnyson. 'The R n c c s i (1847). v. v l The Pocmr of Tsnnyron, ed Chnnaphcr
Rtrks (London Lungman, 1%9L pp 817-18 Rxks also povdes Ihc analogue horn Scou
286 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
regimen. Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, a century earlier, would prescribe marriage as cure for this love melancholy; and Mr
B too grows to realize that this is his best cure. (Maniage eases love
melancholy by evacuating the plethora of semen.) But Pamela distrusts
and so rejects his first proposal of marriage. Mr B resorts to surgery:
he sends Pamela away, immediately goes into a decline, and has himself "blooded." Now seriously ill, he sends after her, begging her to
return and marry him. The crisis occurs after the bleeding, when Pamela
returns and he falls into a "fine Sleep." Soon, in her presence, his convalescence is well on the way. He tells Mrs Jewkes, "You need not ...
send for the Doctor from Stomford ... for this lovely Creature is my Doctor, as her Absence was my Disease."z6 There are many parallel cases
of a moral purgation that coincides with a physical one, both within and
beyond the eighteenth-century novel: Smollett's Matthew Bramble, Burney's Mortimer Delvile, Jane Austen's Marianne Dashwood; and onward
to Dickens's Dick Swiveller, Arthur Clennam, and Pip. Disease in the
novel is never morally neutral.
When Tristram Shandy is pondering the writer's best means of characterization, of putting a person down on paper, he lays out certain alternative
procedures for the difficult business. His first choice, if he could have his
preference, would be to have what he calls a " Momur's glass," a window that opens directly into the subject's heart, so that he could spy on
all the secret motions of the mind, and view "the soul stark naked.""
He wants to see right through the skin, and the "dark covering of uncrystalized f l e s h (1, 23:83), to what goes on inside. But since there
is no Momus's glass, he also considers defining character by the physician's means: "There are others ... who will draw a man's character fmm
no other helps in the world, but merely from his evacuations" (1, 23:84).
Of course we are meant to laugh at the notion of Tristram's poring over
26 Samuel Richardson, Pamelo, or, VinueRewarded (1740). ed. T.C. Duncan Ewer and Ben Kimpel
(Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1971). pp. 219-20.
27 Laurence Steme, The Life ond Opinions of Disrrom Shondy, Cenrlemon ( 1 7 W 7 ) . ed. Meivyn
New and Ioan New, vols I and 2, The Florido Edition of the W o r k of Laurence Strne
(Gainesville, University of Florida Press. 1978). References are to the original volume and
chapter numbers, followed by the page number in the Florido Edition, 1.23:82. For a fuller consideration of the passage just quoted, see my "'Uncrystslized Resh and blood': The Body in
Tristrm Shondy," Eighteenrh-Century Fiction 2 (1990). 197-214. and "Index of the Mind:
Physiognomy in the Novel," F.E.L. Priestley Lecture for 1990, University of Lcthbridge, p. I .
THE MEDICAL MODEL OF CHARACTER 287
his uncle Toby's evacuations with the intent scrutiny of a medical practitioner, analysing the separation of the blood or the exact colour and
viscosity of the urine. But the notion is more than a joke. It reflects
Steme's intense desire to get at what goes on inside, and his wishful suspicion that the doctor may have some more reliable access to it
than the writer. Although he rejects this path, arguing that analysis of
evacuations is no use. unless you compare them with the repletions, the
technique he finally settles for is also learned from a doctor. "In a word,
he deI will draw my Uncle Toby's character from his HOBBY-HORSE,"
cides (1, 23235). George Cheyne, in The English Malady, had explained
the efficacy of the Hobby-horse in avoiding nervous disorder^.^^
Tristram Shandy is full of medical lore. The distinguished obstetrician, Dr Robert Burton, is embodied and satirized as Dr Slop. Many
other prominent physicians are referred to, including Cheyne, Mackenzie, James Drake the anatomist, and Richard Mead (who receives the
dubious appellation "Kunastrokius").~ And the novel is crowded with
medical incident, as we follow Tristram's birth and subsequent flight
from death, Toby's and Trim's wounds and the treatments of them, Walter's humours and his dietary regimen, and the flux fever in the trenches;
all followed through with learned consistency and accurate terminology.
But the subject of Tristram Shandy, of course, is less the action described than the process of creation itself. And here too the medical
model is evident. Tristram is like his father in being a man of ideas.
