Posted 21 October 2003

Bodily and Narrative Forms is a bold attempt to both reconstruct and examine the interplay between modern medical and literary ideas of embodiment. In terms of precise chronology and location, the book spans the period of orthodox medicine's professionalisation in the United States, from the founding of the American Medical Association in 1845 through to 1915, the latter historical moment marking the allopaths’ arrival as the dominant force in the American medical marketplace. However, as Davis emphasizes in her 'Introduction,' while this era of American history undoubtedly witnessed not only the economic, but also the eventual social and cultural triumphs of regular medicine, this was also a period of turmoil for the profession during which clinical, materialist and physiological beliefs were "challenged either by members of the lay public or by other members of the healing professions" (p.2). 

Using a selective sample of the literary productions of this period, Davis asks how a small number of middle-class American authors grappled with these problems of changing notions of embodiment brought on by the increasing influence and authority of science in American medicine and society. In the process of this analysis, Davis also re-evaluates the strange career of sentimentalism in American fiction. For example, the first case study in Bodily and Narrative Forms analyses the medical and literary works of physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes, who, for the most part, employed a writing style that mirrored the clinical gaze then fashionable in orthodox American medicine. Davis notes that despite using an objective and disembodied form of narration for the majority of his first novel, the proto-realist Elsie Venner (1861), at the close of this tale Holmes reverts to the sentimental mode, investing the physician-narrator with a sympathy and sensitivity absent from the clinical perspective and almost certain to appeal to a mid-nineteenth century readership. By contrast, chapter two examines the work of Louisa May Alcott, Harriot K. Hunt, and Margaret Fuller, and their defiance of the standard formulas of sentimental fiction, with its female stereotypes of "precarious physicality" and "excessive emotionalism" (p54). 

I believe Bodily and Narrative Forms is at its most rewarding and engaging in providing stimulating and original close readings of the individual American authors who comprise the text's case studies. However, I also feel that both the choice and small number of texts selected by Davis limits the scope and utility of her inquiry. While the five case studies examined here do include the voices of women and African-American writers, there is no sustained consideration of slave, Native American, immigrant or working-class perspectives on embodiment, literary form, orthodox or 'irregular' medical beliefs and practices. In addition to being an era of professionalisation and intense industrialization (as acknowledged by Davis), the period 1845 to 1915 in the history of the United States also witnessed Southern slavery's apogee and demise, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the first great migration of African-Americans to the Northern states, massive European immigration (from Northern and then Southern Europe), Westward expansion and the destruction of the Plains Indians, large-scale urban growth and the rapid expansion of networks of transportation and communication, the development of mass entertainment, sport and leisure, and legalized racial segregation. Listing just a handful of the possible historical moments contained in a broad survey of this time-frame immediately suggests, to me at least, the absolute necessity for a wider variety of texts and voices in the construction of a critique examining "the heterogeneous and complicated ways in which physical existence was both lived and understood" in the United States in this period (p6). For example, had Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845) or Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) been included in Davis's fifth chapter on 'Black Aesthetics,' then we might have gained some sense of a range of African-American experiences of embodiment in relation to changing historical circumstances in both medicine and society. Bodily and Narrative Forms is likely to be of greatest use to graduate students and researchers engaged in the field of nineteenth-century American literary studies. 

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