Raw Material Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture
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~ CONTENTS
ix List of Figures
xi Acknowledgments
I Introduction
21 ONE I Asiatic Cholera and the Raw Material of Race
60 TWO I Breast Reductions
102 THREE I Fractions of Men: Engendering Amputation
48 FOUR I Monsters, Materials, Methods
209 AFTERWORD I The Promises of Monsters,
or, A Manifesto for Academic Futures
219 Notes
251 Works Cited
267 Index
~ FIGURES
I. The routes of cholera 24
2. Cholera map of Exeter in 1832 26
3. Cases of cholera around the Broad Street pump during the 1854
epidemic in London 27
4. Cholera's minions 28
5. Late-century advertisement for ethnic cleanser 50
6. Pictures of incompletion 118
7. Excessive fingers 119
8. Amputated arms amputating 120
9. Nonsensical torso 120
10. Prosthetic ploughman 127
II. Prosthetic digger 127
12. Prosthetic farrier 128
13. Prosthetic miner 128
14. Man leaping on artificial leg 128
15. Ice skater with artificial leg 130
16. Climbing the evolutionary ladder 130
17. George B. Iliff 140
18. The Tin Woodman meets his meat head 142
19. "The Deformito-mania" 149
20. Barnum and Bailey circus sideshow 149
X FIGURES
21. "Born a Genius and Born a Dwarf" 155
22. "John Bull among the Lilliputians 156
23. General Tom Thumb in his different characters 160
24. Barnum training Tom Thumb 161
25. Millie-Christine, the Renowned Two-Headed Lady 163
26. The Tocci Brothers 164
27- Chang and Eng 165
28. Barnum's American Museum 172
29. "Transparent Man" 178
30. Fat lady IJ8
31. "The English Lamb and the French Tiger" 179
32. "Bone and Flesh or John Bull in Moderate Condition" 179
33. Annie Jones, one of Barnum's bearded ladies 180
34. Anna Swan, one of Barnum's giantesses, presenting a
midget 181
35. Maximo and Bartola, microcephalic Salvadoran dwarfs
displayed as the "Last of the Ancient Aztecs" 182
36. Degenerate family trees 186
37. Galton's criminal composites 188
38. Zip, one of Barnum's "missing links" 191
39. "Iron-Jawed Man" 191
40. "Man with Iron Skin" 192
41. James Morris, one of Barnum's india-rubber men 192
42. Madame Giradelli, the Celebrated Fire Proof Female 194
43. Claude Ambroise Seurat, the Living Skeleton 196
44. Isaac Sprague and family 198
45. Ann Leak Thompson 198
46. Charles Tripp 199
47. Siamese gadget 202-3
48. Overwrought knife 204
49. Miss Biffin 206
50. The iron seamstress 207
~ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing this book has alternately been a labor of love and a lesson in
living. Over the six years of its making, Raw Material has been both
solace and incubus, pleasure and burden by turns. It has had to be
coaxed, tickled, wrestled, fought, and laughed into being, and its diffi-
culties and its joys have over time resolved themselves into a private
joke; like Mr. Venus, eternally anxious about the respectability of his
trade in bones, I have found myself countless times grumbling his
immortal lines at my recalcitrant manuscript: "Don't sauce me, in the
wicious pride of your youth; don't hit me because you see I'm down.
You've no idea how small you'd come out if I had the articulating of
you." Well, now we know: I hope it's satisfied. Many people and in-
stitutions have had a hand in the articulating of Raw Material, and I am
glad to be able to thank them here.
lowe special thanks to my teachers at the University of Michigan,
who saw this project through its earliest incarnations as coursework and
dissertation. For introducing me to interdisciplinary work, and for
managing somehow to provide excellent advice, criticism, and guid-
ance while still giving me the freedom to follow the unpredictable path
of my ideas, I thank John Kucich, Martin Pernick, Adela Pinch, Mar-
tha Vicinus, and Athena Vrettos. Always to me a living example-to
invert Dickens's words-of How To Do It, they continue to inspire and
XU ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
teach me. My colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have been
similarly generous with their time, creativity, and support. Nina Auer-
bach's uncanny critical imagination, David Delaura's finely tuned sen-
sitivity to detail, and Elaine Freedgood's like mind all left their special
marks on the manuscript at crucial moments in its evolution from
dissertation to book; without them it would be raw material indeed. It
has been my great good luck to have had such excellent intellectual
company, both at Penn and at Michigan. My secret life as an other
Victorian has been filled with a type of sympathy George Eliot would
have trembled -pleasurably, I hope-to see; truly it has had the kind of
beauty that is thrown into relief by poor dress.
