The system working as it should

I’ll be honest; I’m prone to complain about those things I am “made” to do as a PhD student. But, delightfully, in the past (incredibly busy) week, I have doubly and duly reaped the benefits of submission to doing what I ought.

In my 16th & 17th c non-fiction prose readings course, the time has come for me to offer the class a presentation of my chosen course text, William Harvey’s Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus, more commonly known as De Mortu Cordis or, more familiarly, as On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals. First published (in Latin) in 1628, this text outlines Harvey’s discovery of how the circulatory system works.

Given my interest in Crooke (surely an understatement, if ever there was one), I chose Harvey’s work for obvious reasons. Harvey and Crooke were contemporaries in more than one sense. Not only is Harvey just a few years the younger, but both were members of the College of Physicians in London, both were anatomists (in a sense; Harvey was definitely the more active in the actual practice of dissection), and both were authors of medical texts. Both upset the system to some degree, although Crooke seems to have struggled more with the institution than did Harvey.

The two also differ, however, in a number of ways. Crooke studied medicine at Leiden, whereas Harvey earned his medical degree at Padua, and I wonder how much of a difference this made in their consequent medical careers. Crooke made zero contributions to science, whereas Harvey is widely celebrate for his work on circulation. Crooke had a stormy tenure as the keeper of Bethlem Hospital and died penniless; Harvey enjoyed greater personal repute and died fairly wealthy. Crooke made tenuous claims of being “physitian to His Majestie” James I, while Harvey enjoyed a long, profitable, and well-documented career in the service of two different English monarchs. Crooke’s book Mikrokosmographia was quite popular during his lifetime and is now largely forgotten; Harvey’s published works were largely scorned and widely contested during his lifetime but have since become canonical in multiple fields.

Although I have long been aware of Harvey and have come across various references to and information about him in my research on early modern medicine, this presentation afforded me my first chance to really focus on him and do some deeper reading. Harvey is a likewise intriguing figure, but (for me, at least) particularly as a foil for Crooke. I am not yet certain how Harvey will fit into my larger, longer-term project(s), but working on him has certainly provided a much-needed portion of my body of knowledge.

Interestingly, because of the way my real-life narrative has played out recently, my work on Harvey also tied neatly into the conference I’ve been attending this weekend. I actually give my Harvey presentation in class tomorrow evening, so I’ve been finishing up some of my reading while I’m in Seattle for PAMLA. On Friday I gave a paper on the influence of Spenserian allegory on Crooke’s book for a two-part panel on allegory, and this conference experience has been a particularly fruitful one, in the way of both professional connections and invigorating ideas. Here’s a summary of my personal highlights:

• Panel organizer Brenda Machosky (University of Hawai’i) is doing some exciting work on allegory, particularly as a juxtaposition to aesthetics; as part of a new book project, she is considering instances in which allegory is a necessary and irreplaceable mode of communication for ideas/concepts that might not otherwise be expressed, particularly in postcolonial literatures.
• Fellow panelist Layla Roesler (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon) introduced me (and much of the audience, I’d guess) to French poet/philosopher Yves Bonnefoy and his work on allegory and the concept of “presence.” I am very interested in his ideas, although unfortunately it seems that very little of his critical work has been translated into English.
• I met Mr. Simon May of Oxford, another fellow panelist, who is doing some very interesting work on Marlowe and Elizabethan politics and who, as I informed him yesterday, wins my award for Best Conference Buddy Ever.
• I made the acquaintance of several other interesting and engaged young early modern scholars, including Erin Weinberg of Queen’s University (check out her Shakespeare blog, “Bardolator“) and Penny Geng (USC).

Between the panel I read for and the five others I attended as an audience member, I was privileged to participate in some of the most interesting, insightful, thought-provoking, and invigorating real-time academic