B007M836FY EBOK (5 page)
Authors: Kate Summerscale
Even in 1846, having returned to his family in Scotland, George continued to seek a cure. In May, he travelled to the
Continent for treatment. That summer Mary wrote a letter to the publisher John Murray, who knew the family, entreating him to help George; her brother was alone in Paris, she explained, waiting to consult the French doctor Claude François Lallemand. She did not mention that Lallemand had recently published a work that identified compulsive masturbatory urges as marks of a dangerous illness. In his study of involuntary ejaculation, printed in French in 1842 and in English in 1847, the doctor argued that both body and mind were corrupted by the excessive discharge of semen. The work of Lallemand and other French researchers set off a moral and medical panic about onanism that was to continue throughout the century. Masturbation was the dark corollary of the individualism so prized by Victorian society, an embodiment of the dangers of privacy and self-reliance: a man like George Drysdale might lose himself in books and dreams, folding inwards into a dissolute imaginary realm.
Mary explained to Murray that Edward Lane had travelled to France with George but had ‘been obliged to hurry home’. She asked that Murray encourage a friend in Paris to call on George at his hotel, and so ‘prevent him from feeling so lonely as he does at present poor fellow’. She and her family dreaded ‘the evil effects so much solitude may produce on dear George’s spirits and health’. Her reference to the ‘evil effects’ of solitude may have been an allusion to the suicidal impulses to which George was prey; or perhaps Murray was aware of George’s sexual compulsions. Mary added a postscript in which she appealed to the publisher to be discreet: ‘pray do not mention to your friend any circumstances connected with his past history as we are anxious he should himself forget it poor fellow’.
Edward Lane’s sudden flight from Paris that summer was probably occasioned by a tragedy in his own family. His younger brother Arthur had graduated from the Edinburgh Academy in 1845, and returned to their father’s home in
Canada. On 26 June 1846 he went to Quebec’s Theatre Royal to watch a chemical diorama – a show in which scenes painted on huge sheets of linen were lit and layered in ways that made them seem magically to alter and dissolve. As the curtain fell at the end of the evening, it brushed against the flame of an overturned camphene lamp and almost instantly the stage and then the auditorium were alight. The audience rushed to the exit but the passage was narrow and the fire too fast: within minutes, forty-six men, women and children were dead. A bystander saw the eighteen-year-old Arthur in his final moments, ‘overturned, in a half-recumbent position, with both feet firmly wedged in the mass of writhing humanity under it’. He ‘appeared to struggle hard; soon the surrounding flames hid him from sight’.
A year after Arthur Lane’s death and George Drysdale’s resurrection, Edward Lane and Mary Drysdale were married. The ceremony took place in June 1847, when both bride and groom were twenty-four. George came to the wedding in Edinburgh, but then made for Europe again, and Edward and Mary met up with him while they were on honeymoon in Strasbourg. Mary said that she had never seen her brother look better: ‘he was in high spirits’, ‘quite overjoyed’ at seeing her, ‘for by that time he had become quite tired of solitude’. In the book that he later published, George explained that he had taken Lallemand’s advice to try coition, with astonishing success. Intercourse with prostitutes, he discovered, quite cured his urge to masturbate.
Outwardly, George remained awkward and reserved. He was later remembered by a young woman of his acquaintance as ‘kind but shy, gentle but oppressive; he had a hard, Scottish face, and was silent, grave, serious, learned, a moral and mental impregnability like a vast mountain or a granite wall’. After the crisis his family kept close by him. Though Edward completed his legal training and was admitted to the prestigious Faculty of Advocates in 1847, he and the Drysdale
family moved that year to Dublin, where George had decided to study medicine. Charles Drysdale, having spent one year studying mathematics in Edinburgh (where he came top of his class) and another in Cambridge, enrolled at Trinity College Dublin to train as an engineer. It was a strange time to move to the city: Ireland was in the throes of a great famine, triggered by a potato blight, and hundreds of thousands of Irish were dying of hunger and disease or fleeing the country.
Mary became pregnant in Dublin, and Lady Drysdale asked her Edinburgh friend James Young Simpson to recommend a local doctor who could administer chloroform during her daughter’s labour; Simpson had discovered the anaesthetic properties of the gas that year in an experiment conducted in his house in the New Town. In Dublin in 1848, Mary Lane gave birth to a boy. She and Edward named him Arthur George, in tribute to their two brothers.
The family moved back to Edinburgh in 1849. Edward, having lost his own mother when he was nine, submitted gladly to Lady Drysdale’s benign dominion at 8 Royal Circus. He decided to abandon the profession for which he had spent the previous seven years preparing, and instead to follow George into medicine. Perhaps the sufferings of his brother-in-law inspired him to take up doctoring, as well as his interest in the new sciences. A medical degree was then the only scientific education available in Britain, and the Edinburgh course was known to provide a practical as well as an intellectually rigorous training. Both young men enrolled at the university in the autumn of 1849.
As a medical student, Edward worked at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, which drew most of its patients from the working classes. He was dismayed by what he saw on the wards and became convinced that conventional medical interventions – with leeches and enemas, laxatives and mercury – were usually useless and sometimes actively damaging to health. The Royal Infirmary, as he pointed out in
his final thesis, even exposed the sick to infection by putting contagious patients in general wards; he said that he knew of two people who had died as a result of this practice. Though he did not detail the ineffective and painful treatments administered by the infirmary’s physicians, he witnessed plenty. One patient – a seaman in his thirties – was admitted with an abdominal aneurism in 1849, and for the next four years was bled, cupped and stuck with leeches (up to fourteen at a time) until eventually he put himself out of his misery with an overdose of aconite.
