Catherine Judd's Bedside Seductions contributes to the large body of work on Victorian medical culture by paying sustained attention to that hitherto underanalyzed figure, the nurse. As the first full-length examination of the social and aesthetic significance of Victorian nursing, Judd's book seeks both to bring the nurse out from under the imposing shadow of Florence Nightingale, and to put the Victorian novel out to nurse: where Nightingale has dominated historical accounts of nineteenth-century nursing so thoroughly that the two have become synonymous with each other, nursing's subtle but continuous influence over the Victorian novel has yet to be fully acknowledged. Weaving together historical and literary analysis, Judd suggests that the changing social role of the nurse over the first half of the nineteenth century made her an ideal figure for thinking through concomitant shifts in culture and literature. As the nurse evolved from slovenly servant (exemplified by Charles Dickens's Sairey Gamp) to heroic professional (exemplified by Nightingale), she became a symbolic figure for women's complex relationship to public and private spaces, an inevitably erotic angel whose tender ministrations subverted social protocol while saving lives. In turn, the nurse's formal ambiguity supplied authors with an ideal means of working through changing conceptions of storytelling.

The book's six chapters reflect its dual historical and literary emphasis, balancing readings of nonfictional writings by and about nurses against analysis of nursing as a novelistic figure for the dilemmas of realist representation. Chapter One surveys the conceptual links between nursing and the novel from 1830 to 1880, showing how new ideas about nursing shaped the novel, and, conversely, how Romantic ideas about the writer-as-healer shaped the Victorian nurse. Chapter Two focuses on the class tensions at the heart of the nursing reform movement, arguing that the new-style nurse owed her symbolic purity--itself weirdly erotic--to representations of working-class nurses as dangerously sexual. From this broad groundwork, Chapters Three through Six center on particular texts. Through readings of "carceral" nursing in Jane Eyre (1847); redemptive nursing in Ruth (1853); epic nursing in the writings of the Jamaican nurse, Mary Seacole (1854-57); and reactionary nursing in Middlemarch (1871-72), Judd demonstrates both the prominence of nursing as a theme in Victorian fiction and its symbolic utility as a cipher for narrative itself. Jane's watchful, resentful nursing images Charlotte Bronte's own controlled, critical realism; while Ruth's pathetic, penitent nursing conveys Elizabeth Gaskell's sense of the futility of overly didactic realism. Where Mary Seacole writes herself into being by framing her nursing career as a modern Odyssey, George Eliot's realism writes modern nursing into a corner with her dispiriting conception of nursing not as a heroic calling, but as the natural duty of domestic women. Judd's reading of Nightingale's outrage at Eliot's unprofessional treatment of nursing marks the highlight of the book.

Judd's project is a good one, but there are problems with its execution. The most pressing of these stem from the peculiarly anachronistic nature of an argument that seems more interested in recapitulating trends in late-1980s Victorian studies than in advancing current debates about literary and cultural history-writing. Much of the most influential Victorian scholarship produced during the 1980s was inspired by Foucault, whose ideas about sexuality, power, discipline, and discourse helped critics as diverse as Nancy Armstrong, John Kucich, D. A. Miller, Mary Poovey, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Walkowitz to articulate an entirely new take on what Victorian culture was and how it worked. Since that moment, thinking has evolved as thinking does, and the most exciting current work in the field complicates and critiques the powerful ideas about narrative and culture that emerged from the productive marriage of Victorian and Foucauldian studies. The trouble with Bedside Seductions is that it is trapped, uncomfortably and uncritically, in a methodological moment that is long past. All too often, lengthy summaries of Foucault's ideas about medicine, discipline, imprisonment, and surveillance stand in for the sort of careful, elaborate contextualizing a book of this breadth requires. As a result, the book frequently feels more telegraphic than illuminating.

Short on archival work and long on paraphrase (Catherine Gallagher, Ludmilla Jordanova, Mary Poovey, and others supply the models Foucault does not), the historical argument is at times overdetermined to the point of predictability. Nurses, like fallen women and prostitutes,Judd argues, "consolidate for Victorian writers fundamental political and social anxieties--especially concerns over class conflict, public health, the Woman Question, female heroics, and the construction of middle-class sexuality" (2). Nursing may be new territory, but Judd's formulaic handling of nursing as a synecdoche for Victorian anxieties about gender, class, and, in the case of Seacole, race makes for unconvincing history. The book skims over the tantalizing fact that the bulk of Victorian nursing was done by male medical orderlies, for example. It fails to provide a clear rationale for bracketing the study between the years 1830 and 1880. It supplies very little actual information about the daily work of nursing. And--oddly--it allows Nightingale to dominate the very readings that are supposed to move our thinking beyond the assumption that this nurse equals all of Victorian nursing.

The literary argument doesn't fare much better. The most intriguing aspect of Judd's study is her contention that a newly idealized nurse was translated into narrative space in ways that helped novelists negotiate the move from romanticism to realism. But this argument is as underdeveloped as its historical counterpart. Judd's extended thematic readings frequently stop short of the sort of formal analysis her thesis requires. They also wander, allowing nursing to drop out of sight for pages at a time. The result: so little space is devoted to theorizing the nursing-narrative link that Judd's freshest claim never really advances beyond a compelling assertion.

The critical condition of Bedside Seductions is, thus, disappointing. What might have been an important contribution to Victorian literary, cultural, feminist, and medical history finally comes off as something of an invalid in its own right, a body of work that cannot stand entirely on its own. The numerous errors of citation, punctuation, and syntax that mar the text and notes only exacerbate this ill effect, making it painfully clear that the book suffers from a want of that special nurturing that only authors can give their work--the painstaking, patient care that is required to nurse a germinal idea into strong and vital scholarship.