"Little boots it to the subtle speculatist to stand single in his opinions,"
he generalizes, "-unless he gives them proper vent" (1, 19:63). That
is, he must write them down and publish them. Opinions, like corrupt
humours, must be purged. The publication of The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, then, is the proper vent for Tristram's opinions. Tristram Shandy itself is its author's evacuation. Moreover, it can
procure a similar therapeutic effect for the reader. And here Tristram
becomes anatomically detailed:
28 "It seems to me absolutely impossible, without such Help [it., Amusement and Exercise], to
keep the Mind easy, and prevent its wearing out the Body, as the Sword does the Scabbard; it
is no matter what it is, provided it be but a Hobby- Horse, and an Amusement, and stop the
Current of Reflexion and intense Thinking, which penons with weak Nerves are apt& to run
into" @p. 18142).
29 According to a scunilous pamphlet probably of 1748, Mead at the age of seventy-five fell in love
with a patient, e young mmied woman. He pmcured co-operation fmm her and her husband, but
at the crucial moment "the Youth of seventy-five" was unable to consummate. "From this time
he contents himself with surveying Dona Maria's naked Beauties, pressing her secret Charms."
Hence "Kunastrokius."See The CornWor of Seventy-Five, being o genuine Nnrrorive of the Life,
Adventures and Amours of Don Ricardo Honeywater (London: J. Cobban. [17481), p. 29.
288 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
If 'tis wrote against any thing.-'tis
wrote, an' please your worships, against
the spleen; in order, by a more frequent and a more convulsive elevation and depression of the diaphragm, and the succussations of the intercostal and abdominal
muscles in laughter, to drive the gall and other bitter juices from the gall bladder, liver and sweet-bread of his majesty's subjects, with all the inimicitious
passions which belong to them, down into their duodenums. (4, 22:360)
In reading Triswam Shandy, we are taking a bolus."
A Sentimental Journey exhibits again Steme's aspiration to probe,
almost literally, the recesses of the heart. Blood-its quality and its
motion-is a frequent source of imagery. Yorick's sentimental adventures, he says, "kept my senses, and the best part of my blood awake,
and laid the gross to sleep" (p. 28). Sentiment refines the blood, it seems.
Relationships progress in physically measurable ways: while Yorick is
holding the hand of the lady in Calais, we hear, "the pulsations of the arteries along my fingers pressing across hers, told her what was passing
within me" (p. 19). Here Yorick is the patient, the lady is the diagnosing physician. But later, in the famous incident with the beautiful
grisette in Paris, Yorick makes the desired transition from pastor to doctor. In the episode called "The Pulse" he compliments her on the quality
of her blood, and she invites him to feel her pulse. Nothing loth, he
writes,
I took hold of her fingers in one hand, and applied the two fore-fingers of my
other to her artery-Would to heaven! My dear Eugenius, thou hadst passed by, and beheld
me sitting in my black coat, and in my lack-a-day-sical manner, counting the
throbs of it, one by one, with as much true devotion as if I had been watching
the critical ebb or flow of her fever-How
wouldst thou have laugh'd and
moralized upon my new profession? ... Trust me, my dear Eugenius, I should
have said, "There are worse occupations in this world than feeling a womn's
pulse." (p. 5 3 )
This for Yorick is the consummation most devoutly to be wished: so the
Yorick in Steme, always aspiring towards new feats of intimacy, covets
a "new profession" as a doctor, acquainted with the ebbs and flows of
blood and the parallel motions of heart and mind.
Smollett was a doctor by profession, so the medical view of character
came naturally to him. His jaundiced view of life is perhaps at its least
30 See Roy Porter, "Against the Spleen." in Lounnce Sterne: Riddles and Mysreries, ed. Valerie
Grosvenor Myer (London:Vision, 1984), p. 90.
T H E MEDICAL M O D E L OF CHARACTER 289
jaundiced when he deals with the doctor-patient relationship. Roderick
Random has a tender sojourn with Miss Williams, for instance, when he
is curing them both of the clap. And his villain-hero Ferdinand Count
Fathom is at his most sympathetic when he takes to doctoring. But there
is a progression in Smollett's art and in his view of human nature that
pertains to him equally as doctor and novelist.
Smollett's first novel, the partly autobiographical Roderick Random
(1748). has a doctor as its protagonist. Roderick belongs in the tradition
of the physician-satirist, the doctor who diagnoses the ills and the vices
of the surrounding society." But Roderick is a rather crude conception
for a central character, since all his powers of diagnosis and his violent
treatments are applied to the symptoms of corruption in those around
him; he is notably blind to his own symptoms. When he does examine
himself, he is hardly a subtle diagnostician. "Pride and resentment ...
were the two chief ingredients in my disposition," he claims (p. 99). He
is less a medical machine than a culinary recipe.
