One month after the passing of the Comstock Law, Rebecca Harding Davis began serializing Berrytown in Lippincott’s monthly magazine. Such an urgency of timing may suggest that the subject matter responds directly to suppression of medical knowledge and social hygiene discourse. In the climactic scene, in which Dr. Maria Haynes Muller decides to confess her feelings to Dr. John McCall, the reader finds Dr. Muller “lecturing,” “chattering for two hours on cervical, dorsal and lumbar vertebrae, without stopping to take a breath,” and “fumbling over [her mankin’s] bones” in the process. Dr. Muller is teaching a social hygiene, or sex education, class at the water cure facility, which Davis well knows violates the conditions of Comstock law. Despite this legalized censorship, two years later, Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins, or The Aunt-Hill emerges in St. Nicholas: A Monthly Magazine for Boys and Girls promoting a similar social hygiene education scene. Intent on turning his recently orphaned ward Rose Campbell into a healthy, vibrant teenager, Dr. Alec Campbell teaches Rose anatomy and physiology to the embarrassment of her aunts, Alec’s sisters. Like Dr. Muller, readers find Rose playing with her manikin as she “counted vertebrae, and waggled a hip-joint in its socket with an inquiring expression.” Her inquiring expression should signal to the reader Rose’s curiosity toward reproductive health, for the “hip-joint” is structurally located around a contested female sex organ: the uterus.

Scholars have long characterized nineteenth-century medical theory and practice as driven by what historians call “medical materialism” and contemporary theorists call “biological determinism,” defined as the prevailing belief among physicians that one’s sex organs determine social and cultural roles. Historians John S. Haller and Robin M. Haller further emphasize the role of materiality in their assessment of the nineteenth century as the “nervous century,” in which neurasthenia defined the industrialized man and hysteria defined the industrialized woman. Yet literary theorist Kyla Schuller updates this scholarly impression. The recursive deployment of affect and impressibility resulting from a legacy of Lamarckian evolution suggests that the operative notion of the body in nineteenth-century scientific writing was sociobiological indeterminism rather than biological determinism. Nineteenth-century scientists theorize the body as a “biocultural formation,” molded by both material and cultural processes. Such narratives do not simply prefigure contemporary theories of new materialism and social construction.