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Romantic Autopsy
Romantic Autopsy
Literary Form and Medical Reading
ARDEN HEGELE
1
3
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Lovingly dedicated to my parents

and to Patrick
Acknowledgments
It is with profound appreciation that I write to thank the people who have
supported this book.
First, I would like to thank the three scholars who supervised the dissertation
that germinated the ideas elaborated in the book, Nicholas Dames, Erik Gray, and
Sharon Marcus. I owe an extraordinary intellectual debt to these mentors for their
perspicacious reading and their generous feedback. James Eli Adams and Nancy
Yousef offered essential comments on the manuscript draft. At a critical juncture,
Daniel Wright infused his reading of the full book with savoir-faire and good
humor. I am grateful, too, to Alan Bewell and Anahid Nersessian for situating my
interests firmly in Romanticism and the sciences during a formative period of my
education.
Numerous scholars generously served as formal respondents or read drafts,
especially Julie Crawford, Jenny Davidson, Deborah Dixon, Deborah Epstein
Nord, Anne Mellor, Jonathan Mulrooney, Joanna Stalnaker, and Dustin
D. Stewart. Friends and colleagues in New York and beyond, who are too many
to list here, lent encouragement at every stage of writing. I would like to thank my
students at Columbia, especially the students in my classes on Frankenstein,
literature and the health humanities, and medical fictions. I am indebted to several
graduate students who assisted at different times with archival research and
proofreading the manuscript: Rosa Schneider, Ami Yoon, Liz Bowen, Katherine
Bergevin, Meg Zhang, Molly Lindberg, and Timothy Kwasny.
From 2016 to 2019, The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the
Humanities at Columbia University was an exceptionally stimulating and sup-
portive place to write much of this book. I am grateful to my fellow fellows for
their attitudes of delight and discovery: Joelle abi-Rached, Benjamin Breen,
Christopher Chang, Christopher Florio, Ardeta Gjikola, María González Pendás,
David Gutkin, Heidi Hausse, Lauren Kopajtic, Whitney Laemmli, Max Mishler,
Rachel Nolan, and Carmel Raz. Thanks, also, to Lan A. Li, my frequent collab-
orator in the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience, and further
thanks to American Council of Learned Societies resident fellows Matthew
Hersch and Amy Chazkel. Christopher L. Brown and Reinhold Martin offered
vigorous intellectual responses to the historical and formalist angles of this
project throughout my time at the Society of Fellows. The Board of Governors,
especially Souleymane Bachir Diagne, injected essential ideas into the work.
Emily Bloom provided invaluable wisdom during my journey to publication.
Above all, I would like to thank Eileen Gillooly not only for her resolute support
 vii
of this project but also for her visionary and ethical commitments to justice
and the public humanities at The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for
the Humanities. I am deeply appreciative, too, of the staff members who
make possible all the professional activities of the SoF/Heyman and of the
Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia.
I have been extremely fortunate to finish the book as an affiliate of
the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and of the Institute for
Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, whose interdiscipli-
nary communities are models for how the medical humanities can be practiced
and taught. I am particularly grateful for the creative inspiration and scholarly
support of physician-scholars Rita Charon and Rishi Goyal, who in our collabora-
tions have each deepened my understanding of the profound interconnections
between medical and literary modes of interpretation. And I am indebted to Alan
Stewart and Jenny Davidson, the Chairs of the Department of English and
Comparative Literature, and to Sarah Cole, the Dean of Humanities, for their
support as I completed the book.
This book would not exist without the help of staff members at the Columbia
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Wellcome Collection, the National
Library of Medicine (NIH), and the Hunterian Collection. In addition to the
exchange award that supported my research at the University of Glasgow,
I am grateful for the material assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada and the Mellon Foundation, which underwrote
much of this project.
Parts of this book were presented at meetings of the Modern Languages
Association and its Northeast affiliate; the North American Society for the Study
of Romanticism; the International Conference on Romanticism; Keats- and
Austen-specific conferences at Keats House and Chawton House; the Medical
Humanities Reading Group at the University of Glasgow; and, at Columbia, the
Nineteenth-Century Colloquium, the Literature Humanities Faculty Lecture, the
Society of Fellows in the Humanities Thursday Lecture Series, and the Center for
Science and Society’s “Narrative” conference. I would like to thank everyone who
offered suggestions on these and other occasions. Brief excerpts of this material
appeared in European Romantic Review and Keats-Shelley Journal, and I thank
the editors who allowed me to reprint it as well as the Keats-Shelley Association
of America.
I am particularly grateful to the anonymous readers at Oxford University Press,
and to my editor, Jacqueline Norton, as well as the staff at the Press.
I wish to end by thanking my family. I have been tremendously lucky to have
their support of my scholarship, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, when
this book was completed. My grandmothers Sophie and Arden were and are
unconditionally interested in my scholarship, and I am moved by their enthusi-
asm in reading my work. My mother-in-law Wendy and my father-in-law Fred
viii 
have likewise offered sustained support. My mother Heather, my father Richard,

my brother Paul and his wife Emily, and my sister Rose and her partner Nikhil,
prove every day how the sciences and the arts can mutually flourish. This book is
dedicated to my parents, who have taught me important truths not just about
health but also about happiness and responsibility, and to my husband, Patrick,
for his great brain and great heart. Finally, I wish to thank my children, Maud and
Rudi, whose births brought tremendous inspiration and energy to the revision of
the book.
Contents
Introduction. Reading Texts, Reading Bodies: Protocols of

Diagnosis in Medicine and Literature 1
I.1 Metapothecaries 4
I.2 Reading Diagnostically 12
I.3 Symptomatic Reading 19
I.4 Four Protocols 23
1. Hermeneutic Dissection in the Lyric 27
1.1 Surgical Reading 27
1.2 Revolutionary Bodies 33
1.3 Wordsworth’s Auto-Anatomy 43
1.4 Therapeutic Dissection 48
1.5 Keats’ Dismembered Poetics 54
2. Postmortem, Elegy, and Genius 63
2.1 Empirical Mortality 63
2.2 Popular Pathologies 68
2.3 Intimacy with Genius 77
2.4 Reviving Keats 85
2.5 In Memoriam: Breathing in the Afterlife 93
3. The Madness of Free Indirect Style 101
3.1 Speech and Surveillance 101
3.2 The Style of Mad-Doctoring 105
3.3 Wollstonecraft’s Political Madness 118
3.4 Lydia’s Folly: Mad-Speech Domesticated 132
4. Unreliable Semiology from Frankenstein to Freud 143
4.1 Monsters, Parody, and Paratext 143
4.2 Semiology Towards Exegesis 147
4.3 Elastic Case Histories 152
4.4 Faulty Diagnostics in Frankenstein 164
4.5 Retrospect: Freudian Legacies 176
Coda: Reviving Symptomatic Reading 183
Bibliography 189
Index 209
Introduction
Reading Texts, Reading Bodies: Protocols
of Diagnosis in Medicine and Literature
How did science and literature become rivals? The Romantics tell us one version
of this story. At the turn of the nineteenth century, in his manifesto for a new
movement in poetry, William Wordsworth wrote that the ancient “contradistinc-
tion of Poetry and Prose” was replaced by “the more philosophical one of Poetry
and Matter of Fact, or Science,” with science substituting for prose or history as
poetry’s “logical opposite.”¹ By setting poetry against an emergent culture of
natural philosophy, Wordsworth was reacting to a new epistemological division
that was claiming exclusively for science realms of knowledge—the material
world, the human body—that had formerly been open to all. With his fellow
Romantics, Wordsworth perceived his cultural identity as poet defined against the
role of the natural philosopher, whose domain of research newly extended into
areas of inquiry that had once been the province of humanistic thought.² Medicine
was perhaps the most notable among these new branches of science: formerly
referred to as an art, the practical field was reconceived after the French Revolution
as being on equal footing with the loftier and more abstract sciences.³ The nature of
¹ William Wordsworth, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, in William Wordsworth: Selected Prose, ed.
John O. Hayden (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 287 n16. The phrase “logical opposite”
is John Stuart Mill’s interpretation of Wordsworth’s assertion, cited in M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and
the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 299.
² Sharon Ruston, Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science, and Medicine of the
1790s (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2.
³ For a succinct history of the emphasis on science in hospitalist medicine after the French
Revolution, see W. F. Bynum, “Science in medicine: when, how, and what,” in Oxford Textbook of
Medicine, ed. David A. Warrell, Timothy M. Cox, and John D. Firth (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
May 2010). DOI: 10.1093/med/9780199204854.001.1. As this book will chronicle, the absorption of
medicine into the sciences was neither abrupt nor seamless. As Steven Shapin writes of the Scientific
Revolution, “there was [no] singular and discrete event, localized in time and space, that can be pointed
to as ‘the’ Scientific Revolution. [Nor was there] any single coherent cultural entity called ‘science’ . . . to
undergo revolutionary change. There was, rather, a diverse array of cultural practices aimed at
understanding, explaining, and controlling the natural world, each with different characteristics and
each experiencing different modes of change.” See Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, 2nd ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996, 2018), 3.
Yet the French Revolution’s consolidation of institutional power into hospitals, reimagining of the
medical curriculum to include practical training in anatomy, and reinforcing of medicine’s emphasis
on the importance of empirical inquiry, suggests that the turn of the nineteenth century was a
watershed in the framing of medicine within scientific culture.
Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading. Arden Hegele, Oxford University Press. © Arden Hegele 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848345.003.0001
2  
human life, the mind, the passions—all these seemed increasingly the preserve of
the natural philosopher and the physician rather than the poet. In an era of
biological and technological innovation, writers who subscribed to the new
Romantic ethos were worried that poets had outlived their social function.⁴
Yet this narrative of literature’s resistance to the new scientism, a familiar story
to readers of the poetry and prose of British Romanticism, offers only a partial
glimpse into the elaborate and evolving affinities between literary and medical
epistemes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—an era bookended
in English literature by Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, a novel that aspires to open
and embalm its heroine, and Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam, an elegy shaped by
the rhetoric of the postmortem report. In an apparent paradox, as scientific and
humanistic cultures seemed to become more polarized by a growing emphasis on
expertise during these years (though the notion of distinct “disciplines” was not
yet in force), the affinities between literature and medicine also became increas-
ingly rich and complex.⁵ Despite their rivalries, Romantic literature and medicine
presented “the most perfect interchange between science and art” (as George Eliot
would later write) as they attempted, in their different ways, to discover the nature
of organicism.⁶ Romantic literature and medicine shared questions about the self-
organization of living beings, their growth and adaptation into their environ-
ments, and the nature of the élan vital, or creative spark, that inspired the physical
system to perform complex functions.⁷ The problem that the fields held in
common is voiced most explicitly in literary writing about medicine: Victor
Frankenstein muses, “Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life
proceed?” while Tertius Lydgate, a follower of the Romantic physician Xavier
Bichat, speculates about the “common basis” for each “living organism,” asking
“What was the primitive tissue?”⁸ In turn, the poet-theorists Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and John Thelwall wondered whether the same “Vital Principle” that
⁴ This phrase, “the poet had outlived his social function,” is indebted to Northrop Frye, The
Educated Imagination (1963; reis. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2002), 11.
⁵ I use “cultures” or “fields” rather than “disciplines” to describe Romantic-era literature and
medicine, since this book’s historical investigation is situated at a moment when the two began to
define themselves as distinct subjects of academic study as well as creative practice, but before the term
“discipline” was used to describe each of them.
⁶ George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Rosemary Ashton (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 145. There is
much ambiguity around the terms “life,” “organicism,” “materiality,” and “vitalism.” Not only did each
term have a specific meaning depending on the context in which it was being used, but, as Ross Wilson
has noted, Romantic thought on these problems was characterized by a “fascination by their para-
doxes,” and the terms thereby took on capacious and contradictory significances. Wilson,
“Introduction,” in The Meaning of “Life” in Romantic Poetry and Poetics, ed. Wilson (New York:
Routledge, 2009), 1–12, at 9.
⁷ For a listing of such “driving” vitalist questions, see David Chalmers, “Moving Forward on the
Problem of Consciousness,” in Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem, ed. Jonathan Shear
(Cambridge, MA and London: Bradford Books, MIT Press, 1998), 379ff, at 381.
⁸ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus: the original 1818 text, ed.
D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, 3rd ed. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2012), 78; Eliot,
Middlemarch, 148.
 3
animated organic growth could also be responsible for structuring thought and
language.⁹ Revealing the poet’s intervention in the vitalist debates of contempo-
rary natural philosophers, Coleridge’s influential vision of organic form argued
that the shape of the corpus—whether physiological or textual—was animated and
structured from within by a vital force.¹⁰ The human body, the mind, thoughts,
language, and literature—all these operated according to this principle of self-
motivated growth into form.
This book, Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading, argues that
as literature and medicine considered the common problem of life and how it was
constituted from their respective vantages, the fields were conjoined by a shared
rhetoric of analogous protocols—structural resemblances suggesting the existence
of connected relations without the implication of direct influence.¹¹ In the
Romantic period, a set of resonant ideas, metaphors, and terms floated between
literature and medicine, producing a rich and flexible nonspecialist register that
brought the knowledge of each field into the other’s sphere. Not merely indicative
of literature’s new enthusiasm for medical innovation, the analogies that this book
traces instead offer evidence that literature and medicine were using culturally
specific strategies to make shared inroads into discovering the nature of organi-
cism. As Coleridge understood it, analogy is not resemblance, but a more nuanced
relation that values “the sameness of the end, with a difference of the means.”¹²
Reflecting the cultures’ mutual desire to explain organic processes and structures,
⁹ See John Thelwall’s discussion of the “Vital Principle” in “Essay, Towards a Definition of Animal
Vitality,” in The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries, ed. Nicholas Roe
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002), 87–119, at 119. See also Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s discussion of the
same “vital principle” in On the Constitution of the Church and State, in The Collected Works of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 numbers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969–2002),
10:5–185, at 20. Coleridge offers a robust theory of vitalism—and its relationship to “analogy” and
“figure”—in Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life, in Collected Works,
11.1: 481–557. For a discussion of vitalism as the central paradigm shift of Romanticism across disparate
fields, see Denise Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009).
¹⁰ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On organic form in Shakespeare’s plays: from Coleridge’s notes for a
lecture given in the 1812–13 series at the Surrey Institution,” in Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare: A
Selection, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Athlone, 1989), 51–3, at 53. Frederick Burwick describes the
Romantic emergence of “organic form” in “Introduction,” Approaches to Organic Form: Permutations
in Science and Culture, ed. Frederick Burwick (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1987), ix–xvii.
¹¹ Like “verve” and “autopsy,” “affinity” was a term undergoing both specialization and cross-
cultural movement at the turn of the nineteenth century; thus, it seems fitting to use this term in
tracing formal associations between literary and medical cultures. Historically, affinity suggested blood
kinship, but also the “similarity of characteristics or nature” without direct influence or common origin.
The Romantic period saw “affinity” being defined in light of the emergence of scientific specialties: for
instance, the “resemblances in structure, properties or composition between different animals, plants,
or mineral substances,” both with and without the implication of a “common ancestral type.” The use
of “affinity” in a humanistic sense—as implying “liking or attraction,” “natural inclination,” or
“sympathy and understanding”—is infrequent before the mid-nineteenth century (e.g. in 1848,
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine commented on how “The confinity with agitated France” produced
“a more active affinity with its ideas.”) See OED Online, s.v. “affinity (n.),” accessed April 24, 2019,
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/3417?redirectedFrom=affinity#eid.
¹² Coleridge, Theory of Life, 531.
4  
the analogies between them reveal that literature and medicine had developed a
mutually resonant set of protocols for the analysis of form—the arrangement of
parts or shape of a structure.¹³ As they considered the forms of their respective
corpora—whether books or bodies—literature and medicine established a set of
immanent interpretive practices held in common between the fields, producing
portable protocols of reading. Novels and poems were newly read through exe-
getical techniques originally designed for the analysis of bodily disease; mean-
while, emergent genres in medical writing, particularly in recently codified
specialties like anatomy, pathology, and psychiatry, offered diagnostic interpreta-
tions by using stylistic strategies borrowed from literary precursors. This book’s
name for these congruences—the interpretive strategies shared between historical
methods of critical reading and techniques that Romantic-era physicians used to
interpret the human body—is protocols of diagnosis. In what follows, I detail how
the conditions of Romanticism produced a methodology of interpretation that
could be applied to bodies and texts alike, and I reveal how the protocols of
diagnosis shared between literature and medicine are relevant both to our under-
standing of Romantic literature and to our modern practices of literary exegesis.
While, in its attention to the innovations of Romantic-era medicine, my study
may at times seem like a historicist one, my main aim is rather to offer an
argument rooted in figurative parallels, literary correspondences, and structural
crossings, as I trace how the protocols of diagnosis shared between literature and
medicine constituted a hermeneutic that encompassed both fields at once.
I.1 Metapothecaries
If, as Wordsworth complained, science had become Romantic literature’s greatest