So many other smart and interested readers have helped this book
along over the years: Jonathan Freedman, Sander Gilman, Jill Matus,
Dianne Sadoff, and an anonymous reader for Duke University Press all
read the whole and made astute and helpful suggestions. Seth Koven
and Thomas Laqueur read earlier versions of the amputation chapter
and made careful, clarifying comments. Laurel Erickson, Jean Leve-
rich, and J ani Scandura patiently sorted through drafts, often at odd
hours and on short notice. Christine Cooper has ever been a faithful
reader, creative listener, tireless interlocutor, fellowyogaholic, and con-
summate friend. Robyn Scherr and Dana Barton, who live and work
in the real world, committed the remarkable act of reading this work
for pleasure, and so reminded me of my reason for writing in the first
place. Maurice Black brought to the book an almost visionary intel-
ligence and a finely focused editorial eye. Much of my thinking about
cultural theory was honed during our conversations, and much of my
language was tightened at his suggestion. His care with details, and his
challenging questions, have made this a far better book than it other-
wise would have been. Ken Wissoker, Katie Courtland, Melinda Con-
ner, Rebecca M. Gimenez, and Patricia Mickelberry at Duke proved to
me that university presses can be both human and humane; they will
never know how much I appreciate their patience, openness, encour-
agement, and all-around reasonableness.
As a heavy and not always well-behaved user of libraries, lowe
particular thanks to the archives I have exploited and the librarians who
have tolerated my often intractable borrowing habits. Thanks to the
Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library and the Taubman Medical Library
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS X111
at Michigan for forgiving fees, bending borrowing policies, and ex-
tending my interlibrary loans for years at a time. Thanks to Van Pelt
Library at Penn for same, especially to John Pollack of Special Collec-
tions for letting me photograph disintegrating books, and to the Uni-
versity Photographic Services for making faded and blurry images
beautifully clear. Thanks to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia,
especially Chris Stanwood and Gretchen Worden, for graciously per-
mitting me to photograph both disintegrating books and disintegrating
photographs; to Carolyn Davis, of Special Collections at Syracuse; to
the Barnum Museum; to Ricky Jay; and to the Circus World Museum
for permission to reprint their images of monsters. Shanyn Fiske la-
bored heroically checking quotes, chasing down sources, procuring
permissions, and prodding photographers.
My thanks also to the University of Michigan for generous financial
support during the dissertation phase. A Mellon Candidacy Fellow-
ship, a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship, and a Rackham One-Term
Fellowship all secured me precious untrammeled writing time.
My deepest thanks go to my family, whose love, friendship, faith,
and chronic irreverence planted the germ of this book in me years ago.
Some of my earliest memories are of ogling the pictures in medical
books while my mother studied for her boards; of smelling formalde-
hyde on my anatomist father when he picked me up from day care on
dissection day; of the quirky anatomical decor of our scientific house
(Bones, warious. Skulls, warious. Bottled preparations, warious. That's
the general panoramic view); and of my own announcement at around
age six that I would be a writer when I grew up. For understanding my
need to read and write, for teaching me to combine labor with creation,
and for raising me in the modern equivalent of Mr. Venus's shop, I
thank you from the bottom of my freeze-dried heart. This book is
for you.
