by Kathleen Beres

Contents

The Vegetable Universal Pill
The Licensed Doctors: A Call for Unity
Morison's Revolution
Purity Commercialized
Individuation and Institutionalization

 

What happens when a doctor or pill “heals” someone? The answer to this seemingly simple question has intrigued scholars in fields as varied as medicine, philosophy and, increasingly, literature. It has and will require many books, but one plausible answer is that a “healed” person is returned to a state of original, Edenic “wholeness.” By purging the body of malignant forces or adding complementary ones, medicine—as the rhetoric goes—brings it back to a state of balance.

Yet the institutionalization of medicine complicates such a holistic view of healing. To take one current example, a depressed patient may take an anti-depressant which, by restoring a “natural” balance of seratonin, returns the person to a state of mental health. To make this person a whole, however, requires a web of social forces: primary care physicians, HMOs, psychologists, therapists, pharmaceutical companies, advertising agencies, and more. The patient paradoxically becomes whole by replacing physical invasions with social ones.

Some branches of what we call “alternative” medicine have long sought to purify both physical and socio-medical bodies. Instead of entering into the complex web of social forces listed above, a depressed patient might take St. John’s Wort, an herbal remedy known for working “naturally” to restore a chemical balance in the brain. Yet this is also, clearly, less than a purified venture; it requires companies to market and package the product, drug stores to sell it, agencies and publications to advertise it, and so on.

If our health care system resembles a Frankenstein-like collection of parts, these parts were still being collected in the early nineteenth-century. As Roy Porter and Logie Barrow have convincingly argued, the walls separating quacks from orthodox doctors had not yet solidified. Orthodox physicians often bled their patients, and quacks often prescribed the same medications as licensed apothecaries. According to Thomas Beddoes, a contemporary advocate of medical reform, “Of quack compositions we regulars cannot in honesty but confess that they are excellent, being, in fact, the very same which we use ourselves” (Qtd. in Porter, “Plutus,” 75). Even within the realm of orthodox medicine, the lack of consensus between branches ranging from apothecaries to practitioners to surgeons still prevented any sense of professional wholeness.

Orthodox physicians, generally educated and licensed doctors who needed to separate themselves from those they saw as glorified salespeople, often used figures like James Morison, a “layperson” without a medical degree who marketed and sold incredible amounts of his Morison’s Universal Pill, to argue the need for medical reform, namely a greater emphasis on education (preferably at Oxford or Cambridge), certification, and regulation. To these doctors, Morison and his ilk illuminated the problems inherent in their medical establishment. Regulating the field would increase patients’ trust in them, their social status, and professional respect.

On the other side of this debate, alternative healers like Morison argued against the formative medical establishment through rhetorics of democratic individualism. His pills would make “every man his own doctor” and, with “natural” ingredients, purge the body of all manner of illness without costing patients an undue amount of money.

Medical historians like Porter and William Helfand have documented the various social factors contributing to the rise of quackery during this historical period. However, no scholars, medical or literary, have examined the discourses which characterized the vituperative debate between orthodox physicians and quacks like Morison. This paper, then, is an attempt to examine the discourses of professionalization, democracy, and commercialization that contributed to and maintained both sides’ claims to healing and wholeness.

The Vegetable Universal Pill

As Roy Porter argues in Health for Sale, quackery saw its golden age in the eighteenth century; by the nineteenth, partly due to the Apothecaries Act of 1815 and the Medical Regulation Act of 1853, both passed to decrease unlicensed medical practice, quacks needed more than a portable stage and personal charisma. However, Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, among others, describe the immense popularity of Morison’s pill. “Brothers,” Carlyle famously writes in Past and Present, “I am sorry I have got no Morrison’s Pill [sic] for curing the maladies of society” (28). Arnold focuses more on the British College of Health, an organization formed by Morison to sell his pills, write pamphlets, and promote natural or vegetable healing. Although he views the College as not in keeping with British character, he does describe its popularity in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”:

Everyone knows the British College of Health; it is that building with the lion and the statue of the Goddess Hygeia before it; at least I am sure about the lion, although I am not absolutely certain about the Goddess Hygeia. This building does credit, perhaps, to the resources of Dr. Morison and his disciples, but it falls a great deal short of one’s idea of what a British College of Health ought to be (46).

