Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-cfpbc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T18:58:05.964Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE “WRETCHED ITALIAN QUACK”: BRADDON’S CRITIQUE OF MEDICINE IN “GOOD LADY DUCAYNE”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2015

Sylvia A. Pamboukian
Sylvia A. Pamboukian*
Affiliation:
Robert Morris University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A critical darling, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula features several infamous blood transfusions. In that novel, Lucy Westenra receives blood transfusions from four different men, making her, according to Dr. Van Helsing, a polyandrist (158). In Stoker's novel, transfusion is not about medical verisimilitude so much as about romance or eroticism. Perhaps because of Dracula's status, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1896 story “Good Lady Ducayne” is often read as a vampire tale because it, too, includes blood transfusions. However, Braddon's engagement with contemporary medicine is very different than Stoker’s, since, unlike Dracula, Braddon's story engages with the experience of day-to-day medical treatment and is strongly invested in medical verisimilitude. Lauren M. E. Goodlad identifies the story's engagement with the medical profession largely through the character of Dr. Stafford, whom she views as a representative of the male-dominated, professional establishment. In Goodlad's reading, Lady Ducayne herself is a figure in both vampire literature and New Woman discourse as an “odd” woman, who becomes an “anti patriarchal figure of women's uncanny power to signify” (213). Goodlad's perceptive reading shows how the female vampire undermines conventional medicine, as embodied by Dr. Stafford. Yet, there is another physician in the story: Dr. Parravicini. If we take Dr. Parravicini as our starting point, we see that Braddon's critique of the medical profession is more wide-ranging and more radical than it previously appeared. What is Dr. Parravicini doing in this story? What is his relationship to Stafford and to the medical establishment? What does Braddon's realistic depiction of anesthesia and transfusion indicate about the medical profession and about the medicalization of modern culture?

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 559 - 575
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Bader, C. “The Administration of Chloroform and of Other Anaesthetics.” British Medical Journal. 29 Jan. 1870: 100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bandish, Cynthia L. “Bakhtin's Dialogism and the Bohemian Meta-narrative of Belgravia: A Case Study for Analyzing Periodicals.” Victorian Periodicals Review 34.3 (Fall 2001): 239–62. PDF. Web. 12 Jan. 2013.Google Scholar
Bilston, Sarah. The Awkward Age in Women's Popular Fiction, 1850–1900: Girls and the Transition to Womanhood. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borell, Merriley. “Setting the Standards for a New Science: Edward Schäfer and Endocrinology.” PubMed Central. U.S. National Library of Medicine. N.d. PDF. Web. 4 Mar. 2013.Google Scholar
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Charlotte's Inheritance. Teddington, Middlesex: Echo, 2006.Google Scholar
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. “Good Lady Ducayne.” 1896. Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories. Ed. Sims, Michael. New York: Walker, 2010. 325–54.Google Scholar
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley's Secret. Ed. Lyn Pykett. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2012,Google Scholar
Braun, Heather L. “Idle Vampires and Decadent Maidens: Sensation, the Supernatural, and Mary E. Braddon's Disappointing Femme Fatales.” Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Authors. Ed. Wagner, Tamara S.. Amherst: Cambria, 2009. 235–54.Google Scholar
Brown-Séquard, C. E.The Elixir of Life: Dr. Brown-Séquard's own account of his Famous Alleged Remedy for Debility and Old Age, Dr. Variot's Experiments, and Contemporaneous Comments of the Profession and the Press. Ed. Dunbar, Newell. Boston: Cupples, 1889. Internet Archive. Web. 28 Mar. 2012.Google Scholar
Buscemi, Nicki. “‘The Disease, which had Hitherto Been Nameless’: M. E. Braddon's Challenge to Medical Authority in Birds of Prey and Charlotte's Inheritance.” Victorian Literature and Culture 38 (2010): 151–63. JSTOR. Web. 8 Mar. 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bynum, W. F.Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Bynum, W. F., and Porter, Roy. Medical Fringe and Medical Orthodoxy, 1750–1850. London: Croom Helm, 1987.Google Scholar
Carnell, Jennifer. The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon: A Study of her Life and Work. Hastings: Sensation P, 2000.Google Scholar
Carter, K. Codell. “The Concept of Quackery in Early Nineteenth Century British Medical Periodicals.” Journal of Medical Humanities 14.2 (1993): 89–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Wilkie. Armadale. Ed. Peters, Catherine. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1989.Google Scholar
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Ed. Sutherland, John. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1999.Google Scholar
“Dr. Heywood Smith.” British Medical Journal 14 Nov. 1885: 921.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Dr. Heywood Smith” British Medical Journal 26 Dec. 1885: 1227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Dr. Heywood Smith.” British Medical Journal 17 Apr. 1886: 751.Google Scholar