rival, it had also become its greatest influencer, especially with respect to medicine.
Paradoxically, as medicine become more explicitly a domain of natural philoso-
phy rather than the arts, the fields’ new consciousness of one another’s differences
produced a more complex and rich interplay, with ideas, discoveries, forms, and
genres moving freely between literary and medical writing. (When I use the term
“form” in this book, it covers quite a wide range of different devices of linguistic
art, including figurative language and tropes, but also classical rhetoric and
poetics. “Genre,” meanwhile, refers to contextually situated conventional cate-
gories for literature, including lyric poetry, prose fiction, and varieties of texts
from the specialty of medicine, such as the postmortem report and the madhouse
¹³ For a basic definition of literary form, see René Wellek, “Concepts of Form and Structure in
Twentieth-Century Criticism,” in Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 55:
for Wellek, form refers to the “elements of a verbal composition,” such as “rhythm, meter, structure,
diction, imagery.”
 5
journal. Both these categories of “form” and “genre” help us to discern conceptual
and representative links between literature and medicine.) By examining
Romantic forms and genres anew—from new historical perspectives and in new
contexts—readers can discover a profound entanglement between literature and
medicine: even as the cultures began to specialize, their practices and ideas
persisted and even established relationships between the realms of knowledge.¹⁴
To illustrate the fluidity of the mutual exchange between literature and medicine,
let me single out two terms, “autopsy” and “verve,” that traveled in opposite
directions between the fields at the turn of the nineteenth century. Reflecting
advances in anatomy and pathology during and after the French Revolution, the
term “autopsy,” derived from the ancient Greek αὐτοψία [autopsía] “seeing with
one’s own eyes,” migrated from medicine to become an established technique of
poetic criticism. First used in 1805 with respect to the medical postmortem
(“cadaverous autopsia”), the term was being used figuratively by 1835 to mean
“the examination of a subject or work” (“moral autopsia”).¹⁵ As the nineteenth
century progressed, this figurative sense became even more pronounced in its
reference to literary production and criticism: by 1870, Mary Elizabeth Braddon
was describing an “autopsy of a fine lady’s poem.” But this cross-cultural influence
also ran in the other direction, from literature into medicine: writerly “verve,” an
indicator of personal style in the Enlightenment art of letters, had by the turn of
the nineteenth century taken on new significance in emergent theories of
vitalism, carrying resonances such as “energy,” “vivacity,” or “go” that helped to
explicate biological animation. In Hygëia (1803), the scientist and physician
Thomas Beddoes wrote about the actions of the internal organs that “many
such processes . . . are carried on with as high a verve or as true fervor as ever
accompanied poetic fiction.”¹⁶ In their illustration of two opposite currents in
medico-literary discourse, “autopsy” and “verve,” and their underlying concepts
of formal organization, mark a chiastic interchange between the science of letters
and the medical arts. The autopsy, bolstered by new discoveries in the field of
clinical pathology, became an experimental practice not only for understanding
¹⁴ Geoffrey Sill describes the interchange of fields in the eighteenth century: “The connection
between the rise of the novel and events in philosophy, science, and religion was one of parallel
developments between loosely associated fields, rather than a directly causal relation, but philosophers,
physicians, and theologians undoubtedly drew some of their knowledge of the passions from novelists,
and novelists drew a sense of the urgency and legitimacy of their task from moral philosophers, religion
and medicine.” See Geoffrey Sill, The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4–5. This book builds on Sill’s account of loosely
connected, increasingly self-aware fields of knowledge that were engaged in topics of mutual interest,
while also attending to how the cultures shared strategies of formal representation.
¹⁵ OED Online, s.v. “autopsy (n.),” accessed December 28, 2017, http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.cul.
columbia.edu/view/Entry/13519?rskey=syHWw4&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid
¹⁶ OED Online, s.v. “verve (n.),” accessed December 28, 2017, http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.cul.
columbia.edu/view/Entry/222815?redirectedFrom=verve#eid. See quotation from Beddoes, taken
from Hygëia III. x. 35 (1803), in definition 2.
6  
the human body but also for opening up the formal workings of a literary text; the
newly medicalized concept of literary verve, meanwhile, offered a model of the
text as a living organism that radiated its energy outward for critical observation.
The crossed movement of autopsy and verve offers a salient example of how
tropes of organicism, disease, and examination in Romantic literature can meto-
nymically reveal the more abstract shared ontology that bridged literary and
medical cultures.
Romanticism was both an epistemological endpoint, when medicine and liter-
ature were formally codified as fields of study, and the beginning of a new
exchange across the cultures that generated mutually resonant terms and ideas.¹⁷
The early modern period had laid the foundations for such an exchange through a
new, Cartesian understanding of the interior of the human body as a machine—a
notion that, in Jonathan Sawday’s words, would leave “its mark on all forms of
cultural endeavor” in the centuries to come.¹⁸ This exchange was newly spurred in
the late eighteenth century by the emergence of an idiosyncratic Enlightenment
intellectual category, the médecin-philosophe, who promoted a holistic view of the
human body in which all vital processes were connected by sensibility.¹⁹ Leading
médecins-philosophes such as Théophile de Bordeu and Charles Bonnet saw their
theories of sensibility taken up by pre-Revolutionary writers—among them, Denis
Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Choderlos de Laclos, and the Marquis de Sade—
who appropriated the genre of the medico-philosophical case history in order to
“diagnose” sensibility in their prose fiction.²⁰ In the aftermath of the French
Revolution, an interchange reminiscent of the earlier one took place in Britain
through the work of such “Metapothecaries” as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
Humphry Davy.²¹ These inheritors of the tradition of the médecin-philosophe
attempted to intervene in both fields at once, as evidenced by their many neolo-
gisms for scientific inquiry: Coleridge alone was responsible for introducing the
¹⁷ As Meegan Kennedy comments, the fields of “science” (and, more specifically, medicine) and
“literature” drew in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “upon a common cultural reservoir of
tropes, rhetoric, and narrative form,” yet the fields “increasingly disavow[ed] their debts to one another
in order to authorize themselves as autonomous disciplines.” Margaret Ann [Meegan] Kennedy, “A
Curious Literature: Reading the Medical Case History from the Royal Society to Freud.” PhD disser-
tation (Providence: Brown University, 2000), 8–9.
¹⁸ Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture
(London: Routledge, 1995), viii, 29. The blazon, a poetic convention that flourished in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries as a “strange fantasy of anatomical surrender,” is the most vivid poetic precursor
to Romanticism’s crossings between literature and medicine (Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 191).
¹⁹ I am grateful to Joanna Stalnaker for introducing me to the médecin-philosophe. See Anne C. Vila,
Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 46.
²⁰ Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, 64. Note that Diderot’s first publication was a translation and
commentary of an English medical dictionary; he would later declare that “there are few works I read
with more pleasure than medical works.”
²¹ This portmanteau is Robert Southey’s, cited in Jane Stabler, “Space for Speculation: Coleridge,
Barbauld, and the Poetics of Priestley,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas
Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 180.
 7
words “bipolar,” “neuropathology,” and “psychosomatic” into the English lan-

guage, and in 1833 he inspired the debate that generated the term “scientist” when
he refused to call members of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science “philosophers.”²² His own scientific interests were many and varied: as a
young man, he “attack[ed] Chemistry, like a Shark,” and in his later years, wrote
an influential biological–theological essay, “On Life,” with Joseph Henry Green,
who had been John Keats’ surgical instructor.²³ Many other creative and critical
writers of the era were involved in the dissemination of scientific ideas: Mary
Wollstonecraft “conversed, as a man with man, with medical men, on anatomical
subjects,” and anonymously reviewed new scientific works.²⁴ John Thelwall, the
radical poet and essayist, was a lecturing fellow in anatomy at Guy’s Hospital even
as he was being investigated for treason. Joanna Baillie informed her prefatory
treatise to Plays on the Passions (1798) with phrenological studies of embodied
personality that she had encountered through the work of her uncles, the pio-
neering anatomists William and John Hunter; her brother Matthew Baillie,
meanwhile, published a definitive book on morbid anatomy, treated Lord
Byron’s clubfoot, and served as the physician extraordinary to George III.²⁵ The
period was also an exciting one for medicine, as the early nineteenth century saw a
number of major innovations and discoveries. Dissection was made the basis of
the French medical curriculum in 1795; asylum inmates were freed from their
restraints in 1797; the analgesic properties of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) were
discovered in 1800 (Coleridge and Davy experimented with it on themselves); the
word “biology” first appeared in 1802; morphine was produced in 1804; the
stethoscope was invented in 1816; the first successful transfusion of human
blood took place in 1818; the function of spermatozoa in human reproduction
was discovered in 1824. Meanwhile, medical specialties were increasingly defined
as fields of academic study: professorial chairs in forensic medicine were estab-
lished in France in 1794 and Britain in 1803, while in 1798, the year that
²² Coleridge is listed as the first user of each word in the OED. See OED Online, s.v. “neuropathology
(n.),” accessed December 11, 2018, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/126420?redirectedFrom=neuropa
thology; OED Online, s.v. “bipolar (adj.),” accessed December 11, 2018, http://www.oed.com/view/
Entry/19300?redirectedFrom=bipolar; OED Online, s.v. “psychosomatic (adj.),” accessed December 18,
2018, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/153938?rskey=RAuA02&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid. While
it is tempting to attribute each coinage to Coleridge’s genius, each term had seen earlier usage in
French or German, and it is more accurate to say that Coleridge introduced these terms into English
from his study of Continental writing.
See also Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 43, and Simon Schaffer, “Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy,” in
Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 93.
²³ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), I: 605, and cited in Frederick Burwick, The Oxford Handbook of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 643.
²⁴ Mary Wollstonecraft, cited in Ruston, Creating Romanticism, 3.
²⁵ James Allard, Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body (Burlington and Aldershot: Ashgate,
2007), 12.
8  
Wordsworth and Coleridge published the Lyrical Ballads, “British Psychologists”

were described as a new order of experts in Alexander Crichton’s An Inquiry into
the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement.²⁶
Changes to the sociology of print culture and to the material arrangements of
the public sphere also allowed literary and medical fields to coexist intimately in
the Romantic period. A new proliferation of specialized periodicals allowed for the
wide dispersal of medical texts to a well-informed readership. In the latter half of
the eighteenth century, London-based physicians’ societies began to publish their
proceedings in a host of new journals; in the same period, another 200 medical
periodicals were launched throughout Europe.²⁷ The height of Romanticism also
saw the founding of generalist medico-surgical journals that documented narra-
tive case histories, including The New England Journal of Medicine (1812–) and
The Lancet (1823–), which continue to thrive today as the preeminent journals of
practical medicine. But medical texts were not restricted to these newly abundant
specialist periodicals. Although the editors of the Edinburgh Review wrote in 1806
that “MEDICAL subjects ought in general, we think, to be left to the Medical
Journals,” literary periodicals such as The Gentleman’s Magazine, the Quarterly
Review, and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine often contained medical writing
alongside their creative and critical content.²⁸ The “Tales of Terror” popular in the
earliest numbers of Blackwood’s (1817–1980) were written by physicians and
surgeons who were interested in experimenting with how literary or philosophical
writing for a popular audience could reflect medical debates on such varied topics
as phrenology and blood transfusion.²⁹ The culturally inclusive format of
Blackwood’s and other Romantic-era journals meant that physician-authors trea-
ted medical topics such as hysteria, coma, catatonia, and addiction, directly
alongside definitive reviews of the era’s great poems and novels. Subscribers to
Blackwood’s—notably, the Reverend Patrick Brontë and his four surviving chil-
dren—encountered a broad selection of medico-literary texts, which the omniv-
orous norms of Romantic print culture made available for consumption beyond a
strictly medical audience. Following Pierre Bourdieu, I propose that these medical
²⁶ Andrew J. Connolly, Walter E. Finkbeiner, Philip C. Ursell, and Richard L. Davis, Autopsy
Pathology: A Manual and Atlas (Philadelphia: Elsevier, 2016), 4; Alexander Crichton, An Inquiry
into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1798), I: xxvii.
²⁷ British periodicals included Medical Communications [of a] Society for Promoting Medical
Knowledge, Medical Observations and Inquiries [by] a Society of Physicians in London, Transactions
of a Society for the Improvement of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge, Medical Records and Researches
from the Papers of a Private Medical Association, and Memoirs of the Medical Society of London—
among many others. See Simon Chaplin, “Dissection and Display in Eighteenth-Century London,” in
Anatomical Dissection in Enlightenment England and Beyond: Autopsy, Pathology, and Display, ed.
Piers Mitchell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 102. See also Christopher John Murray, ed., Encyclopedia of
the Romantic Era, 1760–850 (New York and London: Taylor and Francis, 2004), II: 1025.
²⁸ Editors of the Edinburgh Review, cited in Megan Coyer, Literature and Medicine in the
Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2017), 21.
²⁹ Ibid., 12–13.
 9
works, “circulat[ing] without their contexts,” encouraged periodical readers to

“re-interpret the texts in accordance with the structure of the field of reception”—
that is, through the literary-critical contexts of the periodicals that readers under-
stood, while lacking the deep knowledge of the field of production (medicine) that
would aid readers in making sense of each medical work’s significance.³⁰ The
result of this cross-cultural dissemination was that Romantic medicine became
what Bourdieu calls a “particularly elastic” field that invited the contributions of
nonspecialists, especially writers and poets.³¹ Since the medical sciences appeared
alongside creative literature in periodicals for a general audience, the conceptual
principles that governed the texts produced unexpected rhetorical affinities across
the fields of inquiry, as physicians wrote fiction and poets coined medical terms.
Taking the extent of such medico-literary affinities seriously provides us with a
new vantage on longstanding subjects of Romanticist scholarship: the similarities
between texts and bodies, and the belief that both writing and reading could—and
should—proceed organically. This era of discovery, and the dialogue it produced
between medical and literary fields, not only resulted in new instruments, proce-
dures, and terms but also reflected new concepts that revealed a shared ontology
between biological and textual structures.³² One important such concept was the
brain/mind controversy at the cutting edge of a new materialist strain in natural
philosophy that imaginative writing both adopted and resisted. The growing
interest of Romantic literary writers in the biological sciences is evident in the
emergence of the term “brain,” a newly popular object of medical study, as a
replacement for “mind” in the poetry of the age. In contrast to its typical earlier
usage—to refer to “a mind diseased or deranged” in satirical poetry—the brain
enters lyric verse after the 1790s as a nonpejorative term that captures the
complexity of the mind.³³ This movement of “brain” into poetry conveys a
historical belief in the “corporeality of thought,” a phrase that originates in a letter
that Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote to Robert Southey in 1794. “Go[ing] farther”
than the Enlightenment philosopher David Hartley’s radically materialist argu-
ment that the mind was embodied in the brain, Coleridge asserts that human
thought is not ethereal or spiritual in nature, but is instead a physical form in
“motion.”³⁴ If the mind was located in brain-matter, Coleridge reasoned, it
followed that the thoughts it produced were also biological; moreover, since
these thoughts were normally expressed in language, human communication,
and especially literature, could conceivably be understood as organic: “The spirit
³⁰ Pierre Bourdieu, “The Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas,” in Bourdieu: A
Critical Reader, ed. Richard Shusterman (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 221.
³¹ Ibid., 224.
³² One possibility that critics have proposed for describing this ontology is “organicism.” As Charles
Armstrong observes, organicism was “a grounding system for understanding all holistic structures”
during the Romantic period. See Armstrong, Romantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to
Ambivalent Afterlife (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 2.
³³ Richardson, British Romanticism, 55, 146. ³⁴ Coleridge, Collected Letters, I: 137.
10  
of poetry, like all other living powers . . . must embody in order to reveal itself.”³⁵
Expressing this sequence of ideas in his later criticism, Coleridge echoes his belief
in the corporeality of thought in his formulation of “living language,” claiming
that he sought “to destroy the old antithesis of Words & Things, elevating, as it
were, words into Things, & living Things too.”³⁶ The equivalency of language with
matter, or (more simply) “words and things,” is echoed by Lord Byron, who writes
in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that there exist “Words which are things,” and in
Don Juan that “words are things, and a small drop of ink / Falling like dew, upon a
thought, produces / That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.”³⁷
But if words were really material, how were they produced, and what shape did
they take? For Romantic philosophers, the most important answer to this question
was the theory of organic form, a morphological concept that became the era’s
dominant paradigm for thinking about the similarities between aesthetic and
natural objects. Postulated by German thinkers Immanuel Kant and Friedrich
Schiller, organic form was taken up in English letters by Coleridge, who says that
language is essentially vital: it grows naturally, just as a biological organism would,
into its ultimate manifestation, whose distinct and individual structure is referred
to as its form.³⁸ Endowing literary works with an internal agency, Coleridge writes
that “The organic form . . . is innate. It shapes, as it developes [sic] itself from
within, and the fullness of its development is one & the same with the perfection of
its outward Form.”³⁹ In Coleridge’s formulation, literary texts were creatively
generated in the embodied mind, subject to the same pressures and distortions
as the human body: they could be salubrious, or, alternatively, abnormal, diseased,
and even monstrous. Organically formed texts, meanwhile, could interact with
similarly structured mental matter to produce consequences in the brain. These
physical consequences of reading could be negative—as in the cases of the
“enervating novels” that Percy Shelley deplored in his “Preface” to Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the “sickly German tragedies” that Wordsworth
derided in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads—or positive, as when John Stuart
Mill cured his depression by reading Wordsworth’s poetry.⁴⁰
³⁵ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On organic form,” 51–3.