Clearly, Morison’s pills were popular, but what were they? According to a professor of chemistry hired during a court trial, they contained mainly gamboges, a violent purgative, cream of tartar, which is “very injurious,” and aloes, which “required great care in their administration” (“Poison Vendor Morison…” 764). The pills were purgatives that worked by ostensibly cleansing the blood of impure elements, all of which would be flushed out. Patients were recommended to take as many of these pills as possible; in Morisoniana, Morison writes that “patients have taken 30, 40, and 50 pills at a time in severe or urgent cases; and what was the consequence? Nothing but that they were sooner well” (116).

These pills were distributed in large amounts not only in England, but also throughout the world. The “List of Agents” found in the back of Morisoniana is a full six pages long; it includes booksellers, drapers, grocers, a “spirit merchant,” a tea dealer, and a number of women. Placed above the dealers were Morison’s “agents,” colleagues he sent to a variety of countries to sell his pills. Although a court case against two American doctors accused of “counterfeiting a spurious preparation” (Report…1) is intriguing in its irony, it also provides helpful knowledge about foreign sales of the pill. “Agents were sent to France, Italy, and, in fact, to every part of Europe; to India, the whole of the British Colonies abroad and, in a word, to every part of Christendom” (6). In the state of New York alone, patients consumed $150,000 worth of the product (6). Clearly, Morison was literally giving licensed doctors a run for their money.

The Licensed Doctors: A Call for Unity

These licensed doctors had reason to be threatened by Morison’s success. The profession was in a state of disarray, and the many branches and levels of British medicine prevented even the semblance of a unified front. Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians were the elite, followed by physicians affiliated with other medical societies like the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association (Porter, Greatest Benefit 354). General practitioners could conduct family practice and dispense drugs; surgeons (including barber-surgeons) performed elementary operations, and apothecaries only dispensed drugs. These various branches of orthodox medicine each had their own interests, making uniform professional standards nearly impossible.

The Apothecaries Act of 1815 was the first attempt at setting a standard; yet, although all apothecaries had to be licensed, non-licensed non-apothecaries like Morison could get around it by simply not labeling themselves as such. Instead, grocers, store owners, and laypeople would sell their medications.

The need for regulation eventually culminated in the passage of the Medical Act of 1858, which established a medical register. Now, only approved practitioners could, among other things, dispense medicines, and the GMC (General Medical Council) acted to enforce the ruling (Porter, Greatest…355). However, no regulatory body could completely abolish quackery.

Yet, one may argue, education must have separated the medical sheep from the wolves? This, too, would be a 21st century valuation of a nineteenth century establishment. Porter and others have pointed out the disparities in educational levels within and outside of pre-professional medicine. Porter writes that reformers demanding a “purified profession” ("Plutus"83) demanded at least three years of medical education for aspiring doctors; at the time, only Edinburgh offered such a program. Beddoes went even further, arguing that six years were necessary to train young doctors; this would allow the medical student to “digest 500 to 800 volumes of medicine” (qtd. in "Plutus" 84). The diction here is not much different from that used to sell pills: the more one digests, the more one heals. Medicine as it stood, however, was diseased due to entrepreneurism, limited education, and divisions between various rungs on the medical ladder.

This very division made it difficult for the medical profession to purge itself of impure elements. Thomas Wakely, editor of the Lancet, became a mouthpiece for status-conscious physicians, and James Morison was a favorite target. In the Lancet and elsewhere, articles detailed the deaths caused by Morison’s pill. An 1835 article from the London Medical and Surgical Journal relates the death of a female, purportedly from taking eight to eighteen Morison’s Pills daily. The death was traced to the intestines, where excessive irritation supposedly caused the bowels to stop acting: “The bowels could hardly be said to have acted for two or three days before her death, as there was nothing in them to be acted on” (605). The article also alludes to similar cases and suggests that Morison’s pills may have contained a large amount of conium.¹ The “irritating substance” (605) remained in the intestines and “the portions so affected were well marked from healthy parts”(605).

