In Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth Century British Literature, History and Culture, the contributors offer a transdisciplinary perspective on health and disease by weaving together the medical humanities with mobility studies. Emerging from the work of geographers and sociologists like John Urry, Mimi Sheller, and Kevin Hannam almost 20 years ago, the mobility “turn” or paradigm extorts scholars to attend to the multifarious ways that people, things, and ideas are “on the move” (“Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings,” Mobilities 1, no. 1 [2006]: 1–2). That Victorian Britain was a highly mobile society is probably not news to scholars of this period, but in this volume, editors Sandra Dinter and Sarah Schäfer-Althaus demonstrate that medicine is a powerful but overlooked element of mobility in Britain and its Empire. While readers may find themselves at times craving greater theoretical grounding, they will certainly not lack for fascinating and well-researched case studies from a diverse group of scholars.

The editorial introduction grounds the volume, painting a scene of Victorian Britain on the move, before introducing the state of the field in mobility studies and medical humanities. Dinter and Schäfer-Althaus argue that the volume “initiates a dialogue between mobility studies and the medical humanities, two emerging fields that have rarely been discussed in relation to one another” (3). This seems to be somewhat of an overstatement, given the depth of geographically informed scholarship from historians, literary scholars, and others on movement, circulation, and stoppage, particularly in the context of the British Empire. The literature on tropical medicine and quarantine, for example, often deals explicitly and implicitly with (im)mobilities, such as Alison Bashford’s classic work Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (2004) or more recently Narin Hassan’s Diagnosing Empire: Women, Medical Knowledge and Colonial Mobility (2016). Nevertheless, there is certainly much more room for direct engagement with the theoretical and methodological tools of mobility studies, within both nineteenth-century British studies and the medical humanities. It is therefore surprising that the editorial introduction to mobility theory is so brief. What does thinking within a mobility paradigm lend to the analysis? What are some of the concrete contributions or insights of considering movement, circulation, and immobility as an element of our study? These are questions that the volume’s substantive chapters answer more clearly. For example, Monika Class’s chapter on posture provides a rigorous survey of embodiment and mobility informed by phenomenology: “Being a body, then, is part and parcel with movement (and rest),” she pithily summarizes (125).

Despite these small oversights in the introduction, the volume is composed of a wonderful range of contributions from scholars across the medical humanities spectrum. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the editors’ backgrounds, the case studies tend more to the literary. The substantive chapters thrive where the authors have taken time to reflect critically on what mobility brings to their analyses. In chapter 5, Heidi Lucja Liedke takes a broad survey of representations of idleness and mental health in Victorian literature, demonstrating how walking, idling, and immobility sit side by side with discourses of health and disease. Liedke’s chapter comes to the heart of the volume’s theme: it is not just that medicine and mobility might be advantageously considered together, but rather that health and disease in the nineteenth century demands an engagement with movement. Ursula Kluwick’s contribution takes another critical turn, bringing together disease, mobility, and perspectives from the blue humanities, following the mobility of water as an agent in experiences of ill health. She deploys Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “trans-corporality” in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010) to explore how bodies, water, and diseases intermingle in the works of Wilkie Collins and Jerome K. Jerome.

The volume is rounded out with contributions from historians including Sally Shuttleworth on invalid ships, Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland on Irish insanity and tramping, and Markku Hokkanen on travel as prophylaxis in colonial Africa. I would draw particular attention to Monika Pietrzak-Franger’s excellent and original chapter, “White Fluff/Black Pigment.” She uses mobility perspectives not to follow bodies in motion, but rather commodities. Honing in on the materials used to make colonial clothing, she demonstrates the “Janus-faced character of Victorian consumption” (250) where imperial products like cotton protected colonizers’ bodies from tropical environments while exposing British workers to health hazards in factories. Here, we see the usefulness of mobility as a tool for bringing together multiple sites and experiences and following the differential impacts of movement on diverse bodies and their health.

Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History and Culture provides an essential grounding in what mobility-informed Victorian history and culture can look like. Historians will benefit from engaging with the theoretically informed work of literary scholars whose critical focus on embodiment demonstrates the utility of thinking about movement, bodies and health together. Indeed, in comparison to highly original contributions from Ariane de Waal and others, the historical chapters lean a little too heavily into well-worn subjects like health travel. I am left reflecting on the status of history within medical humanities, especially as it encounters theoretically driven fields like mobility studies. As historians, is it enough to simply observe that the Victorians were “on the move,” or do we need to dig a little deeper to demonstrate why medicine and mobility are a profitable match?