A mechanical conception of the body is however a major constituent of
Smollett's comic vision, particularly in this early work. The visible figuring forth of violent emotion, as a kind of automatic and involuntary
reaction to a particular stimulus, is viewed as irresistibly funny. Somebody else's fear, particularly-as made perceptible by chattering teeth,
pale face, and shaking k n e e e i s hilarious. Man the machine, who jerks in
predictable ways according to the switches you throw, becomes a comic
conception. Roderick's devoted friend, the barber Strap, often obliges
by being terrified. "Poor Strap looked so foolishly aghast, that no unconcerned spectator could have seen him, without being seized with an
immoderate fit of laughter" (p. 357), notes Roderick, inviting the reader
to be similarly amused. It is not the fear itself that is humorous, but
the automatic physical manifestation of it. These are signs that a physician is trained to observe,"' for they are the symptoms of affections of
the mind, "non-naturals" which are part of the data he must take into
consideration. But the physician here subserves the humorist.
A more radical and more moving vision of the body, in the naval
sections of Roderick Random, is as refuse. Treasured by the mind that
...
31 See John F. Sena, "Smollett's Matthew Bramble and the Tradition of the Physician-Satirist,"
Papem on Longuoge and Liararure 11 (1975). 380-96. Significantly. though. Sena does not
mention Roderick as belonging to this wadilion, perhaps because Roderick is a rather glib
diagnostician.
32 See John McAllister, "Smollett's Semiology of Emotions: The Symptomatology of the Passions
and Affections in Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle," English Srudies in Cam& 14 (19881,
286-3-309.
290 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
directs it, the body is nonetheless viewed by outside authorities as expendable, and once spent, as waste matter to be evacuated from the
state. During battle at sea, the ship's surgeon, the brutal MacShane, fortifies himself with rum, and then, "Being thus supported, he went to
work, and arms and legs were hewed down without mercy" @. 183).
The seaman Jack Rattlin, threatened with amputation, enters the eloquent plea, "Odd's heart ... [you] would not suffer Jack Rattlin's leg to be
chopped off like a piece of old junk" (p. 164). But though Roderick manages to save Rattlin's leg, other junk, other human waste, accumulates.
The sick and wounded are "squeezed into certain vessels'%alled hospital ships, though there is neither doctor, nurse, nor cook aboard; and they
are left to rot and putrefy among "millions of maggots" (p. 187). These
vessels are essentially only extended body bags for the disposal of human garbage. The dead bodies are thrown overboard without weights
or wrapping, "so that numbers of human carcasses floated in the harbour, until they were devoured by sharks and carrion crows" (p. 189).
Roderick's (and Smollett's) indignation here is fierce and real, and his
very physical conception of human character becomes a telling rhetorical weapon. For he sees this process of purging as quite deliberate. The
admirals and administrators hold life cheap, and take calculated steps to
make the men despise their own lives and bodies, so that they will become willing cannon fodder (p. 186). Roderick, though here still cast
in the role of doctor, himself becomes a part of what is being flushed
through the system and discarded.))
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1770) is a pilgrimage in search of
health. It is a more mature and subtle conception than RoderickRandom.
Instead of healthy young Roderick the doctor, driven by the fumes of indignation, diagnosing and purging the sins of others, we have hypochondriac old Matthew Bramble the patient-medically informed, certainly,
and highly sensitive to the human corruption around him; but himself
lacking health, and becoming aware of his shortcomings. The medical
profession and practice are themselves under scrutiny.
Matthew Bramble is both identified with and distanced from his doctorauthor-a configuration that is realized in the epistolary layout of the
novel, in which Matthew's letters are all addressed to his physician, Dr
33 See Carol Houlihan Flynn: "In their attempts lo regulate and rationalize the body, theorists
as dissimilar a~ Mandeville and Woodward. Cheyne and Swift, all perhaps following Lock,?
fdlowing Pylhagons, experimented with the idea of a temperance that would cleanse the body.
as well as Ihe body politic, of its ills," T k Body in Swifr Md Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University &ss, IWO), p. 45.