What continually frustrates Lancet writers is the legal system’s unwillingness to purge society of the chief culprits in these cases, the quacks themselves. An 1835 article relates yet another inquest held for a victim of quackery. Why, the author asks, is the distributor (apothecary) punished and the “chief culprit” [Morison himself] allowed to go free? Is there anything in Morison’s character to redeem him from punishment? Morison is, according to the author, no better than a man who “plunges a knife into the bosom of his neighbor” (833).

This silent killer was brought to court multiple times, each time with mixed results. Another Lancet article entitled “The Poison Vendor Morison versus ‘The Dispatch,’” details a court case between Morison, the “man-slaughterer and pill-maker,” and two writers for the Weekly Dispatch newspaper. The writers had accused Morison of running away from creditors and producing pills as dangerous as plagues. Although the writers admitted that the former accusation was false, they were willing to stand behind the latter by calling a professor of chemistry to analyze the contents of Morison’s pills. The defendants also remarked that, when a few pills did not work, patients were told to take even more—until they died. Witnesses for Morison attested to the powers of his pill, but the author compares these gullible people to those seduced by Joanna Southcote² or Prince Hohenlohe. The author notes that, according to the 1815 Apothecaries statute, Morison is unqualified to produce these pills and should be persecuted as such.

Clearly, quacks like Morison stain the honor of a civilized England:

What a spectacle has this trial exhibited in a civilized country! What a reflection it is upon the discernment of the public! What a stigma on the state of medicine! What a disgrace does it reflect upon the government! (765).

Using similar rhetoric, J.S. Wilson, an M.D. from Alabama, rails against empirics like Morison for their “charlatanry” and “base tricks” in the1835 Southern Medical and Surgical Journal. He figures “legitimate Medicine” as a hallowed art soiled by these impostors. Quacks prescribe nostrums without ascertaining their ingredients, and Wilson blames the poor state of medical education for this phenomenon. A reformer, he hopes to improve medical credentials and simultaneously improve information presented to the populace. He suggests that doctors publish their own medical almanac—publications usually written by alternative healers—to educate the populace more effectively. The public would undoubtedly be convinced to embrace standardized medicine and reject uneducated quacks.

Selected prints from William Helfand’s recent collection (aptly entitled Quack, Quack, Quack) illustrate that the press often acted in this capacity as regards to Morison, delighting in anti-Morisonian humor. An anonymous hand-colored 1835 lithograph entitled “Oh! Mam I’ve Got So Thin, That Only One Person Can See Me at a Time” pictures a robust, well-dressed woman talking to a patient who is, literally, all skin and bones. Eight open cases of Morison pills sit on the table by the patient’s side.

Another lithograph by Charles Jameson Grant shows two men, one with wooden legs and crutches, the other carrying a set of crutches he no longer needs. The caption, poking fun at both Morison’s promises and the social class typical of Morison’s patients, reads:

I bought a Box of Morrison’s Uniwersal Wegetable Pills, for a Swelling in my Thighs. Well, so I took’em all afore I went to Bed and when I awakes in the morning to kick of the clothes I’m bless’d if I didn’t find myself with these ‘ere Couple of Jolly good Legs and my Old Wooden ones right at the bottom of the Bed!!! (Helfand 120).

Clearly, this print mocks both Morison’s often ludicrous claims…and the types of people who believed them.

Morison’s Revolution

Yet it was precisely a democratic ethos Morison relied on to reject standard medical knowledge and embrace his more unconventional creeds. Instead of only selling his pills for profit, he and the College also espoused a philosophy: one which disagreed with and staged a “total revolution” (Health… 229) against standard medical knowledge. Utilizing Biblical hyperbole, Morison’s writings established a new covenant with a world-weary public. His rhetoric hearkens back to a Galenic emphasis on the humours, balance, universality, and purity.

This rhetoric is expounded in Morisoniana, the collection of Morison’s works propagated by the British College of Health. On the title page, Morison introduces his aggressive revolution against standard medicine: “THE OLD MEDICAL SCIENCE IS COMPLETELY WRONG” (ii), he writes. “Every one may now be his own doctor and surgeon, at a cheap rate, and enjoy a sound mind in a sound body”(ii). Both aggression against medical practitioners and democratic rhetoric color the entire 600 page “manual.”

