Laura R. Kremmel, Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2022) 272 pp. £70.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781786838483
Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies is a text acutely attuned to the elusiveness of the body. Throughout its five (very informative) chapters, Laura R. Kremmel takes a palpable delight in relating the inexplicability of the body and its various ailments, injuries and idiosyncrasies as they are interweaved with Romantic era medicine and Gothic fiction. In this fashion, Kremmel’s approach mirrors the ‘endearing enthusiasm’ (4) of Matthew Baillie, the author of The Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body (1793) and a key figure in Kremmel’s interpretation and analysis. Between Baillie and Kremmel, the reader is regularly reminded that the body remains remarkable even after being endlessly remarked-upon. Kremmel’s approach situates Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination firmly within the scope of Martyn Evans’ position within the Critical Medical Humanities – that of ‘a reinstatement of wonder’ which acts as a ‘clarion call to us to remain mindful of our materiality, our object-ness, our thing-hood’ (8). This overarching focus and attitude renders Kremmel’s research and scholarship fascinating and well-conceived, an intriguing and powerful emergent area of interest.
Kremmel’s principal argument is that during the Romantic era, the Gothic tradition in many cases aids its characters in ‘harnessing the power of fear’ in order to exercise their agency. The Romantic period is key to Kremmel’s argument; the fluctuating medical theories, knowledge and authority of the era allows this fragile agency to flourish, unfettered by the stricter medical regimes and research of the Victorian period. Romantic Medicine’s chapters are organised according to these often fantastic-sounding medical debates, analysing how they were incorporated into Gothic tropes and narratives during this era.
The first and second chapters of Romantic Medicine are linked and inform each other, with the first focusing on the medical theory of vitalism and the second on whole-body pain. In the first chapter, ‘Reanimated Corpses, Blood, and the Gothic Vital Element’, Kremmel analyses the Romantic idea of vitalism and its presence in Gothic stories of reanimated corpses, concluding with her idea of a ‘Gothic element’ which animates dead characters and gives them agency in the same way the vital element is imagined to in contemporaneous medical debates. In the second chapter (possibly my favourite), ‘Aesthetic Skeletons and the Pain of Melancholy’, Kremmel turns her attention to the dry, tremulous skeletons of wronged, depressed, and hurting women in Gothic fiction. Here Kremmel argues that in the Romantic era, Gothic played with concepts of anaesthesia as producing the most desirable prospect of a body without pain, including emotional pain. Kremmel focuses on the female protagonists of Charlotte Dacre’s poetry, acknowledging that while they are usually characterised as victims, ‘what they do with that victimhood matters. Dacre’s victims either fight back, make their stories known, or find solutions of their own, and men are no heroes in any of these resolutions’ (98). This position is refreshing in its acknowledgment that victimhood, tragedy, and even mutilation can offer intriguing new possibilities and identities in the Gothic, often particularly for women; these events do not preclude other routes and possibilities for those characters. Also, it was enjoyable once again to note that in these chapters in particular, Kremmel revels in the paradoxical nature of many Gothic cornerstones, including an enjoyable dissection (forgive me) of the bleeding nun character in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), a perfect example of this contrary nature as she bleeds forever but remains a corpse.
The third chapter, ‘Counterfeit Corpses and Evaded Dissection’, takes the dissecting room for its centre stage, analysing the Gothic trope of the ‘false’ corpse (through accident, misunderstanding or foul play) and how this reflects upon Romantic era fears of dissection and medical imperialism. This chapter gives an extensive analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), fin de siècle Gothic chapbooks, and Joanna Baillie’s The Family Legend (1810) to demonstrate the dangerous gap between empiricism and imagination.
The fourth chapter is entitled ‘The Devil and Disability Narrative’ and focuses on the troublesome link between the disabled body and the trope of the devil in the Gothic tradition. Kremmel continues her earlier discussion of victimhood in the Gothic into this chapter, arguing that choosing to deal with the devil awards a disabled character a form of agency to experience multiple embodiments. However, the desire for the perfect body is ultimately exposed as useless and artificial, resulting in a powerful disability narrative. Kremmel excels in this chapter; she acknowledges the complicated relationship between the Gothic and disability narratives to the chapter’s end, concluding that ‘[b]y creating a platform for pathologised bodies, the Gothic imagination contentiously villainises physical difference at the same time that it turns victimisation for that difference into power’ (162). Kremmel’s sustained focus on only one text also bears fruit in the form of an excellent introduction to and analysis of The Three Brothers by Joshua Pickersgill Jr (1803), which she describes as labyrinthine in its length and numerous subplots. Kremmel situates this complex nature and form as part of her argument, using its many twists and turns to demonstrate ‘the fragility of attempts to judge bodies on their stability or supposed wholeness’ (146).
The final chapter, ‘Contagious Narratives and Gothic Vaccination’, offers a little less in the form of pioneering analysis and Gothic thrills but nonetheless conducts an in-depth and thoughtful analysis of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826). Kremmel argues that The Last Man acts as a kind of metanarrative about the creation of Gothic narratives, conducted and spread through contagion, although ultimately acting in a forewarning capacity as a kind of vaccination. Her lengthy insistence that The Last Man is not a Gothic novel itself struck me as splitting hairs, but I concede its relevance to her argument, which refers back to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s view of Gothic as a genuine medical threat to Romantic readers (mentioned in the book’s introduction).
Overall, Kremmel’s approach is systematic and well-read, her choice of texts is wide-ranging in terms of format and notoriety, and she picks up threads of complex medical history and explains them as needed with thoroughness and insight into their impact on cultural products. Her approach is empathetic and considerable without veering into overfamiliarity, and her scholarship clearly leaves the way open for further dynamic discussion and analysis in the area of Romantic Medicine and Gothic Studies. Kremmel reads back to an era in history when the Gothic imagination could credibly interweave with medical theories about the body, creating a remarkable portrait of a field at a fascinating crossroads between science, fantasy, and horror.
Rebecca Gibson, University of Cumbria