T H E MEDICAL MODEL O F C H A R A C T E R 291
Lewis. Health, ill-health, and medication are explicitly the major subject
between them. The opening words of the novel set the tone: ''oocrn~,//
The pills are good for nothing. ... I have told you over and over, how hard
I am to move; and at this time of day, I ought to know something of my
own constitution. ... Prithee send me another prescription ... indeed, I am
equally distressed in mind and body" (p. 5). This is a novel that deals
with psychosomatic experience: Matthew is constantly taking his own
physical and psychological pulse. Sometimes he seems like a perfect
textbook case who might have walked out of the pages of a medical
treatise by Doctors Mackenzie, or Cheyne, or Mead. "I find my spirits and
health affect each other reciprocally," he explains; "-that is to say, every
thing that discomposes my mind, produces a correspondent disorder in
my body; and my bodily complaints are remarkably mitigated by those
considerations that dissipate the clouds of mental chagrin" (p. 146).
Matthew's physical complaints are those of plethora. He is costive, as
his opening complaint makes clear from the first. He also has swollen
dropsical ankles, and gout. But the doctors cannot do him any good. Dr
Lewis's pills do not work; and moreover the on-stage doctors, and the
available treatments such as the supposedly medicinal waters at Bath,
promote rather disease and filth than health and hygiene. Steme had
satirized Smollett as "Smelfungus," and probably had him in mind as the
kind of writer who defines character by examining "evacuations." And
of course it can be argued that Smollett had as much of an anal fixation
as Swift." Such a fixation might be said to be an occupational hazard
for doctors. But here Smollett satirizes doctors for the obsession. The
"famous Dr. L[inde]nWin Bath makes an elaborate case for excrement as
sweet-smelling and healthful, and offers to drink a dropsical evacuation
(p. 16). And later in the novel another practitioner pores over the "egista,"
or discharges, of a patient who is suffering the simultaneous effects of an
emetic and an enema (p. 280). (I spare the reader a quotation.) Matthew
too is both fascinated and appalled by various human evacuations. At
Bath he perceives the world around him, particularly the air and water,
as being constituted of a sort of soup of human discharge. In taking the
waters at Bath, he says, "we know not what sores may be running into
34 A contemporary reviewer of Humphry C l i n k r accused Smollett of a "stercnacwus" style and
aligned him with Swift as a writer who has "taken the liberty to be filthy."Gcntlcman'sMogozinc
41 (July 1771), p. 317; as reprinted in Thorson's Norton critical edition of Hurnphry Clinker,
p. 330. M n e recently, Robat Adams Day has elaborated the conmtion berwecn scatology and
sex in Smollen's fictional vision: "Sex, Scalology, Smollett,"in Suuoliry in Eighteenth-Century
Britain, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boud (Manchester University Ress, 1982). pp. 225-43.
292 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
the water while we are bathing, and what sort of matter we may thus
imbibe; the king's evil, the scurvy, the cancer, and the pox" (pp. 4243).
The drinking water, he imagines, is drawn from the same source: "In
that case, what a delicate beveridge is every day quaffed by the drinkers;
medicated with the sweat, and dirt, and dandriff; and the abominable
discharges of various kinds, from twenty different diseased bodies" (p.
43). Another source of drinking water is near an old burial ground, so
that "as we drink the decoction of living bodies at the Pump-room, we
swallow the strainings of rotten bones and carcasses at the private bath"
(p. 43). This is a ghastly vision of the recycling of human waste. through
the human body.
It is a vision that haunts other minds than Matthew's. Gulliver encounters the academician in Lagado whose project is to reconstitute
~ ~ himself recommends the
human waste for human c o n s u m p t i ~ n ,and
Yahoo practice of forcing dung and urine down the throat as a "Specifick against all Diseases produced by Repletion" (p. 214). Even Steme,
in presenting the text of Tristram Shandy both as Tristrarn's evacuation
and as the bolus the reader must swallow, plays with the same set of images. Hamlet's conceit of the king who goes a progress through the guts
of a beggar is hardly better calculated to rub the nose in the infirmities
of the flesh. From aliment to repletion to evacuation is the normal mechanical process of the body. Evacuation to aliment is a kind of hellish
inversion.
But Matthew's hypersensitivity to human corruption is shown to be a
morbid condition. His nephew Jery Melford provides a shrewd diagnosis:
"I think his peevishness arises partly ... from a natural excess of mental
sensibility; for, I suppose, the mind as well as the body, is in some cases
endued with a morbid excess of sensation" (pp. 15-16). This morbid
excess affects Matthew morally, and makes a misanthrope of him. He is
disgusted by the human body and by humanity at large. He is particularly
disgusted by the lower classes (p. 48). and by women. "What have I to
do with the human species?" he asks, apparently ready to write it off
altogether (p. 44).