The first of Morison’s works compiled in this anthology, “Origin of Life and Cause of Diseases,” provides some of his most interesting rhetoric. The byline itself reads “by James Morison, THE HYGEIST,” a name, used by both Morison and his followers, which implies access to the realities of health care. Morison’s theory, reiterated numerous times, is that “Blood forms the Body—Air gives it Life” (5); any more specific attempts at diagnosis are, as he states, “superstitious theories and practices of the medical profession”(6). Among the most superstitious of these are the ideas of the “vitality” of different body parts, sympathetic affections, and inflammation; in Morison’s doctrine, every part of the body merely serves to contribute to the whole. This whole is, in fact, merely a covering designed to protect the blood, the vital element: “…the blood forms this habitation or covering for itself, which is called the body”(6).

In “Some Important Advice to the World…,” Morison begins to list various diseases and emphasize how they can all be cured by purgation. This byline reads “James Morison, Gent. NOT A DOCTOR,” testifying to his anti-medical views. Purging harmful humours or elements restores people to an originally pure state, again that intended by God. Why, he asks, would God have “showered” so many differing illnesses upon us? “The sun,” he writes, “shines alike for all” (97). If the healthiest can become ill, the most sick can be cured, he proclaims. Morison uses the Biblical images knowingly, saying that a healer like himself must have the “fervour of an apostle” (98).

This fervour is often used to attack the medical establishment: doctors who bleed the patient instead of preserving that most precious resource, surgeons who constantly cut, and an establishment that promotes dissection.³ Supposedly drawing from accounts presented in “that weekly castigator, the Lancet,” (582), Morison writes of the workings of the university and hospital systems which sanction public dissections:

… the eternal thirst for grubbing in the rotten carcasses of the dead urges them on to the abettory of murder, and the encouragement of the vilest of atrocities, by having their private doors open for the reception of the purposely-murdered subjects of dissection! (583).

While orthodox medicine becomes akin to murder, Morison’s pills can cleanse and purify a physically and socially impure society. “Mothers will secure the certainty of sound and perfect children” (584), and “the truth [will] shine forth at last” (582), he proclaims triumphantly.

Triumph seemed to be the order of the day for nostrum-makers; an advertisement for Morison’s pills boasts up to 300,000 cases of cure. The cases chronicled point out the pills’s democratic nature; although Porter does demonstrate that both wealthy and poor utilized quack medicines, the fact remains that the poor could more easily afford a few boxes of pills than an expensive medical practitioner. This, too, plays into Morison’s rhetoric of holistic healing—in this case, a healing across social strata. Examples of people healed by Morison’s Pill include “Wm. Williamson, tin-plate worker…cured of tightness of the chest, shortness of Breath, and very severe cough,” “C. Jackson, Afflicted with Boils all over the Head and Body; cured in one week,” “Mr. T. Coles, Draper…cured of ossification of the heart,” and “Captain Downe…cured of congestion of the brain.” Tellingly, the advertisement, as well as the testimonials found in Morisoniana, tend to focus more on those in working-class jobs.

This democratic, humanistic argument is exactly that put forth by most early nineteenth-century fringe⁴ practitioners. Both J.F.C. Harrison and Porter (Health for Sale) have pointed out that many fringe practitioners also supported “fringe”—democratic—political movements like Chartism. Harrison argues that, in addition to democratic values, many of these fringe practitioners echoed Morison in arguing for a return to the principles of Nature:

Owenites criticized competitive, industrial capitalism on the grounds that it was based on a fragmented, atomistic, partial view of what a society should be like. The social system, they claimed, should cater to the needs of all people and of the whole person. The central Chartist demand of universal suffrage was aimed at extending the political nation to the whole of the people, instead of just a section of them (Harrison 204).

This democratic, holistic impulse also carried through to fringe practitioners’ religious beliefs. Most reacted against strict Anglicanism, practicing dissenting religions instead. Although many had an Evangelical or Calvinist upbringing, many also reacted against these. By emphasizing inner experience instead of outward forms, and “the consequent elevation of the individual at the expense of corporate or social effort” (Harrison 207), dissenting beliefs fit right in with the ethos of fringe medical movements: movements like Morison’s own.

