Sally Shuttleworth, In Quest of a Cure (Oxford University Press, 2026) 528 pp. £30.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780198972440
Sally Shuttleworth’s ground-breaking work has, for the last forty years, been a driving force in the field of science and literature. Following her latest research for her ERC project, ‘Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives’, In Quest of a Cure focuses on the fashion of travelling for health in the Victorian era, especially from the 1860s. This study focuses mainly on Menton and Davos, two famous health resorts which became English colonies of sorts, thus favouring what Shuttleworth calls ‘medical imperialism’, in the context of the rise of both medical climatology and industrialisation. Patients with diseases of the chest, convalescents, and overworked or grieving patients were drawn to these places. Rather than dwelling on the much-studied confinement of patients and invalids, Shuttleworth puts forth the paradoxical form of life that emerged from these situations, and especially in the shape of prolific writing, both medical and private. Based on letters home, lists of hotel guests, events published in local papers and medical papers, she analyses the complex relationships between patients and doctors, but also between patients and caregivers. Using rare examples of English patients’ writing, her analysis brings to light the experience of illness and life in European health resorts.
The first part focuses on the rise and fall of Mentone as a successful health resort, encouraged by James Henry Bennett, who advocated for this specific climate and claimed to have been himself saved from consumption by its glorious, sun-bathed shores. His influence drew hundreds of English patients while contributing to establish medical climatology in the late-nineteenth century, as a reworking of the three Hippocratic elements – air, water, and place – within a more scientifically-based framework. A whole economy developed in Mentone with a transplantation of English modes of life and English commodities, as well as a micro-English society in a typically insular mode. Shuttleworth analyses in turn the eclectic leading figures that were drawn to Mentone, such as Algernon Swinburn, John Tyndall, Queen Victoria or Robert Louis Stevenson, and other less famous patients. This allows her to draw typologies of patients that shape communities, from the overworked businessman to the exhausted clergyman, the nervous artist, the sick scientist or botanist, the grieving intellectual, and the delicate child. Shuttleworth draws from both private letters, journals, and publications to highlight the complex power dynamics of medical authority and patients’ ambivalent submissiveness when being ordered to rest in exile.
In the second part, Shuttleworth focuses mainly on two invalid writers and friends, John Addington Symonds and Stevenson. Though not the first patient to try this new health resort, Symonds is considered the founder of this English colony which owes its success to his laudatory writings. Himself the son of a physician, Symonds constitutes an interesting case of hybrid status between medical authority and experimental patient. His collaboration with Clifford Allbutt offers a rare example of co-operation to produce medical cases, as Symonds not only reported on his health but on his fellow residents’. This part also explores how Symonds’ family house, Am Hof, became the intellectual centre of an English colony in Davos that functioned both as a sort of Oxbridge abroad and a space for discussing Symonds’ homosexuality and psychic phenomena. The author shows that, despite Robert Koch’s discovery about the contagious nature of tuberculosis, the idea of a hereditary condition, connected to that of degeneracy, continued circulating despite scientific evidence. Though not as laudatory about the Davos landscape or its benefits, Stevenson nonetheless stayed long in Davos with Symonds. The author analyses the publications and letters of both writers to show how this literary friendship of invalid exile produced a fruitful collaboration, and yet sometimes a source of constraint. More significantly, she demonstrates how invalidity and homosexuality stand, in their writings, as interacting liminal conditions as well as exemplifying the inner division of the self.
Part III envisions how Koch’s medical discoveries on tuberculosis affected Davos’s success, and how the town survived thanks to winter sports and cultural attractions upheld by its resident literary invalids. Among them, Arthur Conan Doyle, a doctor and successful writer, and the painter Samuel Richards. Their artistic works but also their very presence attracted crowds to Davos and helped the town outlive the hopes and fears connected to the ultimately useless treatment of ‘Koch’s lymph’. Shuttleworth also considers fictional works by two figures of ‘new women’, Beatrice Harraden and Annie Holdsworth. Both came to Davos in hope of recovery, not from tuberculosis, but from overwork – a condition in which Davos was henceforth to specialise. Their highly popular works shaped the tropes of sanatorium romance, revolving around love, illness, and death, thus revealing late-nineteenth-century concern about degeneration, while also unveiling economic and psychological tensions at work in the patient-carer relationship. The author finally envisions how medical treatment of tuberculosis started focusing on fresh air rather than on climate, which led to the development of British alternative cures and opened treatment to poorer patients.
In part IV, a long biographical development on Katherine Mansfield allows Shuttleworth to draw on this case study to show the later existence of health resorts like Menton and the Swiss Alps. The self-consciously endless peregrinations of the writer outline the early twentieth-century tuberculous patients’ struggle in quest of a cure, following one medical trend after another, from fresh air to iodine injections to doubtful serums and X-rays. Drawing on geographical, meteorological, and historical details, she offers a convincing new reading of ‘Miss Brill’ as an invalid story probably set Menton, while the text had so far been considered a mere ‘study in loneliness’. Similarly, she reads ‘The Fly’ as a story of medical control over helpless patients, while it had so far been interpreted merely as a story of male repression and war trauma. The misadventures of Mansfield as a tubercular patient are followed by a close examination of influential works by two male authors, Llewellyn Powys’s Skin to Skin and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, both informed by personal experience of the sanatorium life. Shuttleworth shows how Powys magnified and allegorized his journal entries to turn it into published matter, thus providing a highly symbolised vision of sanatoria at the time. She devotes more pages to Mann’s work, published in 1924 but inspired by his experience of caring for his sick wife Katia in 1912. She offers an insightful reading of sounds, in The Magic Moutain, from laughing to coughing, sobbing, and X-Ray buzzing. Those sounds often signal a ‘disturbing elision of the organic and mechanical’ (398) but also reveal a problem of controlling one’s body in a socially proper way, particularly on one’s deathbed. In a somewhat more scattered last chapter, she analyses the various medical technologies portrayed in the novel, from the thermometer to the stethoscope and X-Rays, showing how they act dynamically as symbols of identity, temporality, death and sexuality in Mann’s work.
Shuttleworth concludes this penetrating study by examining the afterlives of health resorts in Europe, which underwent huge transformations after an efficient treatment for tuberculosis was found. The purity of the Alps retained, however, a powerful imaginary influence, and metamorphosed, after WWII, into an ideal of physical and social health allowing unity between nations. As with her previous monographs, Shuttleworth’s new study fulfills its promise of remarkable scholarship. Her original approach to the connection between tuberculosis, literature, and winter sports, and her meticulous readings of texts will open new fascinating paths to generations of scholars.
Noémie Gautier, Centre Alexandre-Koyré (CAK) and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)