The most effective cure for this condition arrives in the shape of
Humphry Clinker. His name signals his connection with poverty and
35 Isaac Asimov presents this projector as a figure much maligned, and one whase project must
be appreciated and put into practice in today's threatened ecology. The Annotated Gulliver's
Travels (New York: Clarksan N. Poner, 1980). p. 170.
T H E M E D I C A L M O D E L O F C H A R A C T E R 293
dirt. "Clinker" means "turd."I6 On his first appearance as "a filthy tatterdemalion" (p. 76). "a beggarly foundling, taken from the dunghill" (p.
81). with pale skin and bare posterior, he represents what Tom of Bedlam is for Lear: "the thing itself: unaccommodated man ... a poor, bare,
fork'd animal." In such company, Lear urges the well-fed gentry, "Take
physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel" (111, iv). It is a
lesson that Matthew needs too, and he does take physic. When he clothes
Clinker and employs him, he takes a large moral stride forwards. Also,
his constipation is alleviated.
At the climax of the novel Clinker saves Matthew from drowning, and
soon afterwards is revealed as his son. As William Park has shown, when
Matthew recognizes Clinker as his own offspring, he "comes to terms
with his own filth and the sins of his
The hyper-fastidious man
learns to accept humanity and its dirt and corruption. For the hypochondriac character and his morbidly sensitive author, the lesson is one worth
learning.
But this climax to Matthew's progression is a medical one too. When
Clinker hauls him out of the flooded coach, old Matthew is unconscious
and almost drowned. Clinker has already shown that he can turn his hand
to almost anything. Now he manages resuscitation. First, he arranges that
"a great quantity of water ran out at his mouth"--after which Matthew
opens his eyes. Then Clinker binds up his arm,"and let him blood in
the farrier stile" (p. 288). Although Smollett has rejected the excretory
obsession of the trained physicians, this back-to-nature surgical practice
seems to be efficacious. Once Matthew's "blood began to flow in a
continued stream," he is able to speak, and his life is assured. He has
been successfully drained of his dropsy and relieved of plethora. Not
satisfied with providing Matthew with a son who reconnects him with the
human race, Smollett arranges that for full efficacy the son is a surgeon
too. Clinker might say, like a renaissance child to another father, "I am
that of your blood was taken from you / For your better health."m
36 "'To dine with Duke Humphrey' was a proverbial phrase for doing without a meal, and 'clinker'
was a slang term for a piece of cxcremenf" explains James L. Thorson, editor and annotator of
the Ncmon edition (p. 76"). Eric Partridge in the Dictionary of Slang and U~onvcnrionnlUsage
does not record the term in this sense until the nineteenth century; but the dating of slang is a
difficult matla. Wyn Jenkins's misspelling of "third" as "turd" when she ~ f n to
s Clinker (p.
309) twds to mhrm Thorson's reading.
37 William Park, "Fathm and Sons: Humphry Clinker," Liarmure ond Psychology 16 (I%@,
1 6 7 4 . Reprinted in the N o n m Critical edition, p. 371.
38 Middleton and Rowley, Tke Chongding (v, iii, 150), in English D r m . 1580-1642, ed. C.F.
Tucker B d e (Boston:D.C. Heath, 1933), p. 942.
294 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y PICTION
Though cured of his misanthropy, Matthew is still a misogynist. But
one does not read Smollett if one is looking for enlightened views on
gender issues.
*
Matthew Bramble's correspondence with his physician is one-sided. We
do not have access to Dr Lewis's replies. George Cheyne's correspondence with Samuel Richardson reverses this pattern: here we have the
doctor's letters, but usually not the patient's.
The two stood in an interesting relation to each other. Cheyne was
the older and, during the decade of their correspondence, 1733 to 1743,
much the more distinguished and authoritative man. He was a doctor, and
a famous one, and author of a number of well-known books-most notably The English Malady (1733). which Johnson praised to Boswell.
But Richardson, at least at the outset of the correspondence, was only a
printer. Cheyne's reason for writing was to convey instructions on the
printing of his various works. He patronized Richardson, telling him, "I
... am convinced you are a Man of Probity and Worth beyond what I have
met with among Tradesmen" (p. 36). Richardson seems to have initiated
a more personal dimension in the letters by asking Cheyne's professional
advice about his infirmities. Cheyne then adds diagnosis, prescriptions,
and medical advice to his instructions about printing. And when he becomes aware that Richardson inclines to obesity and apoplexy, as he does
himself (at one time Cheyne weighed 475 pounds), he takes Richardson more firmly under his wing as one who should walk in his footsteps
and practise the same regimen. Cheyne's distinction as an author no
doubt made him a role model for Richardson, and his role as therapist made him all the more authoritative. Richardson sent Cheyne a copy
of Pamela when it appeared, and received praise. He also received ample instruction on the desirable content of the second part of Pamela,
advice which he followed almost as faithfully, it seems, as the medical
prescriptions of emetics and purges.
