Lindsey Grubbs
Emory University
Lindsey Grubbs is a doctoral candidate in English at Emory University, where she is also obtaining a certificate in bioethics. Her dissertation traces the relationship between literature and medicine in the development of diagnostic schemas for moral disorder from 1785-1890. Archival research for this project has been supported by The Library Company and the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in Literature & Medicine and the American Journal of Bioethics: Neuroscience.
What makes it possible to be mad in a particular way in a certain time and place? Moving past the “real” versus “socially constructed” binary, Ian Hacking offers the generative metaphor of the “ecological niche” for mental disorder: the particular convergence of social, medical, political, and geographic factors that render a mental disorder conceivable within a specific culture at a certain time. Yet, in the nineteenth-century, this idea would have scanned only partly as metaphor. In theorizing why “certain classes of Americans” had “sorely overtaxed” their nervous systems, physician-author S. Weir Mitchell hypothesized a relation to “our habits, our modes of work, and haply, climatic peculiarities.” Physicians, novelists, and laypersons alike imagined a true ecology of madness, taking for granted the impact of environment, climate, and immediate physical space on the health of a body and mind through the medium of the nerves. The papers on this panel investigate the nineteenth century notion of a uniquely American mind drawn from uniquely American ecologies, both literal and figurative, exploring and narrating etiologies of its growth and fracture, its social incorporation and ostracization.
Lindsey Grubbs (Emory University) reads Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “medicated novel” Elsie Venner alongside the meteorological tables appearing contemporaneously in the annual reports of some State Lunatic Hospitals. She investigates how depictions of madness in both literature and medicine deployed the rhetoric of environmental and public health to change the public’s ethical orientation toward the mentally ill subject. The paper situates this analysis within a tradition of environmental and climatological approaches to mental health reaching from the eighteenth century to the current time.
