Boswell's Clap and Other Essays: Medical Analyses of Literary Men's Afflictions

592 Pages·1987·2.36 MB·English

by  William B. Ober

Boswell's Clap and Other Essays : Medical
title:
Analyses of Literary Men's Afflictions
author: Ober, William B.
publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
isbn10 | asin: 0809314339
print isbn13: 9780809314331
ebook isbn13: 9780585178882
language: English
Literature and medicine, Medicine--Case
subject studies, Authors--Diseases and hygiene--
Case studies, Authors--Biography.
publication date: 1988
lcc: R703.O23 1988eb
ddc: 610.9
Literature and medicine, Medicine--Case
subject: studies, Authors--Diseases and hygiene--
Case studies, Authors--Biography.
Page iii
Boswell's Clap and Other Essays
Medical Analyses of Literary Men's Afflictions
By William B. Ober, M.D.
Southern Illinois University Press
Carbondale and Edwardsville
Page iv
Copyright © 1979 by Southern Illinois University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by David Ford
First paperback edition published January 1988
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Ober, William B
Boswell's clap and other essays.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. MedicineCases, clinical reports, statistics.
2. AuthorsDiseases and hygieneCases, clinical
reports, statistics. 3. AuthorsBiographyAddresses,
essays, lectures. 4. Literature and medicineAd-
dresses, essays, lectures. I. Title.
R703.023 809 78-16018
ISBN 0-8093-1433-9 (pbk.)
91 90 89 88 4 3 2 1
Page v
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
1 1
Boswell's Clap
2 43
Swinburne's Masochism: Neuropathology and
Psychopathology
3 89
Lady Chatterley's What?
4 118
Drowsed with the Fume of Poppies: Opium and John
Keats
5 137
Madness and Poetry: A Note on Collins, Cowper, and
Smart
6 193
Chekhov among the Doctors: The Doctor's Dilemma
7 206
William Carlos Williams, M.D.: Physician as Poet
8 233
The Earl of Rochester and Ejaculatio Praecox
9 253
Thomas Shadwell: His Exitus Revis'd
10 262
Did Socrates Die of Hemlock Poisoning?
Notes 273
Page vii
List of Illustrations
First page of Swinburne's The Flogging-Block 45
The Willow Tree, by D. H. Lawrence 91
Manuscript of Keats's Ode to a Nightingale 139
Caius Cibber's figure of Melancholy Madness 139
Anton Chekhov in his garden at Yalta 195
William Carlos Williams' home 209
The Great Falls of the Passaic River 209
Dials and chronometer for the King's Privy Garden 235
William Oldys's copy of Langbaine's English Dramatick 255
Poets
Jacques Louis David's The Death of Socrates 265
Page ix
Preface
These collected essays, written over the past decade, show a number
of ways whereby medical information and insights can illuminate and
perhaps resolve certain literary problems. This does not imply that
every reader should read with a medical eye nor need any given writer
be viewed as a "case." That would be presumptuous and would defeat
the aims of literature.
Many literary critics claim that the text itself is sufficient and
extraneous biographical considerations irrelevant: I am not of this
company. I am unable, perhaps unwilling, to dissociate a statement or
a literary work from its context. I like to know who wrote it, when he
wrote it, why he wrote it, and what audience he addresses; beyond
that, something of the circumstances, immediate and remote, that gave
rise to the work. Such knowledge may not be essential to enjoyment
or understanding, but I find it helpful. People who find such
knowledge useless or gratuitous ought not read this book. I fear that
members of the antibiographical school would happily dismiss
Johnson's Lives of the Poets because they place small value on "the
common sense of readers uncorrupted by literary prejudices."
On first blush it seems a reasonable position to claim that literature
ought not be examined in the light of nonliterary events. But does
literature exist as an entity entire unto itself, independent of other
parts of life, untouched by any other reality? Textual and structural
critics of recent decades claim this is so, that literature lives within the
frame of language alone. True enough, but only up to a point, and nice
molecular analysis does not help. We do not test the consecrated wine
for hemoglobin content, nor would Carême's recipe for a madeleine

Page x
give us insight into the workings of Proust's imagination. But
literature is often a transformation of experience, and it can be
illuminating to find out just what the experience was and how the
writer used it.
No apologia has much value unless it defends against anticipated
critical attacks. One cannot ward off every blow, but a few parries are
obvious. Some will say that applying medical reasoning to literature is
"reductive," a now fashionable word for what in my youth we called
oversimplification. A medical point of view is reductive if and only if
one claims that is the only way to read and stops. It is merely one way
of looking at a blackbird, one form of evidence, one element to be
taken into account in a final synthesis. A reader may adopt a medical
stance to find out what added information it can bring to an
established literary and critical corpus.
Another objection might be the bland assertion that I have
"psychoanalyzed" my subjects, carrying with it a pejorative tone to
the very idea of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a clinical discipline
to which a subject or patient comes voluntarily for a therapeutic
purpose. My subjects did not come to me; I chose them and make no
pretense to cure them. What's more, they are all safely dead. The
cardinal technique of psychoanalysis is for the analyst to listen to the
patient's free associations, and there is a continuing dialogue between
doctor and patient. When associations are made in these essays, they
were made by me and not my subjects, and there is no dialogue. But it
is true that when I have found concepts developed by psychoanalysis
and other schools useful and appropriate, I have tried to apply them.
Does anyone in the eighth decade of the twentieth century deny the
existence of unconscious mental processes, that dreams and fantasies
reveal something about these processes, or that a writer's psyche is
present in his work and examination of such work can help ideas
reveal the man? Surely, by this date psychoanalytic ideas are part of