This theoretical focus on the people helps “the hygeists” place themselves in opposition to an elitist, corrupt medical establishment. Echoing Morison’s own parallels between doctors and murderers, an anonymous 1846 wood engraving entitled “Downfall of the Colleges of Discord; the Hygeian Hercules Cleansing the Augean Stables” depicts wigged doctors, wearing labels like “fees” and “license to kill,” being swept up by a very muscular, Herculean likeness of Morison.

On the left side of the print, the Royal College of Physicians crumbles while the immaculate British College of Health stands on the “rock of truth”(Helfand 123). “Medical Confessions of Medical Murder,” another wood engraving commissioned by the College of Health itself, depicts twelve scenes of doctors committing illegal, murderous acts.

The first scene depicts a doctor poisoning his patient; the second is similar to the “Augean Stables” print in that Morison sweeps medical rubbish into a trash bin. The third illustrates doctors applying leeches and a formidable looking glister⁵ to “save” an obviously dying patient. The third illustrates doctors applying leeches to a crying child, and the fourth shows a group of doctors, most likely at an anatomy theatre, cutting off a patient’s leg. Most of the illustrations thereafter repeat these themes, illustrating the corruption of contemporary medicine.

Purity Commercialized

Both Morison and the licensed doctors thrived on called each other corrupt; although ostensibly for different reasons, both rely heavily on a notion of purification. The notion of a healthy, impermeable system dominates the rhetoric of both sides. This rhetoric is most obvious in Morison’s testimony concerning his “natural” pills, especially in his Ten Commandments:

1. The vital principle is contained in the blood.

2. Blood makes blood.

3. Everything in the body is derived from the blood.

4. All constitutions are radically the same.

5. All diseases arise from the impurity of the blood, or in other words, from acrimonious humours lodged in the body.

6. This humour which degenerates the blood has three sources, the maternine, the contagious and the personal.

7. Pain and disease have the same origin; and may therefore be considered synonymous terms.

8. Purgation by vegetables is the only effectual mode of eradicating disease.

9. The stomach and bowels cannot be purged too much.

10. From the intimate connection subsisting between the mind and the body, the health of one must conduce to the serenity of the other (Porter 230).

If the body merely covers the blood, expunging impure elements from the blood can and will effect any cure, including cures for mental illnesses. “The blood is the person, the individual himself; the mind is in the blood, as are all other senses and feelings” (Morisoniana 7). Through pre-natal influences, illnesses, or faulty habits and diet, this purity can be compromised, but Morison promises that “every individual, even the most diseased, has within him a germ or root of the original pure blood of our common mother Eve” (Morisoniana 12). Purity becomes, again and again, an Edenic state, and pure or good health often becomes encoded in Biblical metaphors.

Purity:

These themes also resonate in an 1840 broadside, sanctioned by the British College of Health, entitled “Truth of the Hygeian System, Illustrated by Hygeists.”

The first tree, the hygeian tree, is “drained of all impurities”; “drainage is to a tree, what proper purging is to the human body.” Here, the hygeian system is depicted as a pure venture that treats the human body as a whole: “Are not trees and plants treated as a WHOLE? So should it be with the human body.” The second tree, the organic or doctors’ system, is clearly in decay—and, I may add, obstructed by words. The print is microscopic, but a small stall reads “To Let: Lancet & Co,” referring to the publication, owned by Thomas Wakely, that catered to medical professionalization. Various branches of the tree are labeled “asthma,” “cancer,” and “dropsy,” but the organic system⁶ prevents one from viewing the tree as a whole. Again, Morison’s endeavor is true, pure, and inclusive.

Wakely and his colleagues often viewed an excessive reliance on “nature” as dangerous to the body, mocking the large number of pills recommended by Morison. A Grant print mocks the large number of pills recommended by Morison. Here, a green grocer, caught in the rain after taking 132 boxes of the pills, wakes up sprouting branches instead of limbs.

This excessive reliance on nature may have been laughable to licensed doctors, but they shared Morison’s concerns regarding purity. Again and again, Lancet articles argue to establish the purity of the medical profession. In fact, reformers like Beddoes rail against both quacks and general practitioners for sullying medical honor by catering excessively to commercial interests.