³⁶ Coleridge, Collected Letters, I: 625–6.
³⁷ George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in Byron: The Major Works, ed. Jerome
McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3.1061; and Don Juan, in Byron: The Major
Works, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3.793–5.
³⁸ See Immanuel Kant’s discussion of organic form in Kritik der reinen Vernunft and Kritik der
Urteilskraft, in Werke, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975),
2:31 and 5.483–90; see also Friedrich Schiller, Kallias Briefe, in Sämtliche Werke (Munich: Carl
Hanswer Verlag, 1960), 5:394–433; and see Coleridge, “On organic form,” 51–3.
³⁹ Gigante, Life, 4; Coleridge, “On organic form,” 51–3.
⁴⁰ Percy Shelley, “Preface” to Frankenstein, in Frankenstein, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen
Scherf, 2nd ed. (1818; repr. in Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999), 47; Wordsworth, “Preface,”
ed. Hayden, 284; John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle, Autobiography, Essay on Liberty,
Characteristics, Inaugural Address, Essay on Scott, with Introductions and Notes, vol. 25 (New York:
P. F. Collier and Son, 1909), 97.
 11
While the theoretical implications of the morphological similarities between

bodies and texts have been extensively documented in their importance for
Romantic writing and its afterlife (and for the lyric poem above all), less well
investigated has been how the concept of organic form governed practices of
critical interpretation during the same period—in other words, how reading as
well as writing might be structured organically. But it was so: the Romantics
depicted literary-critical exegesis, too, in terms analogous to medical methods for
analyzing biological processes. Morbid anatomy, for instance, becomes a model
for exegesis in Robert Burns’ “Third Epistle to Robert Graham, Esq.” (1791):
Critics! appall’d I venture on the name,

Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame:
Bloody dissectors, worse than ten Monroes!
He hacks to teach, they mangle to expose.⁴¹
Anticipating Wordsworth’s famous line from the Lyrical Ballads, “We murder to
dissect,” this passage elucidates many of the key features of this study. In Burns’
formulation, the critical readers who mangled literary texts to expose their
demerits were not only influenced by eighteenth-century advances in pathology,
which encouraged the dismemberment of organic forms; they were even more
ruthless than their counterparts in the biological sciences. Burns’ reference to
“ten Monroes” alludes specifically to two important Monro familial dynasties
in eighteenth-century medicine—the three Alexander Monros who practiced
morbid anatomy at the Edinburgh Medical School, and the four successive
Dr. Monros who managed Bedlam Hospital for 125 years in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. (I discuss the history of both families in the chapters to
follow.) By introducing real-life medical practitioners into his account of early
Romantic practices of analytical reading, Burns is one of the first writers to
identify a literary-critical trend of perceiving the text as a body to be interpreted
through the practices of autopsy, as readers “mangle” the texts to reveal their
underlying formal structures.⁴² Near the end of the nineteenth century, Robert
Louis Stevenson would return to this anatomical trope, denouncing those critics
who would “dissect, with the most cutting logic, the complications of life, and of
⁴¹ Robert Burns, “Third Epistle to Robert Graham, Esq. of Fintry,” in The Complete Works of Robert
Burns (1791; reis. in Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1865), ll. 37–40.
⁴² The protocol of dissection as critical practice extended into other realms of aesthetic interpreta-
tion: in eighteenth-century Germany, pieces of music were critiqued for their “musical anatomy,” with
melodies “dismember[ed]” into their “limbs” or “members,” and “monstrosit[ies]” exposed to the ear of
the listener. Ian Bent, “Introduction,” in Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century: Volume 1: Fugue,
Form and Style, ed. Ian Bent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7–8. I am indebted to
Emmanuel Reibel and Carmel Raz for this observation.
12  
the human spirit.”⁴³ For these and other writers, organic form was the underlying
conceptual link that brought to the human body and the text not just shared
structure, but also shared interpretive methods.⁴⁴ Because bodies and texts were
analogized through organicism, analogous critical principles applied to the anal-
ysis of their qualities. In sum, not only did literary form shape and develop itself
organically into a perfect outward manifestation during the creative process, it
also elicited particular protocols of reading.
I.2 Reading Diagnostically
Medicine played an essential part in constituting Romantic attitudes to critical

reading, particularly as medical paradigms gave new context to a literary redefi-
nition of the “text” as analogous no longer to fabric, as during the Enlightenment,
but to organic tissue. This book argues that Romantic medicine and literature,
whose rhetorical affinities are most vividly apparent as they address the shared
problem of organicism, can be interpreted through a methodology in common—
what I call protocols of diagnosis. This methodology refers to a set of practices for
critical interpretation that could be used alike by doctors to diagnose disease, and
by readers to understand works of fiction and poetry. Living texts were structured
in ways morphologically similar to living bodies, the Romantics believed; conse-
quently, could the strategies for interpreting one corpus be applied to the other? In
other words, was anatomical analysis cognate with deep reading?
This book finds that the answer is yes. As we will see in each chapter, the
historical conditions that produced a sea change in Romantic medicine also
shaped literary writing in structurally analogous ways. The concrete evidence of
affinities among texts across the fields, I argue, points to a novel idea held in
common between the period’s writers and doctors: that not just the rhetorical
patterns, but the interpretive techniques of each field, could, through the power of
analogy, be extended to contexts in the other domain. Readers and doctors alike
approached their critical interpretations with an implicit assumption that books
and bodies could be analyzed through the same methods; they then apprehended
the meaning of their respective corpuses through shared protocols for analysis of
their constituent parts.
⁴³ Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance. From Longman’s Magazine,” Littell’s Living Age
155 (1882): 684.
⁴⁴ While this use of “form” may seem overly capacious, I follow Anahid Nersessian and Jonathan
Kramnick in thinking that a pluralistic capacity of meaning is what gives the term its conceptual power
to transcend disciplinary and aesthetic boundaries: “this expansive view effects a certain traveling
outward of an aesthetic conception of form to domains usually covered by other areas of study.”
Kramnick and Nersessian, “Form and Explanation,” Critical Inquiry 43 (Spring 2017): 651.
 13
No argument about the translatability of Romantic medicine to other fields

could proceed without an acknowledgment of Michel Foucault. Foucault’s histor-
ical epistemologies situate medicine as the prime mover of all knowledge at the
end of the eighteenth century—or as the philosopher himself puts it, “the whole of
Classical knowledge” can be extrapolated out of “medical knowledge.”⁴⁵ This
insight has lent my own project its conviction that the transformation in medicine
in the late eighteenth century was a catalyst for a sudden and through reorgan-
ization in cultures of knowledge, with Romanticism emerging as an aesthetic
manifestation of a fundamental epistemological shift.⁴⁶ And Foucault’s recogni-
tion that provinces of knowledge as diverse as the natural sciences, economics, and
philology were governed by a shared set of historically contingent organizing
principles, grounded in the clinical gaze and pathological anatomy, has motivated
my work’s investigation into how a different domain—the literary writing of
British Romanticism—might participate, too, in the “network of analogies that
transcended the traditional proximities” at the turn of the nineteenth century.⁴⁷
Correspondingly, my own work’s reliance on analogy as the figure connecting
medicine with literature is likewise indebted to Foucault, who in his chapter on
“Signs and Cases” in The Birth of the Clinic introduces analogy as the crucial
diagnostic principle of the new clinical medicine that emerged during the French
Revolution:
The analogies on which the clinical gaze rested in order to recognize, in different
patients, signs and symptoms . . . “consist in the relations that exist first between
the constituent parts of a single disease, and then between a known disease and a
disease to be known.” Thus understood, analogy is no longer a more or less close
kinship that vanishes as one moves away from the essential identity; it is an
isomorphism of relations between elements: it concerns a system of relations and
reciprocal action.⁴⁸
Having established its pragmatic significance to medical diagnosis, Foucault

elaborates his concept of analogy in The Order of Things, where he describes
how the figure operates as a key “organizing principle” of empirical knowledge in
the modern era.⁴⁹ Analogy, he writes, is what permitted a set of heretofore distinct
fields to form, in that crucial moment at the end of the eighteenth century, a
“network” governed by a “positive unconscious of knowledge: a level that eludes
the consciousness of the scientist and yet is part of scientific discourse.”⁵⁰ Rather
⁴⁵ Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. (1970; reis.
New York: Random House, 1994), xxiv.
⁴⁶ Foucault, Order of Things, xxii and 238. ⁴⁷ Foucault, Order of Things, x.
⁴⁸ Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York:
Random House, 1994), 100.
⁴⁹ Foucault, Order of Things, 218. ⁵⁰ Foucault, Order of Things, 10.
14  
than exploring the nature of that “positive unconscious”—a ground well trodden
by Foucault himself, as well as a generation of scholars in the history of science—
this book considers instead not just the analogous rhetorical strategies shared
between medicine and literature, but also the analogous mechanisms of interpre-
tation that those fields elicited. By examining the analogies that linked the
literature of British Romanticism with the medical writing of the same period,
this work asks how the two fields informed one another to develop protocols of
diagnosis that could encompass both cultures at once.
In its contention that historical analysis of the literature of British Romanticism
shared interpretive techniques with practices of medical inquiry, this book joins
other works of contemporary literary scholarship in pushing against an older view
(nonetheless based on a great deal of real evidence) that writers and readers of the
period were “anti-science.”⁵¹ Critical work on Romanticism and the medical
sciences tends to fall methodologically into three categories. The first group of
studies interprets literary works through the historical lens of nineteenth-century
medical practice to gain insight into hidden textual meanings. Hermione de
Almeida and Alan Richardson find that the imagery of the “wreath’d trellis of a
working brain” in John Keats’ Ode to Psyche reflects the poet’s medical education
at Guy’s Hospital, where he learned about the “fibres of the brain” through
botanical metaphors.⁵² Alan Bewell uncovers implicit diagnoses of calenture and
tropical invalidism in Wordsworth’s “The Brothers” and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre, while Tony Tanner and Gillian Beer suggest that Mrs. Clay’s reliance on
Gowland’s Lotion in Persuasion implies a secret condition of syphilis.⁵³ A second
group of studies employs a reverse methodology, mining nineteenth-century
literary texts for their historical reference points about disease and treatment. In
this sort of approach, Lydgate’s use of a stethoscope in Middlemarch acts as
corroborating evidence of the historical developments in 1820s medical education,
and his research into human tissues reflects his training with Xavier Bichat’s
Parisian school.⁵⁴ Coleridge’s reference to the “Ouran utang Hypothesis” in his
prose, meanwhile, shows the dissemination of the ideas of J. F. Blumenbach, a late
eighteenth-century German natural historian who theorized about the phreno-
logical signs of race and moral degeneracy.⁵⁵ Finally, a (smaller) third group of
⁵¹ Ruston, Creating Romanticism, 2.

⁵² Richardson, British Romanticism, 117, 127; see also Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine
and John Keats (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Nicholas Roe, ed., John
Keats and the Medical Imagination (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
⁵³ Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2003); Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 237; Gillian Beer,
ed. and intro., Persuasion by Jane Austen (London: Penguin, 2003), 241 n3.
⁵⁴ Vinod Patel and John Morrissey, “Medical Classics: Middlemarch,” British Medical Journal 335,
no. 7612 (July 28, 2013): 213. Note that this approach of citing fiction as evidence is not used by
historians of science.
⁵⁵ See Peter J. Kitson, “Coleridge and ‘the Oran utang Hypothesis’: Romantic Theories of Race,” in
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
 15
studies reflects Ralph O’Connor’s claim that nineteenth-century scientific and

humanistic cultures were mutually creative: it is “not that science writing and
literature enjoyed a fruitful relationship, but that scientific writing was litera-
ture”—or that literary writing was scientific.⁵⁶ Such diverse works as Lawrence
Rothfield’s Vital Signs (1994), Denise Gigante’s Life (2009), and Amanda Jo
Goldstein’s Sweet Science (2017) uncover a hidden tradition in which literature
explores natural philosophy, scientific writing produces aesthetic innovation,
and, as Goldstein writes, poetry becomes “a privileged technique of empirical
inquiry.”⁵⁷ One particularly rich example in this vein is Sari Altschuler’s The
Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (2018),
which contends that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, poetry
and fiction modeled a form of intellectual scaffolding that trained doctors in
habits of mind such as judgment, inventiveness, observation, and experimenta-
tion. Strikingly, Altschuler goes beyond a historical analysis of early American
medico-literary interchange to argue that such textual strategies for training the
medical imagination might be extended into the present-day discipline of medical
humanities, particularly in the cultivation of “humanistic competencies” that are
essential to the practice of medicine.⁵⁸
Most closely aligned with this last movement in literary scholarship, Romantic
Autopsy makes the case for an interpretive relationship between medical texts and
the poetry, prose, and criticism of British Romanticism, with implications for how
we read and teach in the present day. I argue that in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, affinities between the cultures allowed critical analysts from medicine
and literature alike to perform procedures of diagnostic exegesis on the body as
well as the literary text—in other words, to become medical close readers. Using
common strategies for interpretation, medical close readers could analyze a wide
range of objects deriving from different spheres or with different materialities,
such as the human body, the lyric poem, or the growth of the poet’s mind. Poets
and novelists, periodical reviewers, and even doctors all prove to be close readers
who look for figurative and implicit significances lying beneath surface meaning;
they are also writers who use the text as the space in which to develop and record
their diagnostic interpretations.
During this historical moment, critical readers and physicians used a shared
toolkit of protocols of diagnosis—techniques for expressing, containing, or
2000), 91–116; and Tim Fulford, “Theorizing Golgotha: Coleridge, Race Theory, and the Skull Beneath
the Skin,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 117–33.
⁵⁶ Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 13.
⁵⁷ See Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994); Gigante, Life; Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic
Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), abstract.
⁵⁸ Sari Altschuler, The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 199–204.
16  
diagnosing symptoms located in the body or in text. Referring to a “system of

conventions” or a set of “standards governing the implementation of specific
strategies,” the term protocol offers a compelling alternative to the often too-
capacious literary domains of form and genre.⁵⁹ Nicholas Dames writes that a
protocol is a hermeneutic category: it “function[s] as a bridge between the
vast territory of ‘reading’ and the instantiations provided by examples of past
‘readings.’ ”⁶⁰ Promisingly for its use in this study, a protocol is also inherently
field-crossing: as Alexander Galloway details, its traditional applications encom-
pass such diverse domains as etiquette, diplomacy, and computing. But no matter
its field of application, to follow a protocol means to adhere to an established
ontological structure into which one enters one’s particular data.⁶¹ All this con-
sidered, the term protocol seems to me to offer a rich conceptual framework for
thinking about how practices of interpreting forms might extend across the
boundaries of cultures or fields—in this instance, to describe the strategies for
exegesis that medicine and literature shared at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Meanwhile, in the parlance of Romantic-era physicians John Brown and Thomas
Beddoes, diagnosis refers to the “doctrine of distinguishing diseases from one
another.”⁶² The way I use the term in this book is slightly broader: diagnosis is the
investigation, determination, and articulation of the nature of a condition.⁶³ While
the term diagnosis had been in use in medicine since the seventeenth century, by
the mid-nineteenth century, the term would take on explicitly cross-cultural
meanings: as Herbert Spencer would write in 1855, “Perception is essentially a
diagnosis.”⁶⁴ The emergence of the shared protocols that this book traces for
⁵⁹ Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2004), 6–7 and 50–2. See discussions of the many definitions of “form”and “genre” in Marjorie
Levinson, “What is New Formalism?” PMLA 122, no. 2 (2007): 558–69 and Sandra Macpherson, “A
Little Formalism,” ELH 82, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 388; see also Macpherson’s critique at 387–8 of the
idiosyncratic uses of “form” and “genre” when describing the same object (e.g. the novel).
⁶⁰ Nicholas Dames, “On Not Close Reading: The Prolonged Excerpt as Victorian Critical Protocol,”
in The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature, ed. Rachel Ablow (Ann Arbor:
The University of Michigan Press, 2013), 12.
⁶¹ Galloway, 52. Here I come up against the problem of whether a protocol is prescriptive. Galloway
argues that while a protocol is useful for producing an outcome (a diplomatic treaty; a dataset; a critical
reading) within a range of possibilities, the protocol itself is non-prescriptive: it doesn’t shape the end
result. But following Caroline Levine, I find that a protocol is governed by its affordances, its “potential
uses and actions,” which dictate what it produces. See Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy,
Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 6. Exegetical protocols derived from medical
practice do offer medical affordances in their application to literature—they produce a prescriptive
reading shaped by medicine’s potentialities.
⁶² John Brown and Thomas Beddoes, “Extracts from The Elements of Medicine of John Brown, M.
D.,” 1795, vol. 1, ed. Tim Fulford and repr. in Romanticism and Science (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge,
2002), 95 n15.
⁶³ I follow the OED definition: diagnosis is the “determination of the nature of a diseased condition;
the identification of a disease by careful investigation of its symptoms and history,” and the “opinion
(formally stated) resulting from such investigation.” OED Online, s.v. “diagnosis (n.),” accessed August
7, 2020, https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/view/Entry/51836?redirectedFrom=diagnosis#eid
⁶⁴ Cited in ibid.; see definition 1b.
 17
investigating, determining, and articulating a condition, whether of the body or of

the text, are evidence that, during British Romanticism, the diagnostic tools of
medicine had already begun to circulate beyond the boundaries of their field.
Protocols of diagnosis, then, ask interpreters (whether doctors or literary critics)
to diagnose particular objects of analysis (whether bodies or books) through a
common series of steps. In its focus on how techniques of literary representation
elicit particular forms of critical interpretation, my study elaborates four central
protocols: dissective reading, the postmortem, free indirect style, and semiological
diagnostics.⁶⁵ Each is a literary strategy that shares an affinity with a distinct
medical specialty emergent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries:
anatomy, pathology, psychiatry, and semiology. And each offers a different
reflection on the era’s historical phenomenon of burgeoning medico-literary
exchange, showing how critical methods ran in both directions between the fields.
This study treats the suggestive analogies between Romantic-era medical and
literary texts and the protocols of diagnosis that readers and doctors developed to
analyze them as a backbone of historical evidence of an interchange between the
emergent cultures. The analogies are themselves historical artifacts, circulating as
they do through time, space, and context. This book is not, however, a historicist
study of the influence between medicine and literature, such that innovations in
literature have a direct, traceable effect on the practice of medicine (or vice versa).
By considering how interpretive protocols might share analogies across fields, this
work seeks to attend anew to the connections between literary and medical
cultures that exist at a rhetorical and figurative level. Rather than relying on
what Georg Lukács might call “the pseudo-historicism of the mere authenticity
of individual facts,” my study doubles down on how analogies themselves offer
evidence of a fecund cross-cultural interchange.⁶⁶ In so doing, this work offers an
imaginative reframing of focal cases—examples of familiar works of Romantic
literature that might seem, at first, to have little to do with medicine—in order to
reveal how strategies of reading might extend beyond Romantic techniques of
interpretation into other epistemological contexts.
This study argues that protocols of diagnosis are paradigmatic to British
Romanticism—but could they also be portable beyond its bounds? In what
follows, I do not claim that an exchange between medicine and literature on the
level of interpretive practice is unique to the turn of the nineteenth century
(although the four protocols detailed in this book are deeply rooted in their
⁶⁵ Free indirect style may seem an outlier on this list of protocols, given that it is a technique for the
representation of speech rather than a mode of reading. In Chapter 3, I examine how free indirect style
enables a reader to diagnose madness from speech, while being insulated through its third-person
reporting from the threat of communicating a disorderly state of mind. In other words, free indirect
style is a protocol that elicits a form of reading.
⁶⁶ Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 168.
18  
temporal moment). Certainly, the historical proliferation of new specialties within

