A London physician finds his patient

While Arbuthnot Lane was operating on women to remove the kinks that caused their intestinal stasis, and Wilhelm Stekel psychoanalysed his client’s eroticised bowel habits to cure her Oedipalisation gone wrong, a London physician sought to reduce unnecessary surgeries in a patient whose peristaltic symptoms seemed hysterical rather than organic in nature. This chapter continues our focus on doctor/patient pairings in the domain of female peristalsis, as we turn to Dr Frederick Parkes Weber, who worked in a public hospital that catered to patients of German (and Jewish) origin living in London and treated a woman whose metabolic peculiarities raised the question of whether the human peristaltic system could function entirely in reverse. Parkes Weber’s fascination with his patient Rosa Strosmann extended over several decades, resulting in a plethora of material that allows us to delve more insistently into the question of the ambiguity between what is experienced as the lived body, on the one hand, and its biological substrate, its ‘grown-in tools’, on the other. I put Parkes Weber’s case studies of Rosa in conversation with the work of Elizabeth Wilson on the gut, particularly as she draws from Sándor Ferenczi on the dynamicism of the biology of the enteric system. If psychoanalysis posits an unconscious aspect to the ‘first brain’, then might we ask if the gut, as a ‘second brain’, is subject to the vagaries of its own ‘unconscious’. This Ferenczian model of a biological unconscious enriches our understanding of a local metabolic rift in the faecal habitus of at least one Jewish woman in the British working class, a rift developed through her repeated consultation of a member of the medical establishment. Parkes Weber’s sustained consideration of his patient’s peristaltic feats leads him to speculate on a Darwinian theory of ‘tertiary sex characteristics’, traits that emerge over evolutionary time as a solution to combative tensions between the male and female of the species. Peristaltic hysteria or neurosis is at once the object of this doctor’s study, but also the medium through which he himself plays out the early twentieth-century dynamics of tertiary sex characteristics, in his long-term relation to his patient.