~ INTRODUCTION
In his 1843 critique of industrialism, Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle
describes the Condition of England as one of terminal illness: "England
is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in
every kind; yet England is dying of inanition" (7). Imagining England
as a spent and exhausted body, Carlyle suggests that the trouble with
the nation is consumption. Like the tubercular, or consumptive, body,
which was commonly believed to suffer from a "perverted or imperfect
nutrition" (Greenhow 19), the body of England is dying not from lack
of nourishment (in this case, goods), but rather from a systematic
failure to distribute those goods in an efficient or effective way: "What
is the use of your spun shirts?" Carlyle asks. "They hang there by the
million unsaleable; and here, by the million, are diligent bare backs that
can get no hold of them. Shirts are useful for covering human backs;
unless otherwise, an unbearable mockery otherwise" (27). In Carlyle's
logic, capitalism describes a cultural pathology in which a constitu-
tional inability to assimilate wealth produces an increasingly enfeebled
and diminished social body; unable to make use of its own material
resources, able to produce but not to consume, commercialized En-
gland is literally wasting away.l
Carlyle's image of a consumptive England was more than merely
metaphorical: nineteenth-century England really was dying of con-
2 RAW MATERIAL
sumption. Where Carlyle and others diagnosed a social body incapable
of surviving the advent of consumer culture, doctors noted that con-
sumptive disease was itself reaching epidemic proportions (between
1838 and 1839, for instance, consumption-also known as pthisis and,
increasingly, as tuberculosis-caused more than sixty thousand deaths
in England and Wales alone). The nineteenth century saw both the
consolidation of the mass market and the massive spread of consump-
tive disease, which followed the patterns of urbanization with deadly
accuracy.2 The century's number one killer, consumption spread fastest
in cities and infected disproportionate numbers of the poor. As such, it
operated as a kind of pathological index of demographic shift, a sicken-
ing sign of England's transformation from a primarily rural, agrarian
nation to the world's first and foremost manufacturing economy. Car-
lyle's image of a state consumed by mass production thus found its
material counterpart in actual patterns of tubercular spread, which
mapped a nation of consumptive producers: "If one roams the streets a
little in the early morning, when the multitudes are on their way to their
work," Engels writes in The Condition ofthe Working Class in England
(1845), "one is amazed at the number of persons who look wholly or
half-consumptive." London was, naturally, the capital of this sickly
culture of consumption. "Even in Manchester," Engels continues, "the
people have not the same appearance: these pale, lank, narrow-chested,
hollow-eyed ghosts, whom one passes at every step, these languid,
flabby faces, incapable of the slightest energetic expression, I have seen
in such startling numbers only in London" (I09). For Engels, con-
sumption doesn't just affect the working classes, it defines them: the
picture of poor health, they are the spitting (and coughing) images of
Carlyle's wasted, wasting social body.
Infecting millions of people and informing political critique, con-
sumption was one of the nineteenth century's enduring cultural and
medical problems. Absolutely symptomatic of industrial existence,
consumption described what doctors, in a somewhat different context,
called a "pthisical habitus," a symbolic economy in which the patholog-
ical conditions of consumption and the Condition of England con-
tinually indicated each other.3 Bringing up complementary images of
poorly paid labor and hard, labored breathing; of airless rooms and ill-
ventilated chests; consumption spoke of a decomposition that was tak-
INTRODUCTION 3
ing place on both social and cellular levels, a decomposition that drew
the diseased body into such close contact with social disorder that it
became difficult to tell them apart: if stuffY interiors were felt to be
a principal cause of consumption, breath that reeked of a "newly-
plastered room" was a dead giveaway of advancing pulmonary disease
(Cotton uS). Consumption raised all sorts of hectic, hellish associa-
tions, simultaneously imaging dark, damp courts and rank, rotting
sores; noxious vapors and obnoxious breath; stagnant pools of sewage
and pints of spewed blood; bad drainage and draining pus; choked
privies and endless plugs of putrid sputum, the sticky seals of respira-
tory distress. More than anything else, the products of consumptive
coughing circulated the ugly truth about the system. Alternately clear,
white, yellow, green, or gray, they were streaked with black matter and
shot through with clots. Hawks from strangled lungs were ubiquitous,
festering on floors and mucking up streets; sitting in chamber pots and
saturating sheets; smeared on handkerchiefs, sleeves, and the backs of
hands; crusting into dust and eventually entering other lungs on clouds
ofvitiated air. The hallmarks of universal infection, widespread destitu-
tion, and awful, early death, they were the terribly expressive signs of an
increasingly invalid world. At once a killer figure for an emergent mass
culture and a material condition of that culture, consumption had a
phenomenal career during the nineteenth century.