the broader field of hospital medicine that developed out of the French
Revolution, coupled with creative innovations in poetry and prose, renders the
Romantic period a particularly powerful era for medico-literary exchange. But this
is just one moment in a long history of dialogue between medicine and literature
in Western thought, beginning in ancient Greek myth with Apollo, the god of
both poetry and medicine. There are other cultures and historical periods, too,
that could also support a methodological exchange between literature and med-
icine, albeit one taking a radically different shape. We can imagine, for instance,
finding diagnostic protocols shaping pre-contact Native American narrative med-
icine, or fashioning the healing arts of the medieval Islamic world, where Ibn Sīnā
(Avicenna) argued in his masterwork KitābalŠifā (The Cure) that the philosopher
must become a doctor of the soul.⁶⁷ Even as this study focuses on a particular
manifestation of protocols of diagnosis in British Romanticism, then, the concept
has transhistorical portability with promising implications for theorizing the
crossing of embodied and textual paradigms across time and space. And, as
I will show in a moment, the protocols of Romantic medico-literary interpreta-
tion, born out of affinities in the literary and scientific revolutions during
the modernization of Europe, offer new insight into contemporary practices of
literary exegesis.
A final word on my own methodology: this study depends on the conviction
that specific interpretive techniques can index broad, field-crossing ontologies that
governed Romantic thought. In examining the discursive connections between
lesser-known materials from medical archives as well as canonical works of
Romantic poetry and prose, Romantic Autopsy finds itself in alignment with a
critical methodology that Edward Cahill has called “archival formalism,” which
attempts to bridge the competing disciplinary modes of historicism and
formalism.⁶⁸ This book’s discussions of literary form are visible in each of its
close readings, but every chapter also reveals how protocols of reading permeate
genres and cultural contexts, giving rise to “patterns [that] are visible only from
the wide-angle perspective assumed by an extensive survey of objects” from both
literary and historical sources.⁶⁹ As it examines how writers of the Romantic
period defined literature against medicine, while also linking the fields through
a shared affinity for diagnostic exegesis, this book couples a wide-angle perspective
with close reading in order to trace how these stylistic and exegetical innovations
set the scene for the literary-critical protocols of our own moment.⁷⁰
⁶⁷ Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Narrative Medicine: The Use of History and Story in the Healing Process
(Rochester, VA: Bear & Co., 2007).
⁶⁸ Edward Cahill, “Keyword: Formalism,” in “Roundtable: Critical Keywords in Early American
Studies,” ed. Emily García, Duncan Faherty, Early American Literature 46, no. 3 (2001): 611.
⁶⁹ Ibid., 615. ⁷⁰ Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 299–300.
 19
I.3 Symptomatic Reading
Romantic Autopsy reveals how in the period of British Romanticism, literature

and medicine shared protocols of interpretation than can broadly be called
diagnostic. The book seeks also to draw out a transhistorical through line from
the reading practices of the Romantics to those that literary scholars and critics
employ in the present day. Romanticism’s simultaneous enthusiasm for and
fear of medicine, as well as a newly self-conscious articulation of the nature of
human individuality and genius, looks forward to many of the methodological
questions of our own time—particularly the debates that persist around how
we perform critical readings. The lingering trope of organic form as a model for
the interpretation of lyric poetry, for instance, has been tracked by modern
scholars as an illustration of how more recent interpretive approaches remained
indebted to early nineteenth-century conceptions of literary and scientific cross-
pollination.⁷¹ But an even more salient instance of the tenacity of the Romantic
protocols of diagnosis is the strategy of symptomatic reading—a methodology of
interpretation that privileges what is hidden behind or beneath the text. While
symptomatic reading remains today a dominant paradigm in the practice of
literary criticism, it has acquired a newly suspect status in the twenty-first century.
A reading practice held in common between divergent fields of literary-critical
theory, symptomatic reading is fundamentally a diagnostic approach. It examines
how the expressive details of a text (its symptoms) point towards a hidden
underlying register (the disease)—whether that register is a historical context
(New Historicism), an inherent relationship between language and meaning
(deconstruction), the unconscious mind (psychoanalysis), or a political ideology
(Marxism). But in spite of its capacious applicability across otherwise rival
domains of critical theory, symptomatic reading is often accused of missing the
point: it privileges what is absent over what is present in a text; it is myopic,
paranoid, unfeeling. And yet, even as scholars have offered challenges to it with
new methods of surface reading, distant reading, digital textual analysis, and other
⁷¹ Organic form casts a shadow from Romanticism into modern formalism. T. S. Eliot wrote in 1930
that “words like emergent, organism, biological unity of life, simply do not arouse the right ‘response’ in
my breast.” Eliot, cited in Paul Douglass, “‘Such as the Life is, Such is the Form’: Organicism among the
Moderns,” in Approaches to Organic Form: Permutations in Science and Culture, ed. Frederick Burwick
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1987), 253. While deconstructionist and new historicist
critics shared Eliot’s distaste for organic form, the concept has enjoyed a critical revival in the New
Formalism in the 2000s. See Levinson, “What is New Formalism?” 562. Charles Altieri questions the
New Formalist assumption that a text has an “organic form”: he writes that readers have been “forced
into a language of ‘organic form’” by a long tradition of readers, especially by the New Critics who
admired Coleridge’s theory. Altieri, “Taking Lyrics Literally: Teaching Poetry in a Prose Culture,” New
Literary History 32 (2001): 259.
20  
innovations, it remains the most basic approach to textual analysis taught and
practiced in the modern literature department.
In this study, I seek to revitalize the practice of symptomatic reading by
extending its history back in time, putting it in dialogue with the diagnostic
protocols of the British Romantics. While I stop short of tracing a continuous
lineage between Romantic protocols and contemporary symptomatic reading, I do
contend that by relating cross-cultural exegetical strategies from the turn of the
nineteenth century to present-day reading practices, we can detect a prehistory for
symptomatic reading that casts new light on its vexed critical status today,
revealing rich and unexpected possibilities for the practice. Decades before the
emergence of symptomatic reading as a form of critique in the work of Marx and
Freud, I argue, Romantic protocols of diagnosis posited a radically literal under-
standing of the symptom as a textual phenomenon—an understanding that
derived from the affinities between the period’s medical and literary cultures. By
shedding light on how protocols of diagnosis informed Romantic exegesis, then,
this book shows us a historical precursor that created the conditions for the
modern practice of symptomatic reading.
As a critical keyword, symptomatic reading is of relatively recent coinage,
dating to the poststructuralist moment, but it also explicitly looks back to the
nineteenth century. The term “lecture symptomale” was first used by Louis
Althusser and Étienne Balibar to describe their approach to Karl Marx’s pre-
1845 works in Reading Capital (1965). Inspired by the hermeneutic methods of
Spinoza, Freud, and Marx himself, the authors modeled a process of reading for
“symptoms”—moments when the text “was in contradiction with itself or with
another passage,” or when a “philosophical concept had to have been in use but
was not made explicit”—and then attempted to probe the underlying, deeper
ideology that informed the emergence of such symptoms in the text.⁷² Paul
Ricœur, meanwhile, offered an explicitly medicalized mode of symptomatic read-
ing by postulating that Freud’s psychoanalytic method delves into deep layers of
unconscious thought concealed beneath the surface of the patient’s language.⁷³
Following these French theorists, Fredric Jameson would further amalgamate
Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis in The Political Unconscious (1981), the
book that “popularized symptomatic reading among U.S. literary critics” (to quote
Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus).⁷⁴ Jameson argues that an “allegorical decipher-
ment” could take place “between a superstructural symptom or category and its
⁷² William Lewis, “Louis Althusser,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition),
Edward N. Zalta (ed.), accessed December 29, 2017, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/
althusser/.
⁷³ See Paul Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1970).
⁷⁴ Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1
(Fall 2009): 3.
 21
‘ultimately determining’ reality in the base”—in other words, that a “symptom” in

the text could be read as indicative of latent content (in Jameson, always history
itself).⁷⁵
As the literary-critical profession, following Jameson, has become oriented
towards uncovering what lies beneath the “absences, gaps, and ellipses in the
text” (whether historical, ideological, psychoanalytic, or otherwise), a number of
critics have mounted challenges to symptomatic reading—most often on ethical
grounds.⁷⁶ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for instance, proposes a model of “reparative
reading” that would replace our dominant paradigm of “paranoid reading”—a
form of symptomatic reading that “place[s] its faith in [the] exposure” (and
implicitly, the shaming) of the inner workings behind a text.⁷⁷ Stephen Best and
Sharon Marcus resist symptomatic reading’s privileging of the invisible by attend-
ing to the “literal meaning” that is already available on the “surface” of the text—a
method that Marcus has elsewhere called “just reading.”⁷⁸ Franco Moretti and
other distant readers, in turn, eschew symptomatic reading’s pull towards reifying
a literary canon by employing computational methods to extract data from a vast
number of nineteenth-century novels. And in a nod to Ricœur, Rita Felski defines
critique as a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” and proposes that literary scholarship,
which tends to take critique as its main goal, find other, more ethically responsible
methods of approaching texts—based on “mood,” “attachment,” or even “love.”⁷⁹
But even as these calls from literary practitioners to attend to critique in new ways
reveal the limits and the biases of symptomatic reading, they also show us the
centrality that the practice still has for literary criticism. While no manifesto or
guideline for best practices exists for symptomatic reading, and probably very few
contemporary critics would ever describe themselves as symptomatic readers, the
method seems to serve as the natural launching point for a range of ethically
corrective modes of exegesis in the twenty-first century.
In my view, a clearer understanding of historical and formalist medico-literary
affinities behind symptomatic reading will help literary scholars develop a better
sense of what the practice entails in the first place, and will offer them more
concrete grounds on which to build their methodological responses to it—includ-
ing its ethical register. Romantic Autopsy seeks to add to our standard genealogy of
modern symptomatic reading by considering its similarities to Romantic-era
medico-philological progenitors, which considered textual “symptoms” in quite
⁷⁵ Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1982), 18.
⁷⁶ Ibid.
⁷⁷ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke
⁷⁸ Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 12.
⁷⁹ Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 17–18. See also
Branka Arsić’s “On Affirmative Reading,” introduction to Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
22  
a literal fashion—as external signs of distress that pointed to an underlying

condition of disease. While Best and Marcus have already noticed symptomatic
reading’s “nineteenth-century roots [in] Marx’s interest in ideology and the
commodity and Freud’s in the unconscious and dreams,” this study seeks to
extend the history of the practice further back into Romanticism’s diagnostic
protocols, and particularly to the notion, abetted by Coleridge’s notion of organic
form, that the text and the body were both shaped biologically through the same
vitalist impulse, and could therefore be read in equivalent ways.⁸⁰ Romantic
Autopsy shows that Romanticism’s initiative in reading the dissected body and
the organic literary form for both their external symptoms and deeper pathologies
paved the way for the development of the nineteenth-century branch of medicine
called semiology, which predated the work of both Marx and Freud: as one medical
writer put it in 1839, “Semeiology [sic] constitutes the doctrine of the relations in
which the phenomena of the human system stand with respect to the vital state
which causes them.”⁸¹ This definition of semiology as the symptomatic reading of
the human body reflects Romanticism’s practices of reading organic forms. Thus,
by the time that Ferdinand de Saussure would develop “la sémiologie” (otherwise
known as semiotics) as a purely linguistic field of signs and symbols in the Cours
de linguistique générale, the field-crossing branch of study had long been con-
cerned with the relationship between signs (or symptoms) that were explicitly
bodily in nature. As an area of literary inquiry, semiotics continues to bear the
traces of its nineteenth-century medical sense: Roland Barthes comments on
semiotics’ derivation from medicine, while for Paul de Man, the Romantic-era
trope of organic form, with its relationship to the embodied organism, helped to
explain the “semiotics of the symbol” in relation to other figurative structures like
allegory and metaphor.⁸²
Reassessing how past and present strategies of reading engage productively and
bi-directionally with medical paradigms, Romantic Autopsy finds forerunners of
modern practices of symptomatic reading in the Romantic era. By tracing symp-
tomatic reading’s critical ancestry in the diagnostic protocols of Romanticism,
readers can understand the modern practice anew not merely as inheriting a
Marxist paradigm of the relations between labor and culture, or as reviving a
Freudian indicator of psychological malaise, but as bringing an attention to the
body into literary analysis—an attention with therapeutic as well as destructive
possibilities. Romanticism illuminates how biological understandings of the
body developed by medical practitioners gain a new prominence both in imagi-
native literature and in critical responses to it. Thus, by extending the prehistory of
⁸⁰ Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 4.

⁸¹ Albert Friedrich Schill, Outlines of Pathological Semeiology, trans. Daniel Spillan (London: Henry
Renshaw, 1839), cited in OED Online, s.v. “semiology, n.”
⁸² Roland Barthes, “Sémiologie et medicine,” in L’aventure sémiologique (Paris: Seuil, 1985), 273–83;
Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 7.
 23
symptomatic reading back to the Romantic period, readers gain a new

understanding of the ethical implications of symptomatic reading’s critical arma-
ture—both its violence as it dismembers and diagnoses the literary text, and,
perhaps paradoxically, its implicitly restorative ambition to heal textual patholo-
gies through its attempts at empirical analysis.
I.4 Four Protocols
In developing a theory of protocols of diagnosis as a guiding principle of cross-

cultural exegesis, Romantic Autopsy considers British Romanticism not as a
unified aesthetic movement, but as a historical constellation of revolution, discord,
idiosyncrasy, heterogeneity, and multiplicity.⁸³ Far from restricting its study to a
singular expressive or ethical tradition in creative letters, this book treats advances
in nonliterary fields as deeply influential in the shaping of literary thought and
practice in this era. And while I propose to illuminate four specific protocols that
govern protocols of diagnosis and thereby to reveal a shared ontology in the
doctor’s and the reader’s approaches to analytical interpretation, I also share Kevis
Goodman and Anahid Nersessian’s concern that Romantic writing ought not to
be “reduced or betrayed” into a “ ‘totalizing representation’ of its protocols.”⁸⁴
Rather, I seek to offer a partial glimpse into how the study of protocols of reading
can yield unexpected and fresh interpretations of some of the greatest works of
Romantic poetry and prose—even those texts that seem at first to have nothing to
do with medical science. The chapters of this book do more than merely find
medical motifs lurking in the backdrop of Romantic literature; they also reveal
how texts as varied as the Lyrical Ballads, Pride and Prejudice, and In Memoriam
are structured in ways that elicit practices of interpretation closely aligned with
strategies of medical examination.
In tracing protocols of diagnosis as an emergent analytical approach during the
Romantic period, this book addresses four characteristic modes of exegesis that
moved between fields: dissective reading, the postmortem, free indirect style, and
semiological diagnostics. While this list may appear at first to link together
concepts fitting into categories that are not equivalent (free indirect style, for
instance, is an expressive narrative mode, while the postmortem report is a
medical genre), they are far from being disconnected. At bottom, all of these
prove to be strategies for mediation and interpretation that find their expression in
text; all reveal their historical presence in both medical writing and creative
⁸³ For a similar perspective on the field, see Sharon Ruston, Creating Romanticism, 3.
⁸⁴ Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 109, cited in Anahid Nersessian, Utopia,
Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 5.
24  
literature. Each of these protocols is tied, in turn, to an area of medicine