Ironically, neither Morison nor the medical reformers could argue their version of purity without considerable publication and advertising—commercialization. Remember the anti-quackery society’s argument that the press “vomits forth” advertisements to benefit Morison? That same society argues that the only way to effect change is to publish pamphlets of their own: pamphlets which will inform and “educate” patients.

This “education” was widespread and involved an elaborate commercial venture. I have already pointed out that Morison’s agents worked all over the world; news of his pills and other nostrums was also profuse, especially in America. Although Morison and his cohorts revel in the “circulation” of their pure product, Morison’s pills could not circulate outside of a hierarchical establishment (the British College of Health) and the cash nexus. Since the 1815 Apothecaries Act forbade the selling of unlicensed drugs, quacks subverted the rule by paying parliament a licensing fee in the form of a stamp tax⁷ (Brown 301). Morison’s pills, for instance, came sealed in paper strips which displayed payment, in this case £150,000 (Advertisement...).

Morison attacked doctors for charging high fees, but he himself was attacked for making money off of gullible people. George Cruikshank’s 1833 print entitled “The Fox and the Goose” comically illustrates this attitude. Based on a parable, the devious fox outwits the gullible geese by selling them Morison’s pills. Standing on a box of these pills, the fox—representing Morison himself—tells the geese that “My Universal Pills are quite divine! If one don’t do, you may take nine.” The poem written below the print articulates both medical and public opinions against Morison:

A Fox there is who has such Knowledge
That his dwelling House he calls a “COLLEGE”
And Geese flock to him from all quarters
Bringing Wives & Sons & Daughters
He tells the Geese, that their ills he’s able
To cure with his pills of Vegetable.
And so Goose thinks he can, good lack!
For “Cackle” hath great faith in “Quack”—
So he lives on Goose each day I ween.
His House is built on “Ganders Green,”
His Carriage wheels on “Goose Grease” turn
He Fat of Goose for oil doth burn.
He plucks their feathers for his Bed.
On Down of Goose he lays his head.
He gets his Goose & eke his Stuffing
By Cramming Geese with pills and puffing:
He writes his puffs with “Grey Goose quill”
Of “Goose-berry-fool” he has his fill.
He makes GOOSE pay his “COLLEGE” rent
And calls himself the “PRESIDENT!”
And not in trifles over nice
‘ Tis he himself enacts the “Vice!”
And tho’ tis strange ‘tis also true
He his himself the “Members” too!
Another “COLLEGE” there is I ween
Which may in Newman Street be seen
And there two foxes, “Charles and John”
Carry the very same System on.
(Helfand 126)

Unlike the Lancet editors and the majority of prints, which focus on the medical dangers of taking Morison’s pills, this poem points out what Beddoes had earlier critiqued: the dangers of selling pills for profit. The fox burns “fat of goose for oil” and uses unsuspecting geese to “pay his rent.” His carriage wheels—implying a certain social status—turn on “goose grease.” Like modern presidents of successful pharmaceutical companies, Morison makes his fortune off of others’s ill health.

Individuation and Institutionalization

Does it matter who these geese are? Where they come from? What they feel or think? Cruikshank clearly believed that it did not matter to Morison, and Morison argues that it does not matter to “organic” doctors who dissect and look at only body parts, not people.

Perhaps both sides were correct. If Morison and his colleagues only viewed people as uniform packets of blood shrouded by bodies, medical science probed inside to look at their individual organs. Probing deeper and looking inside are important tropes of this time, not only in medicine but also in fields as disparate as psychology and literature. This cultural desire to look inside resulted in a number of discoveries important to “scientific” medicine; Lannaec, for instance, discovered the stethoscope in 1819. As Foucault argues, illnesses now became more than a collection of external symptoms (163). Without touching the individual body, as had been done with the previous methods of auscultation and tapping, the doctor could hear the inside workings. Clearly, a more comprehensive knowledge of anatomy,⁸ made possible through the recent allowances for dissections, helped in the search for internal truths.

