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Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France

1998; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 113; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.1998.0080

1080-6598

Thomas M. Kavanagh,

History of Medicine Studies

Reviewed by: Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France Thomas M. Kavanagh Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xii + 391 pages. This innovative and exciting study sets itself the goal of uncovering a crucial yet unexamined level of coherence within the scientific and literary endeavors of the French Enlightenment. Focusing on the notion of “sensibility” as [End Page 1196] the Enlightenment’s primary interface between medical theory and literary production, Vila recaptures a dimension that has been obfuscated by the distinctly different epistemologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She cogently argues that the Enlightenment notion of sensibility provides a paradigm that integrates such diverse fields as physiology, medicine, philosophy, ethics, anthropolgy, aesthetics and literature. Part One examines how “sensibility” became the central concept of a revolution in medical theory which responded to the Cartesian mind-body split with an integrated, corporeal theory both of the individual organism and of society as a collective conviviality susceptible to both perfection and degeneration. Part Two shows how the implications of this medicalized “sensibility” effected the literary production of the period, as well as its changing attitudes toward sexuality and gender. This study is ground-breaking in the history of medicine and also a frequently dazzling demonstration of how changes in the way medical science conceived of the human body affected the way novelists and social philosophers represented the human situation. Yet the real power of this work lies in the way it establishes sensibility as a tool bringing clearly into focus a previously hidden layer of coherence within the palimpsest of Western culture. Vila uses sensibility as a kind of Rosetta Stone, allowing us to read and understand more fully the complex interaction between scientific and literary culture within the French Enlightenment. A well-argued Introduction provides a cogent overview of the author’s argument that sensibility functioned during the Enlightenment as a unifying paradigm for understanding the physical and moral nature of humankind, that it became a “queen science” determining how the period understood and elaborated such diverse fields as physiology, philosophy, medicine, esthetics, and literature. Mapping out the relation between her subsequent chapters, Vila shows how the sensible body became a double-edged metaphor promising both a blueprint for progress and a diagnostics of pathology. She clarifies how different the eighteenth century’s view of the body was, and how easily we misunderstand that period when we uncritically impose on it our contemporary paradigms of the psychoanalytic and the postmodern. Chapter One focuses on the central figure of Haller and how his model of the sensible body both displaced the problems of the Cartesian mind-body split and turned away from Boerhaave’s iatromechanist model. Haller’s insistence on a corporeal as opposed to a linguistic or mind-based theory of sensibility made it possible to accept the premise that it was the physical body that most fundamentally constituted the individual. Chapter Two examines “philosophical medicine” and its development via the “vital sensibility” propagated by the Montpellier school. Thus redefined, sensibility not only explained the individual body, but promised new dimensions of therapeutic guidance across the hygenic, moral and social spectra. The médecin-philosophe became, according to this view, the purest form of the philosophe: the ideal observer, analyst, and prognosticator of individual and social benefits. Chapter Three [End Page 1197] analyzes the ambiguities of the resultant “medicalization” of the Enlightenment. It looks at how these developments in medical theory generated both a vast therapeutic enterprise promising to ameliorate all areas of human life and how, under the influence of the more pessimistic Tissot, they also propagated an acute awareness of dangers that became visible only when the human situation was examined from the perspective of sensibility. Part Two, “Narrating the Sensible Body,” shifts focus from medical theory to the effects of this new understanding on a wide range of cultural discouses, most notably the novel as a kind of experimental proving ground for various hypotheses concerning the sensible body. Chapter Four examines works by such writers as Crébillon, Prévost, Marivaux, and Graffigny in an...