This hand-in-glove correspondence with a physician, it seems to me,
was a strong influence on Richardson's writing. He seems to have developed as intense an interest in the workings of his own innards as
Matthew Bramble. Not everyone would rejoice in this kind of advice:
"Your giddiness is from the Stomach and Fumes arising from the Primae Vitae, from a Thickness of Blood and Want of Perspiration. Not only
a temperate but an abstemious Diet, Exercise and gentle Evacuation must
T H E M E D I C A L M O D E L OF C H A R A C T E R 295
relieve you most effectually" (p. 42). But apparently Richardson couldn't
get enough of it. Cheyne's commentary on his constitution was as irresistible as psychoanalysis for today's psychiatric patient. He fairly wore
Cheyne down with his requests for medical advice. In 1742, the year before his death at seventy-two, Cheyne wrote pathetically, "I have so
exhausted all my medical Artillery in your case, and impoverished my
Invention, that I can scarce find wherewith to furnish out a Letter" (p.
117). The fact that all this advice came in epistolary form, like Richardson's novels, also had some effect. Through the post, Cheyne kept his
fingers on Richardson's pulse, as Yorick did on the grisette's. It is an
analogy for what Richardson's characters are doing; a prolonged examination and internal analysis of one another, conducted at a distance; but
with minute attention paid to external signs and symptoms; and with bold
intervention in one another's bodily processes.
Of course Richardson's ample novels are replete with medical action.
Sir Charles Grandison is no mean therapist himself, and he travels with
a doctor as his right-hand man, Dr Lowther; not to minister to his own
medical needs, but to fix up other people. Sir Charles takes on the mission
of physicking the erring populace into health and virtue. Doctors or
surgeons are often in attendance. Richardson is a strong believer, too, in
the physical effects of affections of the mind. Clarissa dies of a broken
heart, and does it over some hundreds of pages. And the evil characters
like MIS Sinclair die ghastly deaths that are medically fitted to their
crimes.
What Richardson was primarily learning during his long correspondence with Cheyne, I think, was medical intervention as a technique,
and one that could be psychologically as well as physically effective. I
must content myself with one example. Early in the Cheyne-Richardson
correspondence, Cheyne provides a prescription that begins with two
ounces of tincture of ipecacuanha root, and one ounce of "cleansing
emetic wine" (p. 33). Ipecacuanha, the Brazilian name of which signifies "creeping plant that causes vomit," is a spectacular emetic. In
another place Cheyne had memorably commented, "Vomits are in diseases what bombs are in besieging forts" (p. 7n). (He seems to have been
fond of military metaphors for his business, as in telling Richardson he
had exhausted his "medical Artillery.") So when Richardson followed
that prescription, and took two ounces of ipecacuanha as well as some
emetic wine-he is likely to have remembered the effect.
Most readers will recall the incident of the ipecacuanha in Clarissa.
Lovelace would like to procure the pity and love from Clarissa that MI
296 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
B's malady procured from Pamela. "I shall be very sick tomorrow,"
he predicts to BelfordJ9 He plans to work on her sympathies. Then he
debates with himself,
Well but, Lovelace, how the deuce wilt thou, with that full health and vigour
of constitution, and with that bloom in thy face, make anybody believe thou art
sick?
How!-Why take a few grains of ipecacuanha; enough to make me retch like
a fury. (p. 673)
It works. And as Lovelace comments on his own condition, he recalls
the Cheyne allegory of sickness as hell-though being evil, he fails to
apply it properly.
This ipecacuanha is a most disagreeable medicine! That these cursed physical
folks can find out nothing to do us g d , but what would poison the devil! In
the other world, were they only to take physic, it would be punishment enough
of itself for a mis-spent life. A doctor at one elbow, and an apothecary at the
other, and the poor soul labouring under their prescribed operations, he need no
worse tormentors. (p. 676)
Clarissa is stricken with compassion for Lovelace, especially since with
the aid of some pigeon's blood from a poulterer's shop he makes her
believe he is vomiting blood clots. "In short, Belford, I have gained my
end," he reports triumphantly. "I see. the dear soul loves me" (p. 677).
Lovelace has some medical artillery of his own.
