Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel

by Jason Tougaw

Strange Cases is the story of the mutual influence of the case history and the British novel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fictions from Defoe's Roxana to James's The Turn of the Screw and case histories from George Cheyne's to Sigmund Freud's have found narrative impetus in pathology. The writer of a case history faces a rhetorical bind unique to the human the need to display the acumen of a scientist and the sympathy warranted to the suffering patient. Repeatedly, case historians justify their publicizing of extreme, often morbid or perverse, states of mind and body by appealing to readers to take pity on patients and to recognize the narrative as a vital social document. Diagnosis and sympathy, explicit rhetorical modes in case histories, operate implicitly in novels, shaping reader-identification. While these two narrative forms set out to fulfill an Enlightenment drive to classify and explain, they also raise social and epistemological questions that challenge some of the Enlightenment's most cherished ideals, including faith in reason, the perfectibility of humankind, and the stability of truth.

Genres: Medicine, Literary Criticism

254 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Denis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tougaw's book presents the medical case history and the novel as two forms whose development during the nineteenth century was spurred on by the inability of an empirical approach to fully address the nature of consciousness and self. Both Victorian medical science and realist novels attempted to draw meaning from the close examination of the particular in their subject's stories, an Enlightenment assumption that proved unsuccessful because both patients and characters were so complex that incontestable diagnoses or interpretations were impossible. Ultimately the way forward in the present lies in medicine and literature acknowledging that meaning comes out of “a subjective encounter with uncertainty” is both diagnostic and sympathetic.