Probing even deeper into the secrets of the body, scientists attempted to explain the mystery of the cell. Theodore Schwann (1810-82) argued that certain diseases could form new cells out of blastema; again demonstrating the fuzzy line between humoralism and “scientific” medicine, Rokanitsky theorized that diseases were caused by an imbalance of proteins in the blood. If this imbalance were fixed, the cell would function properly, effectively purging the body of disease symptoms. This sense of balance as cure clearly resonates with Morison’s philosophies (Porter, Greatest Benefit, 329-30). However, whereas Morison simply assumed that purgation would restore bodily balance, cell theorists had to isolate cells and examine them with a microscope. Incredibly individualistic, this type of probing is also, paradoxically, disengaged.

In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault connects the growth of the scientific hospital with the development of the “individual.” However, as Morison himself argued, hospitals get to know people by probing, examining their various organs or, in extreme cases, dissecting. “The Gaze that envelops, caresses, details, atomizes the most individualized flesh and enumerates its secret bites is that fixed, attentive, rather dilated gaze which, from the height of death, has already condemned life” (Foucault 171). Victor Frankenstein had immense knowledge of individual body parts, but what did he know of his completed creature?

How does any institution emphasize mass purification and still maintain this focus on the individual? Morison’s followers would label their focus on nature as pure and healthy, while more orthodox practitioners would volley back that they, unlike quack apothecaries, could actually see and examine their patients. Yet this very examination would often, as I have pointed out, reduce the individual to a collection of loosely connected body parts.

All of these discourses reflect the Victorian social anxieties inherent in this paradox: while the individual cannot exist without corporate and/or social effort, these very efforts prevent that same individual from existing in a self-enclosed, “pure” realm. I’ll begin by exploring “social” effort. If an individual is really only an individual when others know of her or him, individuality must be based on social effort. Thoreau, an individual par excellence, had to write about his project at Walden Pond to be seen as such; although Morison’s ideas concerning health are fascinating, he truly becomes an individual when he writes his own health biography. A hermit without any connection to society, never seen by others, cannot earn the title, nor can a sick person without any connection to doctors. Jonathan Sawday puts it well: “a feature of our sense of interiority is that it can never be experienced other than at second-hand. We may look into other bodies, but very rarely are we allowed to pry into our own” (7). The very notion of individuality implies the gaze of a collective society; this gaze, in turn, confutes the notion by dividing what, etymologically, should be indivisible.

As I have argued throughout this paper, the notion of a self-enclosed individual also requires corporate effort. This seems obvious in terms of the institutionalization of medicine, but counter-movements eventually require the circulation of (sometimes impure) funds. Someone had to publish Walden Pond for Thoreau to assert his individuality, and Morison clearly gained publicity through the growing field of advertising. His British College, the agents he hired, the complicit backing of both Parliament—via the stamp tax—and the legal system all contributed to the success of his Vegetable Pills.

The very effort at creating a unified, holistic “tree of health” becomes stymied by the complex social and commercial avenues required to do so. In an era of individuality, when health care requires the social gaze and, most frequently, money, can a tree of health exist without branches--a unified medical establishment? Without roots--an external holistic view of the body instead of an internalized, organic one? When do these roots and branches threaten the coherence of the tree itself? These anxieties clearly dominated much medical and extra-medical discourse. On the orthodox side, how does one institutionalize individuality without destroying the individual? On the fringe side, how does one really make “every man his own doctor” in a commercial economy?

These intersections of sometimes opposing ideals characterize not only early Victorian medicine but also society at large. Individuality ran up against and was defined by institutionalization in politics, religion, the family—indeed almost every facet of Victorian social life. In order to be a self or subject, one had to allow for osmosis from periodicals, the church, the government, and other players in an increasingly atomized society. A true individual might argue about current events at a coffee shop, join a dissenting church, oppose parliamentary measures, or take Morison’s pills, but actions, not presence, define what we now call individuality. To play into the ideology of individualism was to define or diagnose oneself, but this diagnosis required help from outside forces.

In 21st century America, we often view individualism in a way which echoes Morison’s rhetoric. We all want to be our “own person,” in some cases our “own doctor.” Yet individuality also requires some disengagement from the here and now of experience: an ability to step back and define the self. In Charles Taylor’s influential book, Sources of the Self, he connects this type of disengaged self-formation to Plato’s notion of self-mastery and Descartes’ notion of disengaged reason. Both remain important in the histories of scientific progress and medical discourse; Plato’s notion of self-mastery rests on an idea of balance. Analogous to humoral theories, this notion equates the “good” with moderation. A subject achieves self-mastery by moderating feelings of anger, lust, greed, and so on. Balance is obviously central to Morison’s theories of health, but it remains intact in scientific medicine: in, for instance, theories of cell permeability.