Perhaps because they have been subject to medical artillery, Richardson's characters, and Burney's too, become adept at using their diseases
as weapons, or at least as instruments of manipulation. Clarissa's father rules over his family with an iron hand, partly because he wields
the threat that anyone who crosses him will bring about the dread catastrophe of throwing the gout upon his stomach (p. 109). The steel-willed
Mrs Delvile in Cecilia, when things are not going her way, cries out, "My
brain is on fire!" and promptly bursts a blood vessel. The surrounding
characters are soon "acquiescing entirely in her ill."^
The intricate manoeuvring and manipulations that make up the significant action of Clarissa particularly, among Richardson's novels, seem
39 Samuel Richard-,
Clorisso, or, The History of o Young Luiy (174748). ed. Angus R o s
(Harmondsworth. Penguin Books. 1985). p. 672. References are to this edition.
40 Frances Burney, Cecilio. or. Memoirs of nn Heiress (1782). ed. Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford:
Oxford University Ress, 1989), pp. 680, 681.
T H E M E D I C A L M O D E L O F C H A R A C T E R 297
to me to bear more than passing resemblance to medical practice. If the
body is a machine, it is a machine you can tinker with; and such activity can be pleasurable, absorbing indeed, if by tinkering with the machine
you can also affect the mind that guides it. Lovelace is adept at manipulation, at calculating effects, foreseeing their consequences, and taking
advantage of them. And he does manage to attain control of Clarissa's
body and to manipulate it. He drugs her and rapes her. But ultimately
Clarissa exceeds the medical model. Despite Lovelace's calculations, her
body and her mind are not a package deal.
The epistolary novel brings the process of composition to the surface
of the action, as Tristram Shandy's hand-to-mouth narration does too. We
often catch correspondents talking about the irresistible necessity they are
under to record their latest perception, and mail the next letter; and rejoicing in the beneficial effects of this unburdening. Matthew Bramble
refers to his letters as "the overflowings of my spleen" (p. 31); and he assures his doctor, "it is no small alleviation of my grievances, that I have a
sensible friend, to whom I can communicate my crusty humours, which,
by retention, would grow intolerably acrimonious" (p. 31). Richardson's
Pamela and Harriet Byron likewise refer to letter-writing as helpful therapy. To adapt the Tennyson poem, "They must write or they will die."
The same applies sometimes to speech. In the Shandy family it is Uncle Toby who is most vulnerable to any grief, because he is not ready with
language. "Madam will get ease of heart in weeping," says Trim, "-and
the Squire in talking about it,-but my poor master [Toby] will keep it all
in silence to himself' (5, 10:437), and so brood and sicken. That is, characters in the grip of grief or anxiety, or other affections of the mind, need
a vent for them. Language-written or spoken-becomes their necessary
evacuation. The familiar phrases like "vent thy spleen" have perhaps become clich6s for us, dead metaphors. But for the eighteenth century they
were still metaphors very much alive; indeed, sometimes regarded as literal medical fact. We need to remind ourselves that the root meaning of
"expression" is a physical "pressing out," a sense we still have when we
talk of expressing milk from the breast.
In fact that huge aspect of characterization in the novel that comprehends what the characters speak and write, their self-expression in
language, is recurrently set in the context of their physical and mental
health, and frequently seen in a medical light. "Concealment," says Burney's Evelina, " ... is the foe of tranquillity.'"' And the foe to health too,
41 Fanny Burney, Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrancc inlo rhe World (1778), ed.
298 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
we learn as Bumey's novels progress. This theme has some demonstrable
relation to Bumey's own experience. When she underwent a full-breast
mastectomy without anaesthetic in 1811, her doctor, she said, "charged
me to cry [out]! to withhold or restrain myself might have seriously bad
consequences, he said.''42 To withhold vocal expression is medically dangerous. In the short space I have in which to discuss the medical model in
her novels, I want to focus on the psychological rather than the physical,
and on the issue of verbal expression rather than of bodily evacuations.
Cheyne's most famous book was The English Malady, or, A Treatise of
Nervous Diseases of All Kinds (1733). He estimated that nervous disorders make up "almost one third of the Complaints of People of Condition
in England" (p. ii). Note the class bias. It is not only particularly English
to be nervous, but rather distinguished too. Those of developed intellect
were particularly prone, he said--thus lending a certain cachet to melancholy, spleen, and the v a p o u r ~ Burney
. ~ ~ sometimes satirized the fashion
for nervous disorders. The unsympathetic Madame Duval in Evelina, for
instance, claims with pride, "1 am nerve all over" (p. 286). She is like
Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, who is always claiming compassion
for her "poor nerves." But more often Burney takes nervous conditions
very seriously. She creates characters with "nerves of the most irritable delicacy.'" Elaine Showalter has shown how the English malady
evolved into The Female Malady:' but without the cachet: nervous disorders, grading through hysteria and various kinds of dementia, came to
be associated particularly with women. Bumey's novels, as chronicles of
"Female Difficulties" (the subtitle of The Wanderer), in part account for
this evolution.
Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University M s . 1982), p. 267. Refermew an to this
edition.
42 The Journols ondktters of Fanny Burney, vol. 6, ed. Joyce Hemlow (Oxford: Clarendon M s .
197% p. 604.
43 Johnson criticized him for this, advising Boswcll. "Do not la him each you a foolish notion
that melancholy i s a pmof of acuteness." Life of Johnson (1791) (London: O x f d University
Rcss, 1953). p. 782 (2 July 1776).
44 Carnillo, or. A Picrurc of Youth (17%). ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Oxfnd:
O r f d University M s . 1983). p. 615.
45 Elaine Showalter, The Fcrnolc Molody: Womn.Madness, and English Cultwc. 183&1980 (New
York Pantheon Books, 1985).
T H E M E D I C A L M O D E L O F C H A R A C T E R 299
The female difficulties Bumey dramatizes are many and various, of
course: they include lack of parents, lack of identity, lack of cash, lack
of experience, lack of power. Lack of occupation is a major one; and
Cheyne considers occupation and exercise to be important cures for nervous diseases. But the most notable difficulty of all is the lack of a voice.
Bumey's female protagonists are recurrently silenced." In the context of
love they may not speak, although the plot is so arranged that unless they
do their happiness is doomed. Camilla, for instance, on the one hand is
lectured by her governess and her father on the necessity of concealing
her feelings until the man she loves makes his declaration. But meanwhile he has decided never to make a declaration until she has revealed
her love. The imperious demands of delicacy often issue in a physical impediment to the heroine's speech: "I seemed choaked," writes Evelina
(p. 303). Camilla's voice became so "husky, the inarticulate sounds died
away unheard" (p. 619).
Camilla, at the beginning of the novel about her, is a "sweet, open,
generous, inconsiderate [that is, unreflecting] girl, whose feelings are all
virtues, but whose impulses have no restraints" @. 120). As parents, society, patriarchy, and the man who loves her begin to apply the restraints,
Camilla must cease to be "open." She is hedged about with rules on female delicacy. "Speech and truth were always one with Camilla; who,
as she could not in this instance declare what were her feelings, remained mute and confounded" (p. 343). This is a recurring situation:
"Camilla again was silent; but her tingling cheeks proclaimed it was not
for want of things to say" (p. 507bhere other physiological symptoms
proclaim the plethora that is not being evacuated. Rather than expressing her love, her father urges her, "Struggle then against yourself as you
would struggle against an enemy" (p. 358). Thus alienated from her own
identity, she becomes beside herself, actually insane. Both in Cecilia and
in Camilla, Burney follows through the process whereby the heroine, deprived of expression, and lacking a natural vent for her nervous disorder,
is driven to insanity.
Psychiatry was yet in its infancy, but Cheyne's The English Malady is an early text; and Bumey's novels provide case histories that
point towards the enormous developments in both psychiatry and the
psychological novel in the nineteenth century.
46 I have written more fullv on this theme in 'The Silent A n d : Imaediments to Female Exomsion
in Bumey'r Novelr;' jrudtcrtn the Now1 21 (1989).-235-55. Sec also l u l t a ~ ~ r & ' sfull
erplureion of !he subjca in The Imn P e n Froncrr Burnsy and the Poluics of Women's Writing
(Madison: Unwenily of Wisfonrm h r . 19891 "Something always stays Camille's tongue.
Language is forever confounded, stunned, or forad underground in Camilla" (p. 40).
300 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
Our different twentieth-century models for how the body works make
it easy for us to overlook the eighteenth-century model, or to dismiss it as
quaint and outmoded. But for the novelists of the period this model was
real; and a highly physical, even physiological, conception of character
carried with it the pressure of necessity. If the mechanical model of the
body as a machine, and the mind as only one of its subtler organs, is rather
crude, the novelists were not stuck with it; by their own explorations of
the human consciousness they could exceed the model. But it provides,
for the Walter Shandys and Yoricks, the Pamelas and Lovelaces, the
Rodericks, and Evelinas, a sturdy and memorable framework, a resilience
that has made them wear well.
University of Alberta