undergoing rapid innovation and disciplinary codification at the turn of the
nineteenth century. These fields are, respectively, anatomy, pathology, psychiatry,
and semiology.
The first chapter, “Hermeneutic Dissection in the Lyric,” engages with a
protocol I call dissective reading, and it explores the close reading practices
derived from Romantic anatomy that share an affinity with modern symptomatic
reading. The chapter considers William Wordsworth’s use of tropes from the field
of morbid anatomy in The Prelude of 1805 and in “Tintern Abbey” (1798).
Referring to medical advances in battlefield dissection and autopsy that occurred
during the French Revolution, Wordsworth turns from social analysis to self-
critique as he performs his retrospective analyses of the “growth of the poet’s
mind” in the “spots of time.” Responding to Wordsworth, the critic Francis Jeffrey
and the poet John Keats evolved the practice of dissective reading, modeling forms
of symptomatic close reading through their segmentation of surface and under-
lying structures, and invoking dismemberment as a tool for converting critical
reading into authorial auto-exegesis.
Turning from dissection to the autopsy and its poetic afterlives, Chapter 2,
“Postmortem, Elegy, and Genius,” explores a brief moment when medical post-
mortem reports became widely available to the reading public. Using the various
commemorative responses to the death of John Keats as the central example, but
also reading the widely published postmortem reports of the deaths of Napoleon
Bonaparte, Lord Byron, and Ludwig van Beethoven, which afforded readers an
unexpected degree of intimacy with the metaphorically charged bodies of the
departed, the chapter focuses on how the postmortem provides a protocol for
interpreting mortality across a range of memorial genres in medical and literary
fields. The postmortem adopts certain generic qualities of earlier epitaphs, while
later elegies such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais (1821) and Alfred Tennyson’s
In Memoriam (1850), continue to show the medical genre’s influence. The chapter
sketches out a new theory of how the discursive practices of medicine might be
dependent on literary models, first appropriating generic conventions from epi-
taphic literature, and then asserting a scientific protocol of taxonomical classifi-
cation within humanistic discourse. When used in this commemorative field,
reading bodily symptomology becomes a hermeneutics of consolation.
The third chapter moves from surgical treatment of the dead to therapies for
the living, and particularly to the power dynamics of the patient–physician
discursive relationship. “The Madness of Free Indirect Style” locates what critics
normally consider a Romantic-era innovation in prose in a longer history of
eighteenth-century psychiatric writing. While many critics attribute the origin
of free indirect style to Jane Austen, this chapter charts earlier traces of the
representational strategy in the 1766 Case Book of Dr. John Monro, the director
of Bethlem Hospital (“Bedlam”), through the political literature of the 1790s, into
 25
realist prose fiction. The chapter contends that free indirect style is a formal
protocol for the mediation of speech that elicits a certain kind of reading: it has
a monitory function that developed alongside the psychiatric practice of moral
management in the late eighteenth century. By examining how free indirect style
continued to bear the traces of the madhouse in Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or the
Wrongs of Woman (1798) and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), the chapter
uncovers a pathological history underlying the formal device that Frances Ferguson
has called the novel’s most distinctive contribution to literature.⁸⁵ This chapter
further argues that free indirect style inaugurates the association of the novel with
the patient’s narrative, anticipating modern discussions of “psycho-narration” as a
medico-literary formal device. Ultimately, I find that free indirect style allows the
reader to diagnose madness through the expressiveness of spoken idiom, while also
allowing the writer to contain its communication through indirect presentation.
Examining through a different prism the third chapter’s question of how prose
fiction and the patient’s narrative share certain formal features, Chapter 4,
“Unreliable Semiology from Frankenstein to Freud,” investigates how the
Romantic-era case history, informed by historical developments in the field of
semiology, models a diagnostic protocol of reading that reveals a fecund exchange
between medicine and the novel. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a partic-
ularly notable—even parodic—literary case history informed by more serious stric-
tures of medical reporting, such as those articulated in Matthew Baillie’s account of
situs inversus (1788) and later in Sigmund Freud’s case history of “Katharina” in the
Studies on Hysteria (1895). The Romantic case history, however, also captures
fundamental tensions between the physician’s scientific report and the patient’s
autobiography, which compromise the physician’s ability to trace a semiotic rela-
tionship between external symptom and underlying condition. The Romantic case
history is a site of disciplinary quarrel between literature and medicine: not only does
it share many of the epistemological problems that attend our modern attempts to
read “symptomatically” or “deeply,” it also interrogates the notions of authority,
personhood, and normality that continue to sustain modern medical discourse and
literary criticism. As the case history reveals the unreliability of the diagnostician’s
production of narrative, it also shows the limitations of interpretation in the emer-
gent medical and literary fields of semiology.
The coda, “Reviving Symptomatic Reading,” extends the relationship between
nineteenth-century techniques of medico-literary exegesis to reading practices in the
present day. The four mobile protocols discussed in Romantic Autopsy—dissective
reading, the postmortem, free indirect style, and semiological diagnostics—not only
offer a new portrait of the cultural interchange between Romantic literary and
medical fields but also set the stage for contemporary reading practices, especially
⁸⁵ Frances Ferguson, “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form,” Modern Language Quarterly
61, no. 1 (2000): 159.
26  
symptomatic reading. The coda argues that the much-maligned practice of

symptomatic reading might be rehabilitated through a reconsideration of the history
of its origins in Romantic protocols of diagnosis, which anticipated present-day
debates in literary analysis about the ethics of critique. In dialogue with the emergent
field of the health humanities, the coda offers an optimistic reconsideration of
symptomatic reading as a particularly rich, transhistorical instance of how literary
scholarship might draw on and inform the medical sciences.
Ultimately, Romantic Autopsy finds that these mobile interpretive practices
offer a new portrait of cultural interchange between Romantic literary and medical
fields, while also anticipating current debates about the tools of literary interpre-
tation. The Romantic period was a moment in which simultaneous enthusiasm for
and fear of medicine foreshadows many of the methodological questions of our
own time. Writing in an era of rapid innovation in the medical sciences, and in the
shadow of the French Revolution’s guillotine and George III’s madness, the
Romantics developed a set of interpretive protocols that reflected the close
proximity and the rich and ongoing affinities between medicine and literature.
The forces that drove these writers—medical discoveries, a new theory of organic
form, and a periodical print culture that offered readers access to both medical
and literary writing—are reflected in their poetry and novels, which reveal a
fundamental ontology shared between the emergent fields of literature and med-
icine. Wordsworth and Keats, Percy Shelley and Tennyson, Wollstonecraft and
Austen, and Mary Shelley and Coleridge all found medicine both alarming and
appealing; despite their misgivings, they were willing to consider medical genres
and interpretive methods as coeval and even interchangeable with literary forms
and techniques of reading. As it retraces how the Romantics sought to reconcile
medical discovery with literary innovation, Romantic Autopsy makes the case for
how the exegetical strategies of their moment foreshadow the modern-day prac-
tice of symptomatic reading, while elaborating protocols of diagnosis as a poten-
tially transferable method of aesthetic interpretation within the growing field
of the health humanities. Not only does Romantic writing look forward to many
of the epistemological problems that attend modern attempts to understand
literature in medical terms, it also illuminates and interrogates the notions of
authority, wholeness, and normality that continue to sustain both modern medical
discourse and literary criticism. So, just as Coleridge began his reviews of
Shakespeare’s plays by identifying their “symptoms of poetic power,” I ask readers
to apply their own diagnostic lens to the Romantic affinities between literary and
medical fields and forms, and to examine how our analytical practices are rooted
in a tradition of reading that embodies the literary text.⁸⁶
⁸⁶ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. Adam Roberts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2014), 215–21, 215.
1
Hermeneutic Dissection in the Lyric
1.1 Surgical Reading
The Lyrical Ballads of 1798 contain some of William Wordsworth’s most

enigmatic verse. While the stated goal of the volume is to affect readers’ emotions
through the simple and prosaic “real language of men,” this “real language” oddly
does not preclude nonpoetic, specialized dictions.¹ The underlying tension
between sociolects becomes obvious in the short lyric, “The Tables Turned,”
which describes Wordsworth’s exhortation to a text-bound friend to “quit his
books” through the varying vocabularies of carpe diem, pedagogy, and, finally,
medicine.² While the poem’s imagery and sound appear at first to be attractively
pastoral—the speaker turns his gaze from a “mountain’s head” to “green fields,”
and divides his ear between a “woodland linnet” and a “throstle”³—the stanza that
contains the poem’s emotional climax is informed by specifically anatomical
diction:
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.⁴
This stanza encapsulates themes central to Wordsworth’s oeuvre, especially the

lessons taught by natural forms, but it also jarringly introduces echoes of the
charnel-house and suggestions of experimentation on living bodies into an oth-
erwise thematically consistent pastoral lyric.⁵ In this stanza, the rhetorical shift—
not just from preachers and teachers to murderers, but also from “you” and “He”
¹ William Wordsworth, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, in William Wordsworth: Selected Prose, ed.
John O. Hayden (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 279.
² William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” in Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth, ed. Mark
Van Doren (New York: Modern Library, 2002), p. 79, line 1.
³ Ibid., lines 5, 7, 10, 13. ⁴ Ibid., lines 25–8.
⁵ These lines in “The Tables Turned” raise the questions of whether the forms being dissected are
living or dead, or animal or human, problems that Wordsworth does not resolve. Some critics have
associated the poet with animal experimentation: Williard Spiegelman says that Wordsworth is
“Ultimately a vivisectionist” of humanity when he writes that he probes “the living body of society /
Even to the heart” in The Prelude. Spiegelman, Wordsworth’s Heroes (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985), 144, and William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), ed. M. H. Abrams, Stephen Gill, and
Jonathan Wordsworth (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1979), X. 81.
Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading. Arden Hegele, Oxford University Press. © Arden Hegele 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848345.003.0002
28  
to “Our” and “We”—helps to signal Wordsworth’s apparent distaste for

dispassionate logical analysis, a distaste he wishes the interpellated reader to
share with the speaker, and this is how most scholars have read the poem. Yet
the climactic stanza of “The Tables Turned” also depends upon the idea of
“beauteous forms” applying equally to literary texts and to living bodies (an effect
Wordsworth achieves through the hinging word “lore”).⁶ In other words,
Wordsworth invokes here the idea of organic form, an “analogy between aesthetic
and biological form” built into poetic language itself.⁷ Following Wordsworth’s
analogy between reading and the emergent medical specialty of anatomy, this
chapter will show how Romantic writers’ investment in organic form as a creative
ideal gave rise to a new critical concept with equal application to both anatomy
and poetry: “dissection.” The surgical diction of the “We murder to dissect”
passage reveals an affinity between Romantic literature and medicine as it gestures
But does “The Tables Turned” show Wordsworth expressing a sentiment against animal experimen-
tation? The lines are reminiscent of earlier writers’ critiques of experimentation on living bodies.
Alexander Pope wrote in the Moral Essays:
On human actions reason tho’ you can,
It may be Reason, but it is not Man:
His Principle of action once explore,
That instant ’t is his Principle no more.
Like following life thro’ creatures you dissect,
You lose it in the moment you detect.
(25–30)
Pope, “Moral Essays, Epistle I: Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men,” Complete Poetical Works, ed.
Henry Walcott Boynton (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903). https://www.bartleby.com/
203/143.html.
Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, and Jeremy Bentham also used the example of animal experimentation
to argue that animals feel pain. Johnson, “No. 17. Expedients of idlers,” The Idler (August 5, 1758).
http://www.johnsonessays.com/the-idler/expedients-of-idlers/; Voltaire is cited in David Perkins,
Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 155; Bentham is
cited in Anita Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 2003), 3. Such literary critiques anticipate the “anti-
vivisectionist” social movement, which emerged decades after the publication of the Lyrical Ballads.
See historical accounts in A. W. H. Bates, Anti-Vivisection and the Profession of Medicine in Britain:
A Social History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017) and Stephen Lock, John M. Last, and George Dunea, ed.,
The Oxford Illustrated Companion to Medicine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 53. Note that
“vivisection” is used throughout in its historical sense; in the early nineteenth century, it had not yet
acquired the pejorative force it has among scientists today.
⁶ Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” line 27.
⁷ This definition of organic form is taken from Denise Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 3. Organic form, a theory that bridged scientific and literary
domains, maintained that the shape of the body—whether physiological or textual—was animated and
structured from within by a vital force. The best-known articulation of this idea appears in Coleridge’s
1811–1812 Lectures on Shakespeare, in which he wrote, “The organic form is innate, it shapes as it
develops from within . . . Such is the life, such the form.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On organic form in
Shakespeare’s plays: from Coleridge’s notes for a lecture given in the 1812–13 series at the Surrey
Institution,” in Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare: A Selection, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Athlone,
1989), 51–3. Wordsworth likewise theorized the concept, writing about “A function kindred to organic
power / The vital spirit of a perfect form” in his unpublished manuscripts. See William Wordsworth,
“Dove Cottage MS. 33 (four passages),” reprinted in The Prelude, 1798–1799, ed. Stephen Parrish
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 161–5.
     29
to a concrete context for Wordsworth’s vehement reaction—the rise of dissection

as a Romantic-era protocol of analytical reading, whether of a human or animal
body, a corrupt society, a poet’s growing mind, or a literary text.
Wordsworth’s introduction of dissection into “The Tables Turned” serves a
more ambiguous function than the poet appears to realize: even as the speaker
condemns morbid anatomy, his invocation of surgery helps to legitimate dissec-
tion as a protocol of exegesis that could plausibly (if destructively) be brought to
bear on Romantic poetry. Elsewhere in his work (and particularly in The Prelude),
Wordsworth seems to be strongly attracted to the rational analysis of the human
or textual body, even in its most violent and critical manifestations. At the same
time, the poet is also committed to developing a therapeutic function for his verse,
and in his criticism he investigates how specific kinds of language might “act and
re-act” to produce a “healthful state” in the reader’s mind.⁸ Although these two
strains of reading might seem to be at odds with one another—the one violently
cutting to pieces, and the other offering holistic restoration—Wordsworth’s
poetry reveals an unexpected concord between them: within the trope of dissec-
tion, surgical and therapeutic methods coexist as models of interpretation.⁹ In this
chapter, I situate Wordsworth’s understanding of dissection as a form of literary
exegesis in analogous relation to the historical transformations in anatomy that
occurred during his early poetic career. I examine how the motif of readerly
dissection in “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798) displays
both the kind of sentimental, therapeutic reconstruction (or, in more potent terms
for this poem, “re-membering”) that had been associated with dissection in the
early modern period, and the kind of radical, violent dismemberment that char-
acterized post-Revolutionary anatomy. Then, by tracing the hermeneutic method
of dissective analysis in late Romantic responses to Wordsworth’s poetry—by
Francis Jeffrey and John Keats—I argue that the Wordsworthian concord between
what I call sentimental and radical forms of dissection was pried apart, in
analogous relation to a historical sea change in the radicalization of dissection
in the world of medicine.
The suggestive trajectory of dissection as an exegetical protocol that this
chapter explores in Wordsworth, Jeffrey, and Keats should not be taken as
evidence of a general trend in literature; nor does it constitute historical proof of
⁸ Wordsworth, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads (1802), in Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed.

W. J. B. Owen (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 70.
⁹ Dissection is not antithetical to surgery on a living body, since the term “dissection” does not
denote a postmortem examination. As a physiological practice, dissection is “the methodical cutting up
of an animal or a plant, for the purpose of displaying its internal structure,” and thus the term can be
applied equally to surgery, animal experimentation, and the postmortem autopsy (OED Online, s.v.
“dissection (n.),” accessed April 19, 2016, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/55372;jsessionid=
1547898EB3EE4EFAD0F012EAA5DFC606?redirectedFrom=dissection). This chapter treats dissection
as one technique within the anatomist’s tool-kit. Conceptually, dissection is also closely related to
diagnosis, since the practice of exposing biological mechanisms was what allowed the practitioner to
determine their underlying pathology.
30  
a transformation in medical practice. Yet this arc intimates a recurrent analogy

that Romantic writers and readers drew between historical developments in
anatomical dissection and exegetical literary practices—one that would be taken
up with vigor later in the nineteenth century. As experimentation on living
beings became integral to medical study in the Victorian period, the protocol of
violent surgical dismantling that Wordsworth feared in “The Tables Turned”
would increasingly become central to scientifically inspired critical reading.¹⁰
Wordsworth’s warning about the effects of critical dissection on poetry foresha-
dowed how anatomical medicine (and the natural sciences more generally)
reflected on later literary aesthetics. The moral philosopher Henri-Frédéric
Amiel attributed the “death of poetry, flayed and anatomized by science” to the
influence of anatomy.¹¹ G. H. Lewes developed an extended analogy between
literature and dissective experimentation, commenting that “criticism . . . is also
vivisection” and that the “real torture inflicted upon authors by critics” was
affectively equivalent to the suffering of animals in laboratory research.¹² Émile
Zola, in turn, “intrench[ed]” his theory of the naturalist novel in the physiologist
Claude Bernard’s model of invasive experimentation on living beings: so indebted
was he to Bernard’s thesis on experimental medicine that “It will often be but
necessary for me to replace the word ‘doctor’ by the word ‘novelist,’ to make my
meaning clear and to give it the rigidity of a scientific truth.”¹³ Prefiguring such
explicit collisions of scientific dissection with literary study later in the nineteenth
century, Wordsworth’s simultaneous antipathy and attraction to dissection as an
interpretive practice indexes a key turning point in both scientific and literary
exegesis, as older practices that surveyed organisms as wholes gave way to new,
increasingly fragmented modes of physical (or textual) analysis that nonetheless
purveyed the idea of holistic, organic form.
¹⁰ See Lock et al., 53.

