Roy Porter's Bodies Politic Analysis

Roy Porter’s Bodies Politic is a well-documented study, rich in illustrations of visual and literary representations, of the social and cultural attitudes towards health, disease, mortality and doctors in Britain from the seventeenth century to the end of the Victorian age. Though the time- frame is clearly stated in the title, Porter has briefly but sincerely traced the cultural history of healing and doctoring in Europe since the Classical times, both in spiritual and pathological senses, and discussed the changing portrayal of the doctor-figure in literature, lithographs and painting through the early and later Tudor periods, and the Jacobean age – before coming to the 1650s. He uses the religious attitudes in early modern England to study
Her focus is on the role of the Victorian doctor as a representative of objective, empirical science, and in this light, she shows the doctor-characters in conflict with the intersubjective, familial and emotional ethics of the typical middle-class Victorian life. Basically, her book examines the incompatibility between the marriage-plot in the Victorian novel, and the doctor-figure in general. The range and dynamics of Sparks’ choices of literary texts and character-types demand critical appraisal. Her approach to Victorian medical science is nevertheless simplified at times, especially when she tends to see the medical profession as a monolithic disciplinary view of empiricism, objectivity, and materialist science. As a result, her study seems wanting in a broader and deeper interdisciplinary consciousness. In an attempt to offer literary interpretation of all that medically happens in the novels, the argument sometimes shows a tendency towards generalization and simplification.
A clearer balance between “literalizing the medical” and “medicalizing the literary” can be found in Meegan Kennedy’s book-length study, Revising the Clinic: Vision, Representation and Knowledge in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel. She revisits the Foucauldian
However, most of the works on this subject are authored by scholars from the social sciences background. Psychoanalysis in Colonial India by Christiane Hartnack has been a valuable contribution to this line of critical approaches. It begins by showing how the burden and ‘guilt’ of imperialism often affected the sanity and sensibility of the British civilians living in India, and afterwards moves into the history of the psychoanalytic studies and practices in colonial India. Sudhir Kakar’s Shamans, Mystics and Doctors: A Psychological Inquiry into India and its Healing Traditions takes a reverse turn across time and history. It goes back to the pre-colonial, ancient times and explores the mystical, esoteric cults of ‘healing’ in ancient India. The Epilogue brings the journey back to modernity, showing how those early traditions can be understood in modern psycho-medical terms of the doctor-patient relationship. The book offers a close examination of the psychic, philosophical and ritual aspects of India’s old traditions of healing, often with references to Ayurvedic, Tantrik and other esoteric