Men under Microscopes: “Medical Gaze” and Homeostasis in Victorian Realist Literature
Abstract
This thesis aims to explore the following questions implicit in four Victorian novels: is the relationship between science and humanities continuously at odds due to fundamental differences in philosophies? Can an understanding of how medicine transformed from an art to a science help bridge the gap between the arts and sciences? As medicine transformed into a science in the nineteenth century, it adopted three key innovations: first, Claude Bernard’s experimental method; second, what Michel Foucault later came to conceive of as the “medical gaze”; and third, Bernard’s theory of homeostasis. The thesis traces the changes in medicine as inflected across four novels. From Charles Kingsley’s Yeast (1848) to Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Stark Munro Letters (1895), the representation of doctors, science, and internal balance reflects the contrast between arts and sciences in the nineteenth century. This thesis employs critiques of medicine in literature in an attempt to integrate the studies of sciences and humanities.