¹¹ Cited in Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (Oxford: Oxford
¹² See Richard Menke, “Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot,” ELH 67, no. 2
(Summer 2000): 617–33, at 626. Lewes’ formulation of this analogy appears in his 1872 essay,
“Dickens in Relation to Criticism” (key excerpts from which are cited in Menke, 617–18). In 1875,
Lewes articulated this view in an interview with the Royal Commission on the Practice of Subjugating
Live Animals to Experiments for Scientific Purposes. The exchange is cited in Menke, 626–7, and
reproduced here:
: It seems to me that the vivisection of which we are now speaking is very much like vivisection in
another department, that of Literature, that is to say, criticism, which is also vivisection. There is a
great deal of real torture inflicted upon authors by critics, which lasts for a considerable time in
sensitive minds.
 : And without anaesthetics?
: —And without anaesthetics . . .
 : But I suppose you would scarcely compare [the “vivisection” done by critics]
in point of necessity of control with the fact of living animals being cut up?
: —Why not?
¹³ Émile Zola, The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, trans. Belle M. Sherman (New York:
Haskell House, 1964). https://www.marxists.org/archive/zola/1893/experimental-novel.htm.
     31
In recent years, Romantic medicine has emerged as a fertile area of critical

study, as readers increasingly turn their attention to literature’s engagement with
the rapid changes in the sciences at the turn of the nineteenth century. This new
engagement replaces an earlier commonplace about Romantic medicine, which
held that although the field came occasionally into contact with literature (espe-
cially in the works of Coleridge and Keats), the two cultures were fundamentally
disjunctive. This impression of epistemic separation between the literary arts and
the natural sciences more generally is encapsulated in William Blake’s suggestion
that “Art is the Tree of Life . . . Science is the Tree of Death,” and in Wordsworth’s
point about the “contradistinction . . . of Poetry and Science” in the “Preface” to
Lyrical Ballads.¹⁴ While New Historicism challenged the separation of the natural
sciences and literature by showing how the poets’ biographies (and especially
Keats’ medical training) revealed a deeper interchange between the fields, scholars
working in the Romantic natural sciences have since turned to an exploration of
how the period’s milestones relate to innovations in poetic form.¹⁵ Although
Wordsworth has not historically been read as a key figure in Romantic literature’s
engagement with natural science, or with medicine specifically, the therapeutic
effects of reading his poetry have been discussed since the poet’s own period, and
critics have resituated Wordsworth as an unexpectedly central figure in Romantic
medico-literary discourse.¹⁶ While Wordsworth’s connections to actual medical
practice were tenuous, he was regarded even by his earliest readers as a healer as
well as a poet.¹⁷ Through the lens of Wordsworth’s poetry and its critical afterlife,
¹⁴ Cited in Donald C. Goellnicht, The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), 3.
¹⁵ Goellnicht’s The Poet-Physician (1984) and Hermione de Almeida’s Romantic Medicine and John
Keats (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) are foundational studies examining the
emergence of medically informed tropes and the scientific background for Keats’ poetry. Important
texts in the formalist tradition include an early examination of the topic in M.H. Abrams, “Science and
Poetry in Romantic Criticism,” in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 298–336; other studies include Nicholas Roe, ed.,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Noah
Heringman, ed., Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History (Albany: SUNY Press,
2003); Charles Armstrong, Romantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to Ambivalent Afterlife
(Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003); Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (New York and Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2005).
¹⁶ Critical works that trace Wordsworth’s engagement with medicine include Alan Bewell’s discus-
sion of The Ruined Cottage and “The Two Brothers” in Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); John Gordon’s “Doctor Wordsworth” in Physiology and the
Literary Imagination (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 8–56; James Allard’s
Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body (Burlington and Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); and Alan
Richardson’s British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001) and The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2010).
¹⁷ Tim Milnes, William Wordsworth: The Prelude, ed. Nicolas Tredell (Houndmills: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), 23. Wordsworth’s intercourse in the early 1790s with John Thelwall, a member of
Godwin’s circle, may have connected him to Revolutionary medicine. Though not a doctor, Thelwall
was elected into the Physical Society of Guy’s Hospital, and he delivered lectures there on vitality and
cognition in 1793. I am indebted to Nicholas Roe for this observation.
32  
then, I offer one illustration of how dissection operated as a hermeneutic protocol

for literature and medicine alike during the Romantic period.
The materiality of poetic form has also become a recent problem of criticism—
particularly in its relation to the practice of “symptomatic reading,” which, in
Fredric Jameson’s terms, involves finding in the text a “latent meaning behind a
manifest one.”¹⁸ In their challenge to the default model of symptomatic reading
that permeates the literary-critical disciplines, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus
describe the long history of the exegetical search for absent, latent, and deep
content within a text, whose modern critical iteration emerges from late
nineteenth-century strategies for reading, particularly Marxist and Freudian inter-
pretive methods.¹⁹ They notice that this reading practice takes on curiously
biological as well as political or psychological resonances: symptomatic readers
consider surface “as a layer that conceals, as clothing does skin,” while modern
surface readers, acting as “anatomists” and “taxonomists,” “attend to what is
present rather than privileg[ing] what is absent.”²⁰ This study builds on Best
and Marcus’s history of the tension between surface and symptomatic reading
by placing the emergence of one especially literal version of the latter practice in
an earlier nineteenth-century moment, as Romantic-era encounters between
literature and medicine gave rise to shared protocols of diagnosis—among them,
dissection. This Romantic prefiguration of modern critical reading proves to be a
practice of exegesis that locates signs of disease or failure beneath the surface of the
organically formed text. At the same time, my study gently dislocates the over-
lapping of the anatomist’s practice with the taxonomist’s, since, at the turn of the
nineteenth century, these approaches were emblematic of different epistemolog-
ical trends, anticipating (respectively) the symptomatic and surface reading of our
own moment. As Michel Foucault describes in The Order of Things (1966), the
nature of the natural scientist’s “gaze” was transformed between the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. The eighteenth-century taxonomist’s classifying gaze,
which surveyed the outward appearances of organisms in their totality, gave way
to the nineteenth-century anatomist’s probing gaze.²¹ Shifting its focus from
¹⁸ Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell
¹⁹ Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1
(2009): 4.
²⁰ Ibid., 9, 11.
²¹ Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random
House, 1994), 268. For the critical distinction between the superficial and penetrative forms of gaze (both
captured by his term le regard), see the “confrontation of a gaze and a face, or a glance and a silent body”
[d’un regard et d’un visage, d’un coup d’oeil et d’un corps muet] in The Birth of the Clinic (New York:
Random House, 1994), xv (for the original French, see Foucault, Naissance de la clinique (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1963), xi. Foucault’s assessment of the transition from taxonomist’s to anatomist’s
gaze finds support in Denis Diderot’s definition of the “enlightened” physician in the Encyclopédie (1765):
“He alone can direct a penetrating gaze [une vue pénétrante] into the most hidden recesses of the body.”
Anonymous, “Séméiotique,” Encyclopédie, ed. Denis Diderot (1765). http://encyclopédie.eu/index.php/
physique/2023365693-medecine-semeiotique/1116014775-SEMEIOTIQUE.
     33
interpreting the body’s “transparen[cy]” to its “greatest corporal opacity,” the

function of the gaze was reconfigured in Romantic-era medical practice.
Foucault writes: “In the eighteenth century, the fundamental act of medical
knowledge was the drawing up of a ‘map.’ ” But Romantic medicine aimed instead
to “read at a glance the visible lesions of the organism and the coherence of
pathological forms”—that is, to uncover how symptomatic evidence corresponded
to a deeper morphological condition.²² For Foucault, the emergence of clinical
medicine itself depended on this fundamental shift in the medical gaze. The
anatomist’s probing gaze was a new protocol of interpretation inspired by the
new biological science of morphology, and with the medical practice of dissection
in particular.²³ Since the protocol for Romantic-era symptomatic reading takes
anatomical dissection as its primary metaphorical register, I call it dissective
reading.
1.2 Revolutionary Bodies
Wordsworth recurrently connects exegesis to dissection: having introduced dis-

section as a potential tool for analysis in “The Tables Turned,” the poet further
explains his revulsion to dissection in his great poem of self-reflection, The
Prelude, which introduces similar surgical imagery at its climax. As in the earlier
Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth uses the motif of dissection to depict his crisis of
conscience—or, in explicitly medical terms, “the crisis of that strong disease”—
that occurred at the height of the French Revolution.²⁴ The 1805 Prelude’s Book X,
“Residence in France and the French Revolution,” offers an extended metaphor of
dissection, in which Wordsworth depicts the poet-speaker as an anatomist vivi-
secting the corrupt social body:
I took the knife in hand,

And, stopping not at parts less sensitive,
²² Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, xiii, 29, 3.

²³ In commenting on the multisensory significance of what he means by “gaze,” Foucault remarks
on the indebtedness of clinical medicine to anatomical dissection. “The medical gaze is now endowed
with a plurisensorial structure. . . . ‘As soon as one used the ear or the finger to recognize on the living
body what was revealed on the corpse by dissection, the description of diseases, and therefore
therapeutics took a quite new direction.’ ” Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 164.
“Morphology,” in turn, is a Romantic-era term first used in French in 1809 and in English in 1828 to
refer to “The branch of biology that deals with the form of living organisms and their parts, and the
relationships between their structures.” See OED Online, s.v. “morphology (n.),” accessed November 20,
2017, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/122369?redirectedFrom=morphology. For discussion of how the
“anatomist’s gaze” relates to eighteenth-century literature, see Geoffrey Sill, The Cure of the Passions and
the Origins of the English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 9–10.
²⁴ William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), in Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth, ed. Mark
Van Doren (New York: Modern Library, 2002), XI.306.
34  
Endeavoured with my best of skill to probe

The living body of society
Even to the heart. I pushed without remorse . . . ²⁵
In keeping with the poet’s anathema to dissection in “The Tables Turned,” this
incisive social probing is ultimately of great detriment to his emotional well-being.
The litotic phrasing of the excerpted passage, as he “stop[s] not” and pushes
“without remorse,” signals his natural distaste for this method of reading the social
body; soon after, Wordsworth’s speaker explicitly loses “All feeling of conviction”
and becomes “Sick” with the knowledge of his earlier complicity in the
Revolution.²⁶ Wordsworth’s medically informed language shows his social prob-
ing in a harsh and historically relevant light, evoking the brutality of the Terror
and confirming his active relationship to the social body he intends to analyze. Just
how concrete he intends this metaphor of physical incision to be is made clear by
comparison with the diction he uses to describe a juvenile episode in his much
later Autobiographical Memoranda: “with the intention of destroying myself,”
Wordsworth says, “I took the foil in hand, but my heart failed.”²⁷ The echoes
between this personal account of an immature moment of suicidal impulse,
and the most troubling public event recorded in his autobiographical poem,
confirm the purely destructive resonance of Wordsworth’s eyewitness perception
of the French Revolution. The exhortation not to “murder to dissect” in “The
Tables Turned,” which anticipates the metaphors of dissection on the living social
body in Wordsworth’s long poem, reveal the poet’s later response to the ruthless
and unfeeling intensity of his own analytical point of view during the Revolution,
as well as a more specific critique of the scientific movement that helped propagate
the practice of dissective reading.
Wordsworth’s troubled self-identification with dissection in The Prelude points
not only to immediate questions of poetic composition, reading, and analysis, but
also to a broader context of “revolutionary tumult,” “councils of intrigue, and
²⁵ William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), X. 877–81. The 1850 Prelude’s Book XI, “France
(concluded),” also offers an extended metaphor of dissection, as it depicts the poet-speaker as a medical
analyst examining the social body:
I summoned my best skill, and toiled, intent
To anatomise the frame of social life;
Yea, the whole body of society
Searched to its heart.
(XI. 279–82)
Wordsworth introduces the term “anatomise” in this version, making explicit his connection between
social critic and surgeon. But the sensory imagery of dissection is less vivid than in the 1805 version,
suggesting that the poet took hermeneutic dissection more literally immediately following the
Revolution.
²⁶ Wordsworth, Prelude (1805), X.903–5.
²⁷ William Wordsworth, “Autobiographical Memoranda (1851),” in William Wordsworth: Selected
Prose, ed. John O. Hayden (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 5.
Another random document with
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Berczi:
»Tiedättekö, että se aloittaa jumalattoman toimintansa

ylihuomenna,
András?»
András nyökäytti päätään.
»Ja luullakseni ylihuomenesta alkaen saamme kaikki ruveta

näkemään nälkää, sillä sittenhän ei ole enää mitään työtä
kunniallisten ihmisten tehtäväksi kuin piru sytyttää savuavan
nuotionsa, kylvää, leikkaa, sitoo ja jauhaa Jumalan viljaa Jumalan
maalla», lisäsi kylän oraakkeli.
»Ja juuri kun tuo pieni kissa keskeytti minut, olin sanomaisillani…»
sanoi seppä Sándor.
Mutta András laski tyynesti karkean ruskean kouransa jättiläisen

käsivarrelle ja keskeytti tyynesti iloisin äänin:
»Aioit kai sanoa, Sándor, näiden muiden äänettömin

suostumuksin, koska he tietävät sen olevan totta, ettei teihin kuulu,
mitä piru ja kartanon omistaja tekevät Bideskut’issa, sillä onhan
Keményn András vielä Kisfalu'ssa. Hänellä on vielä työtä kaikille sitä
haluaville ja hänellä on niin pitkä kukkaro, ettei kenenkään, joka
asuu peninkulmienkin päässä, tarvitse kärsiä muutakaan puutetta,
saati sitten nälkää.»
Seurasi jälleen pitkä vaitiolo ja kaikki näyttivät häpeävän yhä

enemmän. Mustalaiset soittivat liikuttavaa ja sydämeenkäypää
unkarilaista kansanlaulua, jonka sävel voi pehmittää kovimmankin
kuulijan sydämen.
»Olet kunnon mies, András», sanoi kylän oraakkeli seppä
Sándorin juodessa haarikallisen viiniä vapautuakseen kurkkuun
nousseesta vaivaavasta palasta, »mutta…»
»Siinä ei ole mitään muttaa, toverit. Meidän on tuettava toisiamme,

ja uskokaa puhettani, kun sanon, että tuo puhe pirusta on sulaa
hullutusta. En voi selittää tuota kaikkea teille, mutta isä Ambrosius
lupasi minulle tänä iltana, että hän huomenna saarnan asemasta
selittää teille tarkasti, miten maissi kartanon omistajan uudessa
myllyssä jauhetaan jauhoiksi. Silloin ymmärrätte sen luullakseni yhtä
hyvin kuin minäkin, ja kunnes se tapahtuu, pyydän teitä
unhottamaan tuon kirotun myllyn tahi ainakin sen ajattelemisen. Nyt
on jo myöhäinen ja minulla on pitkä ratsastusmatka kotiin, joten
teidän on luvattava minulle, ettette ajattele koko myllyä, ennenkuin
huomenna jumalanpalveluksen jälkeen. Pyydän tätä teidän itsenne
ja terveytenne vuoksi», lisäsi hän kohottaen haarikkansa. »No,
lupaatteko?»
»Lupaamme!»
Vastaus oli yksimielinen. Selvästi oli tuo nuori talonpoika hyvin

rakastettu, koska hänen sanansa olivat vaikuttaneet. Viinihaarikat
tyhjennettiin ja kaikki huokaisivat helpotuksesta ja tyytyväisyydestä.
Mustalaiset alkoivat soittaa iloisempaa kappaletta, ja András
huudahti hiljaa:
»Csillag, kaunokaiseni, missä olet?»
Kuivalta hiekkakentältä alkoi kuulua kavioiden kapsetta ja pian

ilmestyi pimeästä näkyviin miellyttävä musta tamma, solakka ja
suloliikkeinen. Se tuli aivan pöydän viereen, jonka ääressä talonpojat
ryypiskelivät, ja löydettyään isäntänsä seisahtui se tyynesti
odottamaan. Sillä ei ollut satulaa, ei jalustimia eikä suitsia, mutta
Unkarin pustien talonpojat eivät käytä sellaisia välineitä. Kun he
ratsastavat täyttä vauhtia noilla hiekkatasangoilla, näyttää siltä kuin
mies ja hevonen olisivat kasvaneet yhteen.
András hyppäsi heti kahareisin tammansa selkään ja huudettuaan

ystävilleen jäähyväiset, johon nämä vastasivat kaikuvalla
»Eläköön!», katosi hän pimeään.
III
SUKUYLPEYTTÄ.
Bideskutin päärakennuksessa, talleissa, tallipihalla, puu- ja

kasvitarhassa työskenneltiin kuumeisesti. Lukemattomat
tallipalvelijat, ajurit, kokit ja palvelijattaret juoksentelivat sinne tänne
kuin irti päässeet kanat, tehden kukin omia töitään kuumissaan,
huohottaen ja innoissaan. Eikä kreivitär itsekään, tottunut kun hän oli
unkarilaisen aateliston rajattomaan vieraanvaraisuuteen, voinut
kokonaan tukahduttaa tuon sähköttävän innostuksen vaikutusta, joka
oli saanut koko talon valtaansa. Hänen syntymäpäivänsä ja samalla
myös uuden höyrymyllyn käyntiinpanopäivän kunniaksi aiottujen
juhlallisuuksien valmistukset edistyivät nopeasti. Tänään vielä oli tuo
suuri talo aivan tyhjä vieraista, mutta huomenna alkaisi varmaankin
niiden tulo, jota sitten jatkuisi iltaan saakka.
Vaikka se kuokkavieraista tuntuikin aivan arvoitukselliselta, tiesivät

kumminkin muut maakunnan asukkaat, että elokuun
kahdeksaskolmatta päivä oli kreivitär Irman syntymäpäivä.
Bideskut’issa oli noin kuusikymmentä vierashuonetta, ja jokainen
unkarilainen aatelismies, asuipa hän sitten miten kaukana tahi
lähellä hyvänsä, oli kaikkine omaisineen hyvin tervetullut sinne noiksi
muutamiksi ilonpäiviksi, joiden kuluessa tilaisuutta aina vuosittain
juhlittiin. Jokainen sai olla varma lämpimästä vastaanotosta,
tuhlaavaisesta vieraanvaraisuudesta ja parhaimmista ja
valikoiduimmista viineistä, suoraan sanoen, kaikesta, joka kuuluu
Unkarin tasankojen asukkaiden perinnäistapoihin. Senvuoksi
olivatkin Bideskut’in Guyri ja hänen vaimonsa, kreivitär Irma, tähän
vuoden aikaan aina valmiit ottamaan vastaan vieraita. Härkiä,
lampaita, karitsoita, hanhia, ankkoja ja kaikenlaista muuta siipikarjaa
teurastettiin erotuksetta, valkoista leipää leivottiin, vanhimpia
viinitynnyreitä avattiin, hienoimmat puvut, lakanat ja käsiliinat
tuuletettiin, ja kaikki laitettiin valmiiksi noille otaksutuille sadoille
vieraille, heidän lapsilleen, ajureilleen, palvelijoilleen,
palvelijattarilleen ja kuriireilleen.
Eräässä Bideskut’in isiltä perityn päärakennuksen

