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Chemical Romance: Genre and Materia Medica in Late-Victorian Drug Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 April 2019

Christy Rieger
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Extract

Despite Macfie's vivid assertion, studies of Victorian medicine and literature have not paid special attention to the pharmaceutical field, perhaps because of its messy associations with trade or inferiority to more respected healing practices. After all, it is Doctor Lydgate's refusal to prescribe the expected drugs in Middlemarch that proves his commitment to evidence-based Parisian medicine. As I aim to demonstrate, however, pharmacy and its products have a distinct and two-edged history in late-Victorian England. Medical writers increasingly assert the scientific authority and physiological promise of pharmacology. At the same time, they begin to show interest in the romance of drugs: their origins in alchemy and the occult, harvesting in the furthest outreaches of empire, and, at home, display in the magical space of the chemist's shop. This productive tension between medicinal drugs as stuff of ancient mystery and sign of medical progress informs their depiction in the transforming drug narratives of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Arthur Machen's “Novel of the White Powder” (1895), and Rudyard Kipling's “Wireless” (1902). Bringing romance and drugs together invites readers to think about their respective claims to invigorate, transport, even remake the self.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , Summer 2019 , pp. 409 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

The author thanks the curator and librarians at the F. C. Wood Institute of the History of Medicine at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia for their expertise and support in the form of a Wood Institute Travel Grant. She also extends deepest thanks to Natalie Mera Ford and Jeffrey Roessner for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts.

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