Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel: Social Affection and Eighteenth-Century Medicine

266 Pages·2016·2.04 MB·English

by  Maureen Tuthill (auth.)

PALGRAVE
STUDIES IN
LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND
MEDICINE
Health and Sickness in
the Early American Novel
Social Affection and Eighteenth-
Century Medicine
MAUREEN TUTHILL
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science
and Medicine
Series Editors
Sharon   Ruston
Lancaster University
Lancaster ,   United Kingdom
Alice   Jenkins
University of Glasgow
Glasgow ,   United Kingdom
Catherine   Belling
Northwestern University
Chicago ,   Illinois , USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new
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UK; Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College,
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and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA; Martin Willis, Professor
of English, University of Westminster, UK.
More information about this series at
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Maureen   Tuthill
Health and Sickness
in the Early American
Novel
Social Affection and Eighteenth-Century Medicine
Maureen   Tuthill
English Department
Westminster College
Fulton, Missouri, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-1-137-59714-4 ISBN 978-1-137-59715-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59715-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951858
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For Mike
With much love to the all-time greatest “Metsie, Metsie, Metsie”

P
REFACE
It is relevant to the spirit of this book that the idea of it was conceived
several years before the advent of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 and
written during the implementation of that historic legislation. While I was
studying health attitudes in early America, I was absorbing the complicated
debates about the federal government’s responsibility to provide health
care for all citizens. I see the roots of that debate in early American ideas
about healing. I have not mapped my discussion directly to these twenty-
fi rst-c entury issues, but I have always had them in mind while fi guring out
what motivates an individual or a community to reach out to those in need
of health care. I am curious about how those decisions are made, when
healing occurs, and who is deemed worthy of receiving medical attention
from the social network. I have been especially intrigued by the concept of
health itself—different cultures have different beliefs about what makes a
person healthy or sick. In the Western medical tradition, there is a power-
ful assumption that the individual determines his or her own health. Even
genetic understandings of disease often come down to the idea that the
same gene can be expressed uniquely in different people and that the way
we live our lives will determine which of our genes become active.
Like early Americans, we have our own ways of explaining health and
illness. We have rules about who receives medical support from the com-
munity. We correlate social intelligence and personal integrity with condi-
tions of health. We expect people to keep themselves healthy so that they
do not become a burden on others. We view health as a gateway to other
opportunities. We panic and disparage groups of people when we cannot
contain disease. We turn away from the truth that our medical system fails
vii
viii PREFACE
the poor and the oppressed within our communities. As a nation, we are
largely convinced that health is a private matter, a personal responsibility,
an individual right rather than a human right. Medical sociologist Paul
Farmer has called on physicians today to “resocialize their understanding
of who becomes sick and why, and of who has access to health care and
why.” 1 The diffi culty we have had in doing so has perplexed the medical
professionals, government offi cials, and human rights advocates who have
struggled contentiously over the implementation of universal health care
in the USA. Resocializing our understanding of the way we provide medi-
cal care may require that we fi rst locate the origins of the social and politi-
cal attitudes we are seeking to address. Early American novelists, as they
fi ctionalize characters falling ill, recovering from sickness, or practicing
medicine on one another, offer important information about how those
attitudes took shape in the preliminary days of nationhood. These writers
assumed that a natural association existed between the social and physical
being of the individual, and in doing so, they provided a fi rst, early draft
of the health policies we live with today.
Fulton, MO, USA M aureen   Tuthill
NOTE
1. Paul Farmer, P athologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New
War on the Poor (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2005), 138.
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Tucked away in the middle of Missouri for the writing of most of this book,
I have come to appreciate the many ways that people have supported me.
Sherry Harris, my dissertation advisor at the University of Connecticut,
has offered meaningful guidance from prospectus to book proposal, and
continues to invigorate my studies in the medical humanities. I am thank-
ful to have worked with someone whose own contributions to the fi eld
of early American letters have been so innovative. Through Sherry, I met
Theresa Strouth Gaul, who edited the original version of Chapter 2 when
it appeared in slightly different form in L egacy: A Journal of American
Women Writers. Her involvement at the early stages of the process helped
give shape to the book.
I am grateful for the Society of Early Americanists and the Omohundro
Institute of Early American History and Culture, lively organizations that
have provided me with access to resources and crucial opportunities to
present my work among a unique cohort of scholars who share my deep
interest in early America.
I appreciate the opportunity to use previously published material
in portions of this book. Chapter 2 is a revised version of “A Medical
Examination of Charlotte Temple : Critiquing the Female Healing
Community in Rowson’s America,” which appeared in Legacy: A Journal
of American Women Writers , 28.1 (2011). Additionally, Chapter 5 con-
tains material from “Virtue and Self-Interest in the Yellow Fever World
of A rthur Mervyn, ” which appeared in L iterature in the Early American
Republic: Annual Studies on Cooper and his Contemporaries, Volume 5
(2013).
ix