In order for the subject to achieve this balance, he/she must cultivate an objective view of subjective experiences. A woman, for instance, may examine her breasts and find a lump. The breast now becomes almost distinct from the woman herself: an object to be analyzed and brought under control. The woman remembers what she has read and, using what Descartes would call “disengaged reason,” consults her doctor. The doctor, too, examines the woman but focuses on this one body part, looking for signs of illness. A biopsy may be performed and examined by cell technicians who know nothing about the patient, but it is this disengaged reason which ultimately allows the patient to (literally) maintain her self.

This blatantly unromantic version of selfhood—a version focused on reasoning and detachment—comes into conflict with a romantic focus on self-expression and a Victorian emphasis of individual liberty. Self-expression, or what Taylor calls the “creative imagination” (395), rebels against the fetters of hierarchy and a rule-bound society. This is, I would venture to say, what we most often associate with individuality: painted hair, body piercings, or an unorthodox career choice. Self-expression is then interestingly linked to an evolving concept of democracy which erodes hierarchy and promotes greater and greater equality. Morison plays into this version of individuality by basically peddling democracy. A woman working at a grocery store could sell his pills to a carpet maker, who could then take as many as he could afford in order to cure himself without any intervention from the medical establishment.

Both versions of individuality work together in order to form what we now call the self. As Taylor puts it:

… those who condemn the fruits of disengaged reason in technological society or political atomism make the world simpler than it is when they see their opponents as motivated by a drive to “dominate nature” or to deny all dependence on others, and in fact conveniently occlude the complex connections in the modern understanding of the self between disengagement and self-responsible freedom and individual rights, or those between instrumental reason and the affirmation of ordinary life (504).

Disengaged reason is, then, necessary to a democratic notion of self, as is participation in society. The subject, the self, and the individual are all terms construed by, or at least in relation to, otherness. It is therefore logical that the notions of purity and wholeness, notions which governed this now-forgotten nineteenth century debate, could only resonate in an increasingly bureaucratic, organized society. However, Taylor’s compromise diminishes the tensions between “disengaged reason” and “individual rights”: a tension which continues to both shape and enchain the modern individual.

James Morison’s motto, “Every man his own doctor,” reveals the tensions between democratic and scientific individualism. It also reveals the tensions between cognizant selves and an increasingly impersonal social structure. Morison’s cure-all achieved its popularity not because of its ingredients but because of Morison’s rebellion against the social and mind-forged manacles which medical counter-movements simultaneously embraced and resisted.

Notes

1. Conium is only mentioned in this one articles as one of the ingredients of Morison’s pills. More commonly listed ingredients were gamboges, cream of tartar, and aloes.

2. Joanna Southcote (1750-1814) claimed to be a virgin pregnant with the new Messiah, “Shiloh.” She maintained a large following during her supposed pregnancy; doctors of the time diagnosed her actual condition as dropsy.

3. The 1832 Anatomy Act gave doctors the right to utilize unclaimed bodies for research purposes; this, of course, led to a morbid strain in literature which suggested that doctors somehow contributed to a number of murders.

4. In addition to herbalists and “natural” healers, the category of fringe commonly included spiritualists, mesmerists, phrenologists, vegetarians, and homeopaths (Harrison 198).

5. Glisters were often applied to provide internal moisture to patients, especially women. Resembling a large turkey baster, they were inserted into the patient either vaginally or rectally.

6. As opposed to a holistic view of the body like Morison’s, an organic view would entail looking at body parts as separate, almost unconnected entities.

7. Interestingly, the British stamp tax only ceased in 1941 (Brown 301).

8.This has been explored extensively in medical history scholarship; for the purposes of this paper, I will not explore dissection and its relation to the individual. Please consult Michael Sappol’s A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton University Press, 2002. Another excellent, albeit historically earlier, source about the ideologies surrounding dissection is Jonathan Sawday’s The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture.