Forthcoming, Science as Culture

For the King has in him two bodies, viz., a body natural, and a body politic. His body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a body moral, subject to all infirmities that come by nature or accident, to the imbecility of infancy or old age, and to the like defects that happen to the bodies of other people. But his body politic is a body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of policy and government, and constituted for the direction of the people, and the management of the public weal, and this body is utterly void of infancy, and old age, and other natural defects and imbecilities, which the body natural is subject to, and for this cause, what the king does in his body politic cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any disability in his natural body.

--Edmund Plowmen, 1571

In the beginning, the body politic was a wonderfully vital image. Born out of an ancient symbolic association between the body and the state, the body politic grew during the early modern period into a phenomenal image of state power. Henry VIII used it to stunning effect. Declaring himself "Supreme Head of the Church of England," he severed his ties with the Catholic Church, divorced Catherine of Aragon, and married Anne Boleyn, arguing that his duty was not to Rome, which forbade divorce, but to the body politic, which required him to produce a son. Likewise, Elizabeth I consolidated her power by representing herself as pure body politic, a Virgin Queen who, in transcending her natural body, had become the incarnation of the state. Able to convey the abstract concept of rule as a natural and right phenomenon, the body politic's figurative vitality lay in its ability to confer vitality, to cast the mere mortal occupying the throne as the emblem of the state's everlasting life. In Milton's words, "the King is a body politick" that "never dieth."¹

From its early days at the Tudor court, the body politic went on to enjoy a distinguished career, playing a prominent role on the Shakespearean stage, and then doing more studious work for philosophers such as Hobbes and Rousseau.² After a remarkable comic turn in the satirical prints of post-Restoration artists such as James Gillray, George Cruikshank, and Thomas Rowlandson, the body politic has served radicals, moderates, and conservatives alike. In the Canadian queer magazine Body Politic, in wrestler-governor Jesse "The Body" Ventura's I Ain't Got Time to Bleed: Reworking the Body Politic from the Bottom Up, and in Second Lady Lynne Cheney's novel about a White House cover-up, Body Politics, we can see the image's continued energy, which can anchor seemingly any kind of writing and any political perspective.

In recent years, the body politic has been especially popular in contemporary academic writing. But where the trope's extracurricular existence has been as colorful as it has been long, its prolific scholarly career has been comparatively narrow. Appearing with great frequency in the titles of scholarly books and articles since the 1980s, the body politic always appears for the same purpose: to signal the author's intention to discuss "body politics," a subject that has become one of the academy's abiding obsessions. Blunted into a buzzword for a contemporary critical topic, the specific meaning of the term "body politic" has been lost in its expansive academic circulation, which covers everything from eroticism, consumption, and dress to gender, empire, and even Latina writers. Stuck in glib and anachronistic titles like Gender and the Southern Body Politic; Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body Politic; and Postcommunism and the Body Politic, the academic body politic conveys neither a historically particular sense of the leader as the embodiment of the nation, nor even a clear analogy between the human body and the state. In scholarly guise, the body politic is a degraded, sadly non-referential shadow of the solid image it has been elsewhere.

I begin with a brief history of the body politic in order to suggest that in academic circles, the body politic has become what George Orwell called a dead metaphor, an image so overused, so exhausted, that it has lost its vitality as an image, becoming instead a lifeless linguistic placeholder for a concept that has long since lost its evocative power.³ Our language is haunted by the hackneyed relics of better linguistic days, and it is the recognized responsibility of writers to find livelier expressions. All the more damning, then, to uncover a dead metaphor certain writers are loathe to bury, and all the more interesting to probe for reasons why. What is it about the body politic that makes scholars--the very people whose job it is to not to think in cliches--so reluctant to part with it? And what are the costs of doing scholarship under the sign of a dead metaphor? Some provocative answers are suggested by Roy Porter's recent Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900.

To people interested in medical history, Roy Porter is something of an institution. At the forefront of his field for over a quarter of a century, Porter is known for producing work full of reliable information and rich detail culled from his years at London's Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. He is the editor of the Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine (Cambridge, 1996) and co-editor, with W. F. Bynum, of the landmark Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine (New York, 1997). Covering subjects as wide-ranging as gout, Enlightenment theories of madness, and the history of narcotics, Porter's books constitute essential reading for anyone interested in studying the turbulent, vibrant history of Western medicine. Bodies Politic is a curious addition to Porter's distinguished record. A book built on a dead metaphor, it is perhaps best read not as a work of scholarship so much as a work that tellingly marks the limits of a certain contemporary critical style. That style is known as "body criticism," and in a prominent medical historian's participation in it we can learn a great deal about the special pressures and hidden costs of the contemporary academic scene.

Popularized during the 1980s by Michel Foucault's work on discipline and sexuality, body criticism is distinguished most readily by a heavy, almost unthinking reliance on "The Body" as a category of analysis.⁴ The female body, the laboring body, and the body of the other are the main figures in body criticism, which tends to think in terms of gender, class, and race, and which focuses on The Body's "social construction," a term that contains the following givens: that The Body acquires meaning only in a cultural context; that culture in turn finds in The Body a fine symbol of society; that the social construction of The Body is always refracted through uneven power relations that favor white, western, privileged men; that The Body makes those power relations seem natural and right; and that as a result the key to the historical oppression of women, the poor, the mad, the monstrous, and people of color is written large on their bodies, in the meanings that have been ascribed to them and in the uniquely complex experiences that they have lived. Thus The Body emerges as a dramatic theoretical character capable of striking any number of poignant attitudes: there are, to name a very few, The Body in Pain, Unstable Bodies, Bodies Under Siege, Virtual Bodies, Recovering Bodies, Extraordinary Bodies, and Bodies That Matter.⁵

Bodies Politic sits squarely within the field of body criticism. Part of a new series from Reaktion entitled "Picturing History," Bodies Politic presents itself as an attempt to discover whether, and how, looking at pictures changes our understanding of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British medical history. "This book raises questions about the portrayal of matters corporeal and medical in post-Restoration England," Porter writes. "What symbolic significance did medicine carry? And how did the body and healing practices in turn supply metaphorical commentary upon the wider worlds of politics and the body politic?" (20). Porter's stated goal is to identify "stereotypes and images, visual and verbal" (12), to locate patterns of representation surrounding doctors, patients, and diseases, and to assess the historical meaning of those patterns. In ten generously pictorial chapters (there are 137 illustrations, 37 of them color prints), Porter covers social and clinical depictions of health and disease, doctors and patients, diagnosis and treatment, professionalism and politics. Each chapter centers on a particular area of "body politics"--"the body grotesque and monstrous," "the body healthy and beautiful," and, of course, "the body politic." Opening with the questions body criticism typically asks, Porter concurs with body criticism's typical conclusions. Medicine is indeed socially symbolic, Porter finds; it is a form of "pageantry" that offers a "repository of texts and tenets, advice and apothegms, 'sick roles' and 'well roles,' a corpus of identities, teachings and practices to be respected--or reviled--for their theatrical, spectacular and even magical aspects" (22-3). In short, writes Porter, flesh is "eloquence itself, but it is also a contested semiotic site" (35).

When The Body burst onto the academic scene almost twenty years ago, it gave instant cachet to such hot new specialties as postcolonial theory, queer theory, gender theory, performance theory, cybertheory, and race theory. The reasons for this are not hard to find: The Body automatically conjures the questions about identity, oppression, and experience that are so dear to these openly activist fields. Even more to the point, The Body naturalizes those questions, makes them seem to be the only ones around (or, to borrow a bad body criticism pun, the only ones that "matter"). In the hands of such cutting-edge scholars as Homi Bhabha, bell hooks, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Elaine Scarry, "body criticism" became a slick new scholarly genre, a prestigious style of self-consciously "radical" critique so patently risque, and so eminently adaptable, that literary scholars, sociologists, and historians working in every period on every imaginable topic have tried their hand at it.⁶ At the same time, body criticism posed a particular problem for medical historians, whose meticulous, unassuming work on the complex histories of health and disease was suddenly and violently upstaged by a flashy new brand of scholarship. The result: a discipline that has spent the past fifteen years becoming increasingly marginal to its own terrain.

Often, body criticism is the quick and dirty, crowd-pleasing version of medical history. Where medical history has little use for "the body," preferring to focus on more specific, historically locatable subjects (the cholera years, surgical technique, the endocrine system), body criticism tends to read medical literature with an eye to its symbolic and political undercurrents. Sometimes, as in the case of Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, 1990), this focus leads to insightful, original scholarship. But more often it leads to the weak, prefabricated arguments of critics who neither grasp nor respect the science surrounding their subject matter. When a literary critic decides to discourse on the hegemonic power of "the medical gaze," for instance, or a philosopher finds, upon careful meditation, that sexual difference is a mere social construct, then you've got what we might call McMedical history.

Medical history has always been a deeply conservative field, strongly wedded to painstaking archival research, strongly opposed to sloppy reasoning and showy arguments. But since the mid-1980s, medical history's subject matter has been one of the hottest things going, not because of anything medical historians did, but because body critics began to do what their more reserved counterparts would not: they wrote about death, disease, and suffering as if they were the coolest things ever. Over the past fifteen years, scholars with no training in either the life sciences or historical method have built careers speaking authoritatively about The Body, and they have been able to do so not because they bring special knowledge to the subject (there is not, after all, a Ph.D. in Body Studies), but because they bring special style to it. That style--a glamorous confection of heady jargon, harsh moral judgement, sweeping political commentary, and sensational detail--comes with a special, stylized story. Doctors are the evildoers of McMedical history, the patriarchs who subject women to degrading cures, the racists who see non-whites as always already dirty and diseased, the bourgeois hypocrites who see in prisoners, the poor, and the mad a conveniently disempowered pool of experimental subjects. And body critics are the heroes of McMedical history, the noble authorities who expose doctors for the brutal beasts they have always been. McMedical history does not tell the story of medicine's slow and grueling progress; it is not concerned with the role doctors have played in giving us our health and lengthening our lives. Rather, it is interested in medical history as an allegory for the history of oppression, as a parable of privileged white men's exploitative and self-serving control over the bodies and psyches of everybody else. Medical history proper is not interested in telling this story. And so true classics such as Ruth Richardson's Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (London, 1987), Sander Gilman's Seeing the Insane (New York, 1985), and Hans Zinnser's Rats, Lice, and History (Boston, 1934) slide out of sight, out of mind, and finally out of print.⁷

Bodies Politic sits uncomfortably between traditional medical history and body criticism's sensationalist reporting. Porter's encyclopedic knowledge of medical history is astonishing. Rich in anecdote, the book is especially strong when discussing the colorful and curious careers of famed physicians and notorious quacks. And the variety of illustrations offers a densely textured portrait of medicine's prominent place in the great satirical tradition so deftly practiced by Hogarth, Cruikshank, Gillray, Rowlandson, and others. But the notion that societies articulate themselves through the symbol of the body is the thesis of just about every body book out there. Likewise, the premise that medicine's symbolic role is at least as important as its therapeutic one, and that the "drama" of the doctor-patient relationship "stages" a variety of social tensions and redemptive fantasies, can be found in scads of historical, anthropological, sociological, and even literary critical writing on illness. Bodies Politic is the McMedical history of a medical historian. Its breadth of knowledge is as impressive as its failure to synthesize that knowledge, its rich detail as compelling as its rote argumentation is not.

Roy Porter's decision to write within the trendiest of scholarly genres thus tells us much about medical history's cramped position in today's stridently hip academy. Indeed, the book's conceptual shortcomings are in many ways the most interesting things about it. They arise from its indecision about what it ought to be, from a failure to know itself whose fascinations extend far beyond the book and speak volubly to one of the most driving and divisive schisms in the field. Just as the book's strengths come from its roots in medical history, its failings come from its wish to seem a little more attractive, a little more showy, than medical history typically is. Bodies Politic is an example of what happens when medical history sells out, when it allows clever showmanship to stand in for the deep, searching thought that defines truly original, meaningful scholarship. To the extent that Bodies Politic speaks to larger trends in contemporary medical history, it speaks to the sad fact of its anti-intellectual concessions to fashion. The book is a parable of disciplinarity lost, the sad story of an essentially conservative discipline's uncomfortable and awkward attempts to make a place for itself in an academic climate that increasingly values clever stances over substance.

Notes:

1. The classic history of how the idea of the body politic came into being is Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957).
2. See Hobbes' Leviathan (1651) and Rousseau's Social Contract (1762). The idea of the body politic permeates Shakespeare.
3. See Orwell's classic 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language."
4. See Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and The History of Sexuality, Volume I.
5. I take these phrases from the books whose titles they are: Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain (New York, 1986); Jill Matus' Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (Manchester, 1995); Armando R. Favazza's Bodies Under Siege: Self-Mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry (Baltimore, 1996); N. Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthhuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, 1999); G. Thomas Couser's Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life-Writing (Madison, 1997); Rosemarie Garland Thomson's Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Literature and Culture (New York, 1996); and Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York, 1993).
6. For a sampling, see Bhabha's 1984 essay "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," in The Location of Culture (New York, 1994); hooks' Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989); Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1989); Haraway's 1985 essay "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York 1991); Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York 1985); and Scarry's The Body in Pain.
7. Richardson's book was reissued by Chicago University Press in 2000.