If it Looks Like a Duck Review of Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle by Sylvia A. Pamboukian. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012. 207 pp

摘要

From the perspective of a biomedicalized twentieth century, judging Victorian medical practice as predominantly quackery is understandable: mercury used for syphilis, cocaine hydrochloride for hysteria, and arsenic and galvanism for melancholia (Merck 1899). What was then medicinal is now considered illicit and noxious, and treatment modalities may seem, at present, unbelievably hazardous. Surprisingly, however, arsenic is still used in chemotherapy, and both standard rat poison and Warfarin, a commonly prescribed anticoagulant, contain the same active ingredient. Such realities reflect how both medicine and nostrum involve socially constructed dimensions because their chemistry is not the only determining factor for their categorization. Indeed, we can see how slippery the term quackery can be and how context, perception, and related social discourses influence its meaning and use.Sylvia A. Pamboukian's Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle explores and deconstructs the binary between quackery and orthodox medicine through representations of medical discourse in the Victorian novel. While many readings could easily categorize physicians and medical representations in the literature as either quackery or orthodox, Pamboukian's study suggests that we should not take these seemingly clear-cut distinctions at face value. Reading this binary, an iteration of orthodox medicine, as a strictly hegemonic force that "others" non-traditional practice as quackery would be tempting.