vanhanaikaisessa ilmavassa huoneessa istuivat kartanon herra ja
hänen ylimyksellinen puolisonsa keskustelemassa lopullisista
järjestelyistä noiden kaikkien odotettujen ja odottamattomien
vieraiden huvittamiseksi. Huone oli kalustettu kylän puusepän
taitavasti kyhäämillä ja kaivertamilla hienoilla ja vanhoilla tammi- ja
mahonkituoleilla ja -pöydillä, ja pienissä lyijypuitteisissa ikkunoissa
oli paksut, valkaisemattomasta pellavakankaasta valmistetut
monenvärisillä koruompeluksilla kauniisti kirjaillut verhot
viilentämässä kuumaa keskipäivän auringonpaistetta.
Hilpeä ja hyväntahtoinen Bisdeskut’in Guyri veteli haikuja

lempipiipustaan kreivitär Irman laskiessa solakoilla sormillaan
huomiseksi odottamiaan vieraita.
»Egregyis'it tulevat varmasti», sanoi hän mietiskelevästi, »ja

samoin Kantássy't Vécsery't, Palotay't, Arany't, Miskolczy't ja
Barótcz'it. Et voi laskea vähemmän kuin neljä palvelijaa kutakin
perhettä kohti, ja kun lasketaan heidän lapsensa ja muutamia heidän
ystäviään, jotka he luultavasti tuovat mukanaan, on meillä jo
seitsemänkymmentä aivan varmaa vierasta. Sitten saapuu aina noin
neljä- tahi viisikymmentä sellaista, joita emme ole osanneet
odottaakaan. Muistat kai, että meitä istuutuessamme viime vuonna
pöytään oli sataseitsemänkymmentä?»
»Hyvä on, rakkaani», vastasi kreivi, »saat antaa sellaisia

määräyksiä kuin haluat ja teurastuttaa niin paljon karjaa kuin luulet
vieraiden syövän. Jumalalle kiitos, Bideskut’issa on vielä niin paljon
elintarpeita, että ne riittävät jokaisen ystävämme perheen ravinnoksi
niin kauaksi aikaa kuin he vain haluavat viipyä luonamme. Ellei ole
tarpeeksi tilaa valmistaa heille jokaiselle eri vuodetta, voimme
levittää olkia harjoitustallin lattialle. Nuoremmat miehet saavat
nukkua siellä ja luovuttaa paremmat huoneet naisille ja lapsille.
Teurastuta, rakkaani, mistään välittämättä, käske Pannan valmistaa
ruokaa sellaisesta siipikarjasta, kaalista ja porkkanoista kuin hän
vain haluaa, sillä ne eivät lopu, vaikka ne hieman vähenevätkin.»
Ja Bideskuty, ollen ylpeä ja varma hedelmällisistä maistaan, jotka

antoivat hänelle kaiken tähän tuhlaavaiseen kuuluisaan
unkarilaiseen vieraanvaraisuuteen tarvittavat aineet, nojautui
taaksepäin tuolissaan ja veteli tyytyväisesti haikuja pitkästä
kirsikkapuisesta piipustaan.
»Olisin mielelläni hankkinut Ilonkalle uuden silkkipuvun tähän

tilaisuuteen», sanoi kreivitär Irma toivovasti.
»Rakkaani», sanoi hänen miehensä nauraen hilpeästi, »Ilonka on

hurmaava tuossa musliinipuvussa, jonka ostin juutalaiselta parilla
floriinilla. Tiedät kai sitäpaitsi aivan hyvin, että rasvaiset setelit ja
muut rakastamamme keisari Frans Josefin kuvat ovat hyvin
harvinaiset tässä maamme kolkassa. Olen kumminkin kiitollinen
Jumalalle siitä. Emme milloinkaan halua mitään, jota emme voi
saada. Ellei», lisäsi hän tyytyväisesti nauraa hihittäen, »tuota
myllyäni koneineen olisi olemassa, en haluaisi nähdä rahaa
vuosikausiin».
»Ja kumminkin tuhlaat sitä tuohon kirottuun höyrymyllyyn ja

niittokoneihin, joita talonpojat pelkäävät ja vihaavat, mielestäni eivät
niinkään aiheetta. Jumalalla ei voi olla milloinkaan minkäänlaista
osaa tuollaisiin asioihin, jotka ovat pirun omia keksinnöitä, Guyri. En
voi tukahduttaa pelkoani, että tuolla kaikella on vielä pahat
seuraukset».
»No mutta, sinähän puhut samoin kuin nuo taikauskoiset

talonpojat! Te naiset ette ymmärrä, millaisen hyväntyön ja hyödyn
teen itselleni ja maalleni, kun saan höyrymyllyni vain käyntiin».
»Tuo ansio voi joko tulla vähitellen, tahi olla tulematta, sitä en
tiedä, sillä en ymmärrä ollenkaan noita asioita. Käsitän vain, ettet
ikuisesti voi syytää rahaa noihin pirullisiin laitoksiin.»
Bideskuty ei vastannut. Perinpohjainen kokemus oli opettanut

hänet huomaamaan, että hänen silloin oli parasta vaieta kokonaan,
kun kreivitär rupesi puhumaan hänen suunnattoman kalliista
lempiaatteestaan.
»Guyri», jatkoi kreivitär Irma, »ei ole vieläkään liian myöhäistä.

Luovu tuosta hullutuksesta äläkä turmele syntymäpäiväni iloa
panemalla myllyäsi tekemään tuota jumalatonta työtä».
»Rakkaani», vastasi kreivi, jonka itsepäisen vaikenemisen tämä
suora kysymys katkaisi, »sinuahan on tähän asti luultu
ymmärtäväiseksi naiseksi, ja niin ollen kai et voi kuvitellakaan, että
tuhlattuani melkein miljoonan markkaa tuon myllyn rakentamiseen,
en panisi sitä käyntiin saatuani sen valmiiksi?»
»Koska olet vain jatkanut sen rakentamista itsepäisyydestä, on

sinulla vielä aikaa keskeyttää se. Ei ole olemassa ainoatakaan
ihmistä, joka ei ole varoittanut sinua noista uusimuotisista laitteista.
Olet niiden vuoksi joutunut vain kaikkien vihattavaksi täällä omalla
tilallasikin».
Jälleen turvautui hänen miehensä järkkymättömään vaitioloon.

Hän veteli vain haaveillen savuja pitkävartisesta kirsikkapuisesta
piipustaan ja salli vaimonsa kaunopuheliaisuuden aaltojen vyöryä
taipumattoman päänsä yli.
»Guyri», jatkoi kreivitär, »olen huomannut, että luonasi on viime

aikoina käynyt paljon juutalaisia. Naimisiinmenomme jälkeisinä
aikoina ei sellaisia näkynyt huoneissamme. Tiedät minun vihaavan
noita koneellisia päähänpistojasi niin, ettet ole kertonutkaan minulle
mitään, mihin tarkoitukseen ne on rakennuttu, mutta ei ainoakaan
juutalainen tulisi tänne, ellei sinulla olisi jotakin ostettavaa ja
myytävää tahi ellei sinun tarvitsisi lainata rahoja heiltä suurta korkoa
vastaan. Häpäiset meidät kokonaan, jos alat myydä maitasi, viljaasi
ja viinejäsi kuin tavallinen juutalainen kauppias. Tiedän ja olet
sanonut sen itsekin, ettei meiltä mikään lopu, vaikka se joskus
väheneekin, mutta vilja ei kasva unkarilaisen aatelismiehen vainioilla
senvuoksi, että hän likastaisi sormensa rupeamalla myymään sitä».
»Kultaseni», huomautti Bideskut’in herra lempeästi, »kun perin

tämän tilan isäni kuoltua, oli täällä kolmekymmentätuhatta mitallista
vehnää mätänemässä pelloilla sen sijaan, että se olisi käytetty
johonkin hyödylliseen tarkoitukseen».
»Niin», vastasi kreivitär, »miksi se ei saisi mädätä, jos sitä on niin

paljon, ettei sitä voida kaikkia lahjoittaakaan pois? Kodissani mätäni
eräänä vuonna kolmetuhatta mitallista vehnää ja isäni olisi sallinut
mädätä viisikymmentäkintuhatta, ennenkuin hän olisi ruvennut sitä
myymään. Ottaa nyt rahaa sellaisesta kauheata!» lisäsi hän vanhoin
isiltä perityin ylpeyden tuntein.
Kreivi ei vastannut nytkään mitään. Ehkä hän ajatteli sitä tosiasiaa,

ettei hänen vaimollaan eikä tämän sisarilla olisi kattoa päänsä yllä,
jolleivät he olisi päässeet naimisiin, sillä ei ainoastaan vilja, vaan
myöskin pellot, karja, maatilat sekä isiltä peritty koti olivat jo aikoja
sitten joutuneet kokonaan juutalaisten haltuun. Heidän isänsä ei ollut
likastanut sormiaan myymällä viljaa ja tukkeja, vaan oli kiinnittänyt
talonsa, maansa ja kaiken omaisuutensa viimeistä tikkua myöten ja
jättänyt lapsilleen perinnöksi Luciferin ylpeyden, mutta ei muuta
äyrinkään edestä.
Huolimatta neljästäkymmenestä ikävuodestaan oli kreivitär Irma

vielä kaunis nainen. Hänen vartalonsa oli vielä mukiinmenevä,
hänen ihonsa terve ja hiukset olivat vielä niin mustat kuin korpin
siivet. Hän oli aikoinaan ollut kuuluisa kaunotar ja parina huvikautena
Budapestin tanssiaisten kuningatar. Äiti oli kasvattanut tyttärensä
sellaisin lujin mieleenpainuvin ohjein, että jokaisen unkarilaisen
ylimystytön on oltava kaunis ja mentävä edullisiin naimisiin, ja nuori
kreivitär Irma oli täytettyään kahdeksantoista valmis noihin
molempiin. Ensimmäisenä vuonna, kun hän otti osaa seuraelämään,
valitsi ja valikoi hän huolellisesti monien ihailijoillensa joukosta.
Kuuluisa nimi ja suuret tilukset olivat välttämättömät, ennenkuin
kukaan kosija uskalsi edes pyytääkään häntä parikseen kotiljonkiin.
»Paroonit ovat vasta ihmisiä», oli usein toistettu määräys, joka
todellisuudessa karkoittikin jokaisen kosijan, jolla ei ollut tuollaista
yhteiskunnallista arvoa. Mutta ensimmäinen vuosi kuluikin niin, ettei
kreivitär Irmalle ilmestynytkään sellaista kosijaa, joka olisi tyydyttänyt
sekä hänen että hänen äitinsä vaatimukset, ja seuraavana vuonna
kuiskailtiin Budapestin aateliskerhossa, ettei Irman huvikauden
kuluessa kertaakaan oltu kuultu vetoavan tuohon vanhaan sääntöön
ihmisyydestä.
Seuraava huvikausi tuli ja meni, ja kreivitär Irma totesi suureksi

kauhukseen, että hänen parissa tanssiaisissa oli syytettävä
päänkipua ennen kotiljonkia, koska ei kukaan ollut pyytänyt häntä
toverikseen. Asiat alkoivat jo näyttää hyvin surullisilta, kun äkkiä
Bideskuty’n Guyri ilmestyi näyttämölle. Hän oli nuori, hyvännäköinen
ja omisti puolet Heven maakunnasta, ja sitäpaitsi näytti hän olevan
hurjasti rakastunut tuohon hieman jo vanhentuneeseen
kaunottareen. Hän ei ollut kyllä mikään parooni, ja olisikin luultavasti
pari vuotta aikaisemmin alennettu samalle tasolle, kuin kreivittären
sylikoira ja lempilintu olivat, mutta senjälkeen oli paljon vettä
virrannut Tonavasta ja maailma alkoi tulla jo paljon
radikaalisemmaksi. Bideskuty kosi ja sai vastahakoisen myöntävän
vastauksen. Kreivitär Irman kuultiin sitten huomauttavan suurissa
tanssiaisissa, että kaikki unkarilaiset aateliset, jotka omistavat puolet
jostakin maakunnasta, ovat ihmisiä.
He olivat sitten eläneet melko sovinnollisesti keskenään, sillä

Guyri mukautui aina vaimonsa tahtoon kaikissa asioissa. Onneksi oli
rouvan maku samanlainen kuin hänen miehensäkin kaikissa, paitsi
eräässä seikassa. Kuten Bideskutykin, rakasti hänkin unkarilaisen
aatelisen melkein kuninkaallista elämää maatilallaan, ja kun hän
kerran oli mennyt naimisiin, ei hän enää ikävöinyt Budapestiin, jossa
tarvittiin rahaa, jota heillä oli hyvin vähän, ja jossa hänen olisi ollut
pakko syödä toisten ihmisten härkien ja vasikoiden lihaa ja vieraissa
kasvitarhoissa kasvaneita vihanneksia. Kuten Guyrikin, ei hänkään
välittänyt ollenkaan maansa politiikasta, vaan rakasti sitä senvuoksi,
että se oli hänen oma maansa ja sentähden parempi kuin muiden
kenenkään, koska siellä kasvoi parempaa viljaa ja viiniä, koska siellä
kasvatettiin lihavampia nautoja kuin missään muualla maailmassa;
mutta ministerien vaihdoksista tuolla Budapestissä, parlamentista,
vaaleista, yhtymisestä Itävaltaan tahi täydellisestä itsehallinnosta, ei
hän eikä hänen miehensä välittäneet ollenkaan. Hän toivoi vain, että
hänen tyttärensä, Ilonka, menisi vuorostaan edullisiin naimisiin, ja
rukoili, ettei hänen miehensä joutuisi juutalaisten kynittäväksi
onnettomien maanviljelystä edistävien suunnitelmiensa vuoksi.
Hänestä oli sama, oliko Unkari venäläisten, hottentottien tahi
saksalaisten hallussa, kunhan vain hänen toiveensa toteutuisivat.
Hänen elämänsä olisi sujunut hyvin rauhallisesti ja hän olisi ollut
hyvin tyytyväinen tämän parhaan maailman parhaimpiin antimiin,
ellei rypistynyt ruusunlehti olisi huolestuttanut häntä hänen miehensä
onnettoman kiintymyksen muodossa koneihin, jollainen tuoksahti jo
poroporvarillisuudelta eikä ollenkaan sopinut unkarilaiselle
aatelismiehelle, jonka velvollisuus oli elää kreivien tapaan, syödä ja
juoda, huvittaa ystäviään ja jättää kaikki muu ihmisille, joilla ei ollut
esi-isiä eikä senvuoksi täydellistä ihmisyyttäkään.
IV
RAHANLAINAAJA.
»Rosenstein, tuo juutalainen, on odotushuoneessa, herra kreivi»,

ilmoitti Bideskuty’n palvelija, Jánko, kunnioittavasti avattuaan oven.
»Hän sanoo teidän pyytäneen häntä tulemaan tänä aamuna».
Kreivitär Irma ei huomauttanut mitään, sillä hän ei milloinkaan

vastustanut tahi väitellyt miehensä kanssa palvelijain kuullen, vaikka
nämä olisivat olleet kuinka luotettavia tahansa, vaan aina osoitti
esimerkiksi kelpaavaa kunnioitusta ja nöyryyttä talon isännälle.
Mitään ei voitu nyt voittaa moittimalla Rosensteiniä, jonka
laahustavat askeleet jo kuuluivat käytävästä.
»Niin, rakkaani», sanoi Bideskuty hieman levottomasti, »ehkä

sinun pitää mennä vielä puhuttelemaan Pannaa sillä aikaa kuin minä
keskustelen Rosensteinin kanssa. Muista nyt, että olen antanut
sinulle luvan teurastuttaa niin paljon karjaa kuin haluat, ja muutenkin
menetellä parhaan ymmärryksesi mukaan. Pidä nyt huolta, että
ruoka riittää ja toimi niin, ettei Bideskuty’n vieraanvaraisuutta moitita.
Käske juutalaisen tulla tänne», lisäsi hän kääntyen palvelijansa
puoleen. »Katso, että hän pyyhkii likaiset kenkänsä ennen lämpiöön
tuloaan.»
Juutalainen tuli pian nöyrästi huoneeseen kumartaen niin, että hän

oli melkein kaksin kerroin. Kun kreivitär purjehti majesteetillisesti
hänen ohitseen, kumartui hän vieläkin syvempään yrittäen suudella
kreivittären vaipan lievettä, mutta kreivitär kiersi viitan tiukemmasti
ympärilleen, ja suomatta juutalaiselle silmäystäkään poistui hän
huoneesta.
Rosensteinin ikää ei voitu arvata, ei likimainkaan. Hänen

tummahko porkkananvärinen harva tukkansa riippui vaalenneen
kalotin alta kahtena suortuvana kasvojen kummallekin puolelle.
Hänen pitkä nuttunsa, joka oli napitettu kaulasta jalkoihin asti, riippui
irrallaan hänen laihan ruumiinsa ympärillä ja oli kulunut melkein
nukkavieruksi terävien olkapäiden kohdalta. Hän hieroi laihoja
käsiään alituisesti ja hänen vesisiniset silmänsä katsoivat lattiaan
koko sen ajan kuin jalo kreivi suvaitsi keskustella hänen kanssaan.
Ainoastaan silloin tällöin, kun hän luuli voivansa tehdä sen
huomaamatta, katsoi hän tuimasti ja pahansuovasti unkarilaiseen
ohuitten huulien melkein kadotessa terävien hampaitten väliin. Silloin
oli noissa värittömissä silmissä sellainen ilme, että jokainen viisas
mies olisi sen huomattuaan heti muuttunut varovaisemmaksi.
»Oletko tuonut minulle nuo rahat?» kysyi Bideskuty ratkaisevasti.
»Niin, katsokaahan, herra kreivi, asia on näin. Teidän

korkeutennehan tietää minut niin köyhäksi, ettei minulla itselläni ole
noin suurta rahamäärää, ja…»
»Tiedän tuon tavallisen valeen», keskeytti Bideskuty nauraen.