Edward noticed ‘the total dearth of
books
of every description’ on the wards of the Royal Infirmary and deplored ‘the perfect mental blank’ this inflicted on the patients: ‘The effect on the spirits, it is clear, is as bad as possible … and the depression of spirits does its work on the health.’ To combat this evil, he asked Charles Dickens to supply the hospital with free copies of his weekly magazine
Household Words
and Robert Chambers to provide
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal
. Both agreed. The new bestseller
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, was also popular with the patients.
During his time on the wards, Edward began to conceive of more humane and natural ways of treating illness, methods of healing the mind and the body in unison. He became convinced that environment could transform a patient’s prospects of recovery. The sick were much more likely to get better, he argued in his thesis, if housed in hospitals in the suburbs or the countryside, where they could exercise gently in daylight and pure air, surrounded by the sights and sounds and smells of nature. The inmates of the Royal Infirmary had access only to ‘the prison-gloom of a damp back-green, overgrown on every side with rank grass, and shut out from the rattle of a busy thoroughfare by a dingy wall’. He asked his fellow doctors to recognise ‘the immense resources possessed and wielded by nature towards her self-cure, as compared with the pigmy, tentative, and too
often only hap-hazard means, which the very best human skill can furnish’.
Edward’s brothers-in-law were similarly sceptical about traditional medicine. John, the homeopath, was expelled from the Liverpool Medical Institute in 1849 because of his insistence on administering homeopathic remedies to cholera victims – with, he claimed, great success. George had discovered for himself that medical interventions failed to cure onanism; only the natural cure of sexual intercourse had saved him. He abandoned university again in 1851, this time to start work on a clandestine project, his book about sex.
Like George Drysdale, Isabella Robinson was excitable and depressive, ambitious and anxious. Like him, she was disturbed by her sexual appetites. Her lust, she believed, had hastened her into two bad marriages and was now snaring her in longing for Edward Lane. He was not the only object of her affections: another – unidentified – married gentleman in their circle claimed that Isabella besieged him with letters in an attempt to seduce him, and that he eventually disentangled himself by begging his wife never to let her in their house again. In Edinburgh, Isabella at least found a new way of thinking about her erotic urges. Her teacher was George Combe, a luminary of the Drysdales’ circle and the pioneer of phrenology in Britain. The sixty-two-year-old Mr Combe was a thin, tall man, with a wide mouth, strong cheekbones and a huge, high forehead. He lived in the New Town with his wife, Cecilia, a daughter of the actress Sarah Siddons.
When Isabella met Combe in 1850 she adopted him as a surrogate father – her regard for him, she said, was ‘quite filial in its character’. She believed him to be ‘the exponent of a clearer, & more spiritual creed, than any yet preached to man’. Mrs Combe’s cousin Fanny Kemble agreed that he was ‘a man of singular integrity, uprightness, and purity of mind
and character, and of great justice and impartiality of judgment; he was extremely benevolent and humane, and one of the most reasonable human beings I have ever known’. Marian Evans, later to become famous as a novelist under the pseudonym George Eliot, was also a friend and an admirer: ‘I often think of you,’ she wrote to him, ‘when I want some one to whom I could confess all my difficulties and struggles with my own nature’.
Combe’s book
The Constitution of Man in Relation to External Objects
(1828) had sold 90,000 copies by 1851, most of them in an edition published by Robert Chambers. An enormously controversial work, it proposed that man should accept his subjection to the laws of nature; the secrets of health and happiness, it implied, lay in science rather than religion. In
A System of Phrenology
(1843), Combe argued specifically that people’s feelings were located in their heads, that their characters could be deduced from the contours of their skulls. The bump-reading aspect of phrenology was often ridiculed, but the principles of the new science were radical and influential: Combe insisted that the mind was located in the brain, that the mind and body were indivisible, that different parts of the brain had different functions and that human nature was based in matter rather than spirit. The defining image of the theory – a brain split into numbered segments – was a model for a new science of the mind.
Soon after they met in Edinburgh, Combe examined Isabella’s skull. He informed her that she had an unusually large cerebellum, an organ found just above the hollow at the nape of the neck. The cerebellum, he explained, was the seat of Amativeness, or sexual love – men typically had larger cerebella than women, discernible in their thicker necks, just as highly sexed animals such as rams, bulls and pigeons had fatter necks than other creatures. Another of Combe’s subjects, the nine-year-old Prince of Wales, had a similarly shaped skull: when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert
consulted the phrenologist about the upbringing of their children, he observed that the young prince’s ‘Amativeness is large and I suspect will soon give trouble’. Combe’s own amative region, he said, was small – he had not known the ‘wild freshness of morning’, even in his youth.
Josef Franz Gall, the Viennese physician who invented phrenology in about 1800, claimed to have identified the amative region while attending a nymphomaniac widow. ‘In the violence of a paroxysm,’ explained George Combe in
A System of Phrenology
, ‘he supported her head, and was struck with the great heat and size of the neck.’ Combe declined to go into further detail on the subject in his book for the general reader, but he pointed ‘medical students’ to his translation of Gall’s
On the Functions of the Cerebellum
(1838), in which he elaborated on the story of the quivering widow: ‘she fell to the ground in a state of rigidity to such an extent that the nape of her neck and vertebral column were strongly drawn backwards. The crisis inevitably ended with an evacuation [an orgasmic emission], accompanied by a convulsive voluptuousness and a veritable ecstasy.’ The cerebellum had since become the most established of the phrenological faculties. In
On the Management and Disorders of Infancy and Childhood
(1853), a mainstream medical manual, Thomas John Graham asserted: ‘The appetite of love is seated in the cerebellum, at the base of the brain; and when excited by any cause, it does, under certain circumstances, if not indulged, become greater and greater, until it induces derangement of various functions, and hence hypochondriasis, convulsions, hysteria, and even insanity may be the result.’
