This highly innovative and fascinating book joins a growing number of works that attempt to redraw the map of science in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. Dissatisfaction with traditional accounts of the Enlightenment that privilege mechanical descriptions of nature composed by rational philosophers has prompted scholars such as Jessica Riskin, Peter Hanns Reill, and now Elizabeth Green Musselman to suggest, respectively, that sentimentality, active matter, and misfiring nervous systems helped condition the study of nature during this time.
While the cast of characters in Nervous Conditions, James Watt, Humphry Davy, and William Herschel among others, is well known to historians, the light in which they are presented in this book reveals a different side of their personalities and their natural philosophy. All of these men suffered from some sort of ailment associated with their nervous systems. That scholars have paid scant attention to these illnesses is, Green Musselman argues, the fault of imposing modern boundaries of scientific study backward onto people who would not have recognized them. In her words, “The main reason that no one before now has noticed the prevalent nervous difficulties of such well-known men of science, is that such a topic falls between the cracks of traditional disciplinary history.” As a result she has chosen “a problem-focused approach” that “can reveal aspects of the sciences that a discipline-focussed approach cannot” (194).
Green Musselman presents the bodies of male natural philosophers as objects of correspondence with the industrial world around them by arguing “that early industrial British natural philosophers thought of the well-maintained nervous system as a model of the ideal scientific and social organization that they hoped to institute nationally and even internationally” (5). Like the machines that thrust England into an era of steam-powered prosperity, these human bodies did not always operate with utmost efficiency. In suffering from so-called illnesses of the nervous system that were viewed as infecting mostly women, natural philosophers faced a threat to their masculinity. These men compensated for, and sought to control, their illnesses and as a result shore up their masculinity. In other words the goal was to discipline their bodies at the same time that natural philosophy itself became disciplined and transformed into modern science, roughly between 1780 and 1860.
The nervous maladies that are examined in this book all relate to the eye: color blindness, hemiopsy (seeing geometric images brought on by migraines), and visual hallucinations. Each of these three conditions comprises a separate chapter in part 2, “The Nervous Conditions.” These case studies come after part 1, “Embodied Epistemology,” which provides context and theoretical grounding. What happened when repairs or monitoring were required for the malfunctioning natural philosophic body closely paralleled what happened in the industrial arena. For example, let us consider chapter 4, “Mental Governance and Hemiopsy,” where Green Musselman writes, “the natural philosopher must manage an abnormal body just as he would any other technological device in his service” (102). Thus, the human body—itself a tool of scientific observation and contemplation—required the same kind of supervision as did factories filled with machines that would fail under incompetent administration. Managing workers is equated with managing one's faculties. This is also a result of changing notions of machine metaphors and government. In the case of the former, self-running Enlightenment automata models of humanity operating within Newtonian style universal laws were replaced by conceptions of machines that required governors to achieve efficiency. A similar alteration occurred in models of government and mind where the goal of achieving harmony of state or body was replaced by a desire to obtain maximum efficiency of the industrial nation and of the natural philosopher's own body. Green Musselman further incorporates contemporary political and religious issues into her study by examining natural philosophers’ color blindness against their distaste for provincialism.
The conclusion of the book, and indeed the denouement of the story, suggests that coming to terms with the conditions that plagued the bodies of England's most renowned natural philosophers allowed these men to reorder natural philosophy itself into the modern recognizable disciplines of science. Through the realization that not all human experience fell under universal laws characteristic of natural philosophy, but was individually subjective, and that this subjectivity could be quantified with statistics and then disciplined through a properly conditioned mind rather than through a pious soul beholden to an all powerful God, the role of the divine faded from the study of nature, which itself became increasingly specialized. The suggestion that the abnormal paved the way for modern science is not entirely convincing. In part this is due to the brevity of Green Musselman's discussion, which comprises three and a half pages. Nonetheless, it is intriguing, and I hope that she will expand her thesis in another venue and give it the full hearing it deserves.
As should be apparent Nervous Conditions is a complicated book that covers much ground and offers the reader a great deal to consider. It is a clearly written and thoroughly researched work that successfully merges science, politics, religion, and gender into an important and groundbreaking work of cultural history. This fine book demonstrates that when done well gender theory and studies of “the body” introduce exciting new avenues of research to the history of science.