»Älä viitsi puhua minulle tuosta palvelevaisesta ystävästä, joka
suostuu auttamaan kohtuuttomasta korvauksesta, jonka vakuudeksi
sinun on luvattava hänelle tilani paras maakappale. Sano minulle
pian, haluatko ottaa Zárdan noiden
kahdensadanviidenkymmenentuhannen floriinin pantiksi ja millaisen
koron haluat tuosta summasta».
»Zárda on hyvin mitätön pantti, jalo kreivi, neljännesmiljoonasta.

Siellä ei ole rakennuksia eikä .»
»Hyi hitto, vieköön piru nuo juutalaiset!» jyrisi Bideskuty. »Vaikka

he ovat eläneet turvemajoissa koko ikänsä ja heidän esi-isänsä ovat
olleet viemäriojien matoja, haluavat he nyt oikeita rakennuksia
asuakseen. Zárda ei tule milloinkaan joutumaan teidän likaisiin
käsiinne, älä sellaista toivokaan. Lunastan sen, kuten kaikki muutkin
maani heti, kun myllyni pannaan käyntiin ja jauhojani ruvetaan
kehumaan koko maassa».
»Teidän korkeutenne puhuu viisaasti», sanoi viekas juutalainen

katsahtaen salaa ja ivallisesti Bideskuty'yn. »Tuo höyrymylly on
suurenmoinen liikeyritys, sillä se vähentää työtä ja senvuoksi
parantaa teidän talonpoikienne asemaa. Senvuoksi eivät
ystävänikään kiellä minulta noita rahoja, jotka luovutan hyvin
mielelläni teidän korkeudellenne tuohon jaloon tarkoitukseen,
kunhan vain saan tuon mitättömän Zárdan pantiksi».
»Etkö sinä, hitto vieköön, voi olla puhumatta tuolla tavoin

Zárdasta, sillä se on tarpeeksi arvokas pantti kirotuista rahoistasi.
Luullakseni et tule likaisine jalkoinesi sille milloinkaan
astumaankaan. Ilmoita nyt vain korko».
Bideskuty'n puhuessa näin herjaavasti puri Rosenstein kovasti

huuliaan. Hän, samoin kuin hänen kärsivällinen, itsepintainen ja
paksunahkainen rotunsakin, oli niin tottunut tällaiseen kieleen
lainatessaan yhä useammin rahoja näille ylpeille ja komeasti eläville
unkarilaisille aatelisille, että sellainen ikäänkuin kuului heidän
mielestään sopimukseen. He lisäsivät vain korkoa sen mukaan.
»Ah, herra kreivi», vastasi hän vaatimattomasti, »minun oli pakko

hyväksyä ystävieni vaatimukset korkoon nähden. Olen köyhä mies,
ja sitten kuin olen maksanut heille, jää minulle vain hieman
elääkseni. Onneksi elän hyvin vaatimattomasti, joten sata mitallista
vehnää tuosta viidestäkymmenestätuhannesta, jonka he vaativat
vuosittain, riittää minulle aivan hyvin».
»Viisikymmentätuhatta mitallistako vehnää? Sinä roisto, sinä…!»
»Enhän minä ole sitä määrännyt, jalo kreivi, vaan ystäväni. He

ilmoittivat minulle, että vehnän hinta tulee tänä vuonna
laskeutumaan enemmän kuin milloinkaan ennen, minkä vuoksi
niiden lisäksi vaaditut sata nautaa…»
»Sata nautaako vielä? Sinä kapinen koira, sinä häpeämätön

kiskuri!»
»Joista saan vain itselleni härän ja vasikan, herra kreivi. Köyhän

on todellakin vaikea tulla toimeen. Ystäväni eivät anna minulle
rahoja, elleivät he saa yhdeksääkymmentäkahdeksaa nautaa, tuota
vehnää, puhumattakaan viidestäsadasta lampaasta ja
kahdeksastasadasta päästä siipikarjaa, joista he eivät luovuta
minulle muuta kuin viisikolmatta tämän vaikean liikeasian
järjestämisen palkkioksi.»
»Sinä kirottu roisto, ellet tuki suutasi, kutsun Jánkon tänne ja

pieksätän sinut niin, ettet vielä ikinä ole saanut sellaista
selkäsaunaa. Kymmenentuhatta mitallista vehnää, neljäkymmentä
härkää, parikymmentä vasikkaa, kolmesataa lammasta ja viisisataa
lintua annan sinulle, mutta en jyvää enkä lampaan häntääkään
lisäksi».
Juutalaisen silmät välkkyivät ohuitten punaisten luomien takana,

mutta hän katsoi kumminkin kiinteästi maahan, kun hän pudisti
arvellen päätään ja sanoi:
»Olen keskustellut ystävieni kanssa perinpohjin tästä asiasta ja

ilmoittanut nyt teidän korkeudellenne lopullisen koron, jota he eivät
suostu alentamaan».
»Ja minäkin sanon sinulle, etten suostu sellaiseen kiskomiseen.

Jos uskallat vielä seisoa siinä ja vaatia sellaista, käsken palvelijani
antamaan sinulle selkään».
»Silloin olen hyvin pahoillani, herra kreivi», sanoi Rosenstein

nöyrästi, »ettei tästä asiasta tänään tullutkaan mitään.
»Mutta sinä kirottu, saastainen juutalainen, onko piru mennyt

paksuun kalloosi? Minun on saatava nuo rahat heti! Pian on minun
maksettava palkka Budapestista tänne tulleille insinööreille ja
työmiehille, ja sitten tarvitsen osan noista rahoista koneihinkin.
Vieköön piru koko roskan!»
»Jos teidän korkeutenne haluaa, keskustelen ystävieni kanssa

jälleen, vaikka olen melkein varma, etteivät he suostu alentamaan
korkoa».
»Jumalan nimessä, älä enää valehtele, koska kumminkin tiedät,

etten usko puheitasi! Annan sinulle kymmenentuhatta mitallista
vehnää .»
»Viisikymmentätuhatta, herra kreivi…»
»Kaksikymmentä, sanon minä! Kuusikymmentä nautaa!…»
»Sata, herra kreivi…!
»Kahdeksankymmentä, ja tartuttakoon piru ruton niihin heti, kun

likaiset kätesi koskevat niihin! Neljäsataa lammasta…»
»Viisisataa…»
»Sanoin kaksikymmentätuhatta mitallista vehnää,

kahdeksankymmentä nautaa, neljäsataa lammasta ja viisisataa
lintua. Jos suostun antamaan enemmän, vietäköön minut helvettiin
sinun ja sinunlaistesi seuraan!»
»Ja, jalo kreivi, minut on valtuutettu ilmoittamaan teille, että elleivät

ystäväni saa viittäkymmentätuhatta mitallista vehnää, sataa nautaa,
viittäsataa lammasta ja kahdeksaasataa lintua, eivät he luovuta
rahoja».
Tämä oli varmasti katkeraa. Bideskuty tarvitsi välttämättömästi

rahaa ja tuo kirottu juutalainen oli niin itsepäinen, että aatelismiehen
oli luultavasti suostuttava koronkiskojan vaatimuksiin. Tämä oli hyvin
vastenmielistä ja varmasti kuulumatonta julkeutta menneiden
sukupolvien aikana, jolloin nuo kurjimukset olivat sanomattoman
onnellisia saadessaan lainata rahoja sellaista tarvitseville jaloille
parooneille.
»Kuulehan nyt, sinä kirottu roisto», sanoi Bideskuty vihdoin, »olen

ilmoittanut sinulle viimeisen kantani korkoon nähden. Ota tarjoomani
korvaus ja mene rauhassa tiehesi. Mutta ellet luovu noista
häpeämättömistä vaatimuksistasi, suostun niihin, koska tarvitsen
rahaa, mutta luovutan sinut sitten palvelijoilleni, jotka saavat antaa
sinulle terveellisen kurituksen, ennenkuin poistut talostani. Valitse
nyt, haluatko parikymmentätuhatta mitallista vehnää,
kahdeksankymmentä nautaa, neljäsataa lammasta ja viisisataa
lintua, vai etkö?»
»Haluan viisikymmentätuhatta mitallista vehnää, teidän

korkeutenne», toisti juutalainen tyynesti, »sata nautaa, viisisataa
lammasta ja kahdeksansataa lintua…»
»Ja selkäsaunanko?»
Juutalainen vaikeni hetkeksi katsahtaen ylimykseen. Suorana ja

voimakkaana, ylpein silmin ja jaloin ryhdin seisoi Bideskuty hänen
edessään kuin sen rodun ruumiillistunut edustaja, joka vuosisatoja
oli sortanut, kiduttanut ja vainonnut juutalaisia, kieltänyt heiltä kaikki
inhimilliset oikeudet ja kohdellut heitä pahemmin kuin kulkukoiria ja
mustalaisia. Aikoiko ruuvi kiertyä nyt toisinpäin yhdeksännentoista
vuosisadan viime puoliskolla? Aikoivatko nuo sorretut, jotka olivat
aseistautuneet vaivalloisesti hankkimallaan kullalla, nousta noita
tuhlaavia ja harkitsemattomia sortajiaan vastaan rahansa voimalla
päästäkseen pian tämän suloisen Arkadian, Unkarin tasankojen,
hallitsijaksi?
Tietämättään hieroi juutalainen nukkavierua nuttuaan, joka ilmaisi

selvästi, ettei tuollainen kohtelu vihastuneiden aatelismiesten ja
heidän lakeijainsa puolelta ollut hänelle ollenkaan outoa. Hän vastasi
senvuoksi tyynesti:
»Niin, selkäsaunan myös, jaloin kreivi».

Bideskuty nauroi sydämestään. Hänen vihansa oli haihtunut
kokonaan. Kun hän kerran saisi katsella, miten juutalaiselle
annettaisiin kelpo selkäsauna, ei hän mielestään maksanut
ollenkaan liikaa tuollaisesta huvista. Rosenstein aukaisi pitkän
nuttunsa, ja otettuaan povitaskustaan pari suurta paperiarkkia levitti
hän ne pöydälle.
»Mitä pirullisuuksia nuo ovat?» kysyi Bideskuty.
»Teidän korkeutenne on hyvä ja katsoo. Nämä ovat jonkunlaisia

velkakirjoja ja sitoumuksia, että korko maksetaan täsmällisesti».
Bideskuty punastui raivosta.
»Sinä kirottu koira, eikö unkarilaisen aatelismiehen sana sitten

riitä? Mitä voi rasvainen paperisi pakottaa minua tekemään, ellei
kunniasanasi sido minua?»
»Katsokaa, kreivi», sanoi juutalainen niin nöyrästi, että Bideskuty’n

viha haihtui, »en halua sellaista omasta puolestani, mutta ystäväni
vaativat minulta jonkunlaista takuuta. He eivät ole ennen olleet
liikeasioissa niin kunnioitettavien kreivien kanssa kuin te olette».
Juutalainen sanoi tämän hieman ivallisesti hänen sinisten

silmiensä kiintyessä samalla pahansuovasti Bideskuty'yn, joka ei
kumminkaan huomannut äänensävyä eikä katsettakaan.
»Rangaistakseni sinua tästä kirotusta itsepäisyydestäsi, on sinun

syötävä palanen sianlihaa», sanoi hän tarttuessaan vihaisesti
papereihin.
Hän ei viitsinyt edes lukea papereita läpi, sillä sellainen teko, joka
olisi edellyttänyt jonkunlaista liikeasioiden tuntemista, ei olisi
ollenkaan sopinut niin jalolle Bideskuty’n suvun jälkeläiselle, suvun,
joka oli auttanut kuningas Mátyáksen valtaistuimelle.
Vastustelematta enää ollenkaan kirjoitti hän nimensä molempien
paperien alasyrjään suurin kirjaimin kuin koulupoika. Hän oli
huomannut Rosensteinin taskussa pullollaan olevan rasvaisen
lompakon.
»Työnnä nyt rahat tänne», sanoi hän heittäen kynän menemään.

»Sitten lähden katsomaan, miten palvelijani antavat sinulle niin
selkään, ettet sellaista saunaa ole vielä ikinä saanutkaan».
Juutalainen luki molemmat sitoumukset huolellisesti alusta

loppuun, ripisteli hiekkaa tuolle kunnioitettavalle nimikirjoitukselle,
käänsi paperit sitten harkitusti kokoon ja pisti taskuunsa. Bideskuty
alkoi hermostua ja veteli tuimasti sauhuja kirsikkapuisesta piipustaan
silmien kiintyessä ikävöivästi seinää koristaviin keppeihin ja
ratsupiiskoihin. Mutta selvästi oli hän sitä mieltä, etteivät ne menetä
mitään tehoisuudestaan, vaikka tässä hieman täytyi odottaakin,
koska hän ei puhunut sanaakaan, vaan katseli, miten Rosenstein
laski lompakostaan kaksisataaviisikymmentä tuhannen floriinin
seteliä likaisilla sormillaan hänen ylimykselliseen kätensä.
»Olen valmis milloin tahansa», lisäsi juutalainen, »kun teidän

korkeutenne haluaa käyttää taitoani hyväkseen, neuvottelemaan
puolestanne ystävieni kanssa, jotka varmasti suositukseni
perusteella tahtovat aina palvella teidän korkeuttanne».
Mutta kreivi Bideskuty ei kuunnellut enää. Tukittuaan setelit

taskuunsa avasi hän oven ja huusi hilpeästi Jánkolle:
»Vie tämä kirottu juutalainen keittiöön ja ota selville, haluaako hän

mieluummin syödä palan sianlihaa, vai ottaako hän kunnollisesti

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Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and

Medical Reading Arden Hegele

Lovingly dedicated to my parents

have likewise offered sustained support. My mother Heather, my father Richard,

Introduction. Reading Texts, Reading Bodies: Protocols of

If, as Wordsworth complained, science had become Romantic literature’s greatest

words “bipolar,” “neuropathology,” and “psychosomatic” into the English lan-

Wordsworth and Coleridge published the Lyrical Ballads, “British Psychologists”

works, “circulat[ing] without their contexts,” encouraged periodical readers to

³⁵ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On organic form,” 51–3.

While the theoretical implications of the morphological similarities between

Critics! appall’d I venture on the name,

I.2 Reading Diagnostically

Medicine played an essential part in constituting Romantic attitudes to critical

No argument about the translatability of Romantic medicine to other ﬁelds

Having established its pragmatic signiﬁcance to medical diagnosis, Foucault

⁵¹ Ruston, Creating Romanticism, 2.

studies reﬂects Ralph O’Connor’s claim that nineteenth-century scientiﬁc and

diagnosing symptoms located in the body or in text. Referring to a “system of

investigating, determining, and articulating a condition, whether of the body or of

temporal moment). Certainly, the historical proliferation of new specialties within

I.3 Symptomatic Reading

Romantic Autopsy reveals how in the period of British Romanticism, literature

‘ultimately determining’ reality in the base”—in other words, that a “symptom” in

a literal fashion—as external signs of distress that pointed to an underlying

⁸⁰ Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 4.

symptomatic reading back to the Romantic period, readers gain a new

I.4 Four Protocols

In developing a theory of protocols of diagnosis as a guiding principle of cross-

literature. Each of these protocols is tied, in turn, to an area of medicine

symptomatic reading. The coda argues that the much-maligned practice of

1.1 Surgical Reading

The Lyrical Ballads of 1798 contain some of William Wordsworth’s most

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

This stanza encapsulates themes central to Wordsworth’s oeuvre, especially the

to “Our” and “We”—helps to signal Wordsworth’s apparent distaste for

     29

to a concrete context for Wordsworth’s vehement reaction—the rise of dissection

⁸ Wordsworth, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads (1802), in Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed.

a transformation in medical practice. Yet this arc intimates a recurrent analogy

¹⁰ See Lock et al., 53.

     31

In recent years, Romantic medicine has emerged as a fertile area of critical

then, I offer one illustration of how dissection operated as a hermeneutic protocol

     33

interpreting the body’s “transparen[cy]” to its “greatest corporal opacity,” the

1.2 Revolutionary Bodies

Wordsworth recurrently connects exegesis to dissection: having introduced dis-

I took the knife in hand,

²² Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, xiii, 29, 3.

Endeavoured with my best of skill to probe

»Tiedättekö, että se aloittaa jumalattoman toimintansa

András nyökäytti päätään.

»Ja luullakseni ylihuomenesta alkaen saamme kaikki ruveta

Mutta András laski tyynesti karkean ruskean kouransa jättiläisen

»Aioit kai sanoa, Sándor, näiden muiden äänettömin

Seurasi jälleen pitkä vaitiolo ja kaikki näyttivät häpeävän yhä

»Siinä ei ole mitään muttaa, toverit. Meidän on tuettava toisiamme,

Vastaus oli yksimielinen. Selvästi oli tuo nuori talonpoika hyvin

»Csillag, kaunokaiseni, missä olet?»

Kuivalta hiekkakentältä alkoi kuulua kavioiden kapsetta ja pian

András hyppäsi heti kahareisin tammansa selkään ja huudettuaan

Bideskutin päärakennuksessa, talleissa, tallipihalla, puu- ja