Eknoyan, Garabed. “Emergence of the Concept of Endocrine Function and Endocrinology.” Advances in Chronic Kidney Disease 11.4 (2004): 371–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Eliot, George. “The Lifted Veil.” The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob. Ed. Small, Helen. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2009. 1–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Embley, E. H. “The Causation of Death during the Administration of Chloroform.” British Medical Journal. 19 April 1902: 951–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flint, Kate. “Blood, Bodies and The Lifted Veil.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51.4 (Mar. 1997): 455–73. JSTOR. Web. 3 May 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodlad, Lauren M. E. “‘Go and Marry Your Doctor’: Fetishism and ‘Redundance’ at the Fin de Siècle and the Vampires of ‘Good Lady Ducayne.’” Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context. Ed. Tromp, Marlene, Gilbert, Pamela K., Haynie, Aeron. Albany: SUNY P, 2000. 211–34.Google Scholar
Gorham, Deborah. “The ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ Re-examined: Child Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late-Victorian England.” Victorian Studies 21.3 (Spring 1978): 353–79. JSTOR. Web. 8 Jan. 2013.Google Scholar
Hunter, William. “Summary of Three Lectures on Transfusion: Its Physiology, Pathology and Practice.” British Medical Journal 20 July 1889: 115–19.Google Scholar
Lynch, Eve M. “Spectral Politics: M. E. Braddon and the Spirits of Social Reform.” Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context. Ed. Tromp, Marlene, Gilbert, Pamela K., Haynie, Aeron. Albany: SUNY P, 2000. 235–53.Google Scholar
Marsh, Joss Lutz. “Good Mrs. Brown's Connections: Sexuality and Story-telling in Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son.” ELH 58.2 (Summer 1991): 405–26. JSTOR. Web. 7 Jan. 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mendelssohn, Michele. “‘I’m not a bit expensive’: Henry James and the Sexualization of the Victorian Girl.” The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture. Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present. Ed. Denisoff, Dennis. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 81–94.Google Scholar
Onslow, Barbara. “Sensationalising Science: Braddon's Marketing of Science in Belgravia.” Victorian Periodicals Review 35.2 (Summer 2002): 160–77. JSTOR. Web. 1 Sept. 2013.Google Scholar
Palmer, Beth. Women's Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phegley, Jennifer. “‘Henceforward I Refuse to Bow the Knee to Their Narrow Rule’: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Belgravia Magazine, Women Readers and Literary Valuation.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 26.2 (June 2004): 149–71. Academic Search Complete. Web. 1 Aug. 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, Solveig C. “Editing Belgravia: M. E. Braddon's Defense of ‘Light Literature.’” Victorian Periodicals Review 28.3 (Summer 1995): 109–22.Google Scholar
Robson, Catherine. Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Royal College of Physicians and Dr. Heywood Smith.” Lancet 26 Dec. 1885: 1209–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schroeder, Natalie and Ronald, A.From Sensation to Society: Representations of Marriage in the Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, 1862–1866. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2006. JSTOR. Web. 8 Jan. 2013.Google Scholar
Senf, Carol A. “Daughters of Lilith: Women Vampires in Popular Literature.” The Blood is the Life: Vampires in Literature. Ed. Heldreth, Leonard G. and Pharr, Mary. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1999. 199–216.Google Scholar
Snow, Stephanie J. Blessed Days of Anesthesia: How Anesthetics Changed the World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Stead, W. T. “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon: Report of Our Secret Commission. Parts I-IV.” Pall Mall Gazette 6–10 July 1885. W. T. Stead Resource Site. Web. 10 Nov. 2013.Google Scholar
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ed. Auerbach, Nina and Skal, David J.. New York: Norton, 1997.Google Scholar
Stratmann, Linda. Chloroform: The Quest for Oblivion. Stroud: Sutton, 2003.Google Scholar
Swenson, Kristine. “The Menopausal Vampire: Arabella Kenealy and the Boundaries of True Womanhood.” Women's Writing 10.1 (2003): 27–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tattersall, Robert. “Pancreatic Organotherapy for Diabetes, 1889–1921.” Medical History 39 (1995): 288–316. JSTOR. Web. 15 Mar. 2013.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tomaiuolo, Salverio. “Reading Between the (Blood) Lines of Victorian Vampires: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's ‘Good Lady Ducayne.’” From Wollestonecraft to Stoker: Essays on Gothic and Victorian Sensation Fiction. Ed. Brock, Marilyn. Jefferson: McFarland, 2009. 102–19.Google Scholar
Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wallace, Jo-Ann. “Technologies of ‘the child’: Towards a Theory of the Child-Subject.” Textual Practice 9.2 (1995): 285–302. JSTOR. Web. 12 Jan. 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wells, H. G.War of the Worlds. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1995.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. 2nd ed.New York: Norton, 2006.Google Scholar
Wooden, Shannon R. “Mary Braddon's ‘Good Lady Ducayne’ in Context(s): Victorian Medicine, Literary Gothicism, and 21st Century Pedagogy.” CEA Forum 36.2 (Summer/Fall 2007): n. pag. Web. 9 Feb. 2013.Google Scholar