The word consumption articulates a convergence that is everywhere
apparent in nineteenth-century thinking: where social critics diag-
nosed England as a diseased and dying body, disease itself provided a
gross anatomy of the social system. This book concerns itself with the
complexities of this formation, analyzing the inextricable entangling of
ideas about capitalism and corporeality in Victorian discourses of dis-
ease. It studies the poetics of pathology during the nineteenth century,
examining how the material patterns of disease became the basis for a
highly metaphorical exploration of the human condition. 4 Drawing on
medicine, literature, political economy, sociology, anthropology, and
popular advertising, this work explores the industrial logic of disease in
Victorian culture, the dynamic coupling of pathology and production
in Victorian thinking about cultural processes in general, and about
disease in particular. It centers on the epistemological continuity be-
tween the disorderly materiality of unhealthy bodies and the radically
4 RAW MATERIAL
altered social order of an increasingly materialist culture, examining
how the forms and figures of urban industrial disorder filtered through
the language surrounding actual disease. Paying particular attention to
how the exigencies of the material body were explained by-and as-
problems of material culture, this book traces how the language of
disease continually aligns pathological processes with social forces. In
so doing, it seeks to show how anxieties about cultural shift informed
and sometimes merged with models of disease, and to situate those
models within a set of broad concerns regarding the status of the human
body under capitalism. 5
The conceptual conjunction between pathology and production in
Victorian thinking is perhaps most succinctly expressed in what Ruskin
refers to in Unto This Last (1860) as "illth," a term that combines illness
and wealth into a single category ofbiosocial detritus (105). Suggesting
that "ill" effects are built into progress, that economic development
necessarily involves some form of physical decay, illth both demarcates
an imaginative fusion of body and money and designates that fusion as
inherently pathological: illth implies a physicality whose unhealthy
economic relations render it always already unwell. As Catherine Gal-
lagher has pointed out, the viability of money in Ruskin's logic depends
on the well-being, or "valor" ("The Bio-Economics of Our Mutual
Friend" 99), of its possessor; a dead man cannot technically be rich
because he cannot spend, and a living man who does not know how to
use his resources cannot properly be said to be alive, precisely because
his money is not circulating. 6 Such men are "inherently and eternally
incapable of wealth"-they are "in reality no more wealthy than the
locks of their own strong boxes" -and this incapacity renders them
incapable of life (104). At best, they are merely "animated conditions of
delay" (105); at worst, they are "as pools of dead water, and eddies in a
stream (which, so long as the stream flows, are useless, or serve only to
drown people)" (104). Imagining a perfect correspondence between
civic responsibility and bodily health, illth describes an economy in
which those who are wasteful will themselves waste away. We might
take illth as a metaphor for Victorian models of pathology, which not
only overlap with ideas about production at various points but are also
embedded in a wider investigation of the relationship between physical
and economic well-being. Where Victorian political economy orga-
INTRODUCTION 5
nized social critique around questions of bodily health, medical litera-
ture developed a political economy of pathology, a rhetoric of human
physiology in which disease figures, paradoxically, as a profoundly pro-
ductive degenerative force. Illth imagines a deeply elemental relation-
ship between wasting and disease, casting death as an objectification
of the body-the man who is "inherently and eternally incapable of
wealth" is not a dead man but a pool of dead water; he doesn't drown
people, but the thing he has been reduced to does. In illth, the body
wastes into waste itself.
This imaginary fusion of trash and flesh must be understood in the
context of nineteenth-century debates about the impact of industry on
public health, and, more specifically, about the vexed and uncertain
relationship between the human body and the raw materials of man-
ufacture. The rise of the factory system and the attendant growth of
cities during the nineteenth century caused a national health crisis,
subjecting people in ever greater numbers to the killing effects of eco-
nomic growth. 7 Works such as James Phillips Kay's Moral and Physical
Condition ofthe Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in
Manchester (1832), Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition
of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), and Friedrich En-
gels's Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) offer elaborate
accounts of how the living conditions in urban slums contributed to the
spread of infectious diseases such as typhoid, smallpox, cholera, influ-
enza, and scarlet fever, as well as how extreme poverty and overwork
fostered a range of constitutional disorders. Known colloquially as
"fever nests," the slums' lack of ventilation and fresh water, inadequate
sanitation, and severe overcrowding encouraged epidemics and exacer-
bated disorders arising from malnutrition such as rickets, scurvy, and
anemia. Disease was the most visible index of the decisive power of
urban squalor to squelch human life. Despite important medical ad-
vancements such as improved diagnostic and therapeutic techniques,
anesthesia, and antisepsis, and despite an increasing number of public
health measures devoted to providing better sanitation and purer water,
cities took an unbelievable toll on health. 8 Life expectancy in the cities
was exceptionally low, especially among the poor. Most people never
made it past middle age, and between industrial accidents and grinding
poverty, workers were lucky to see thirty.9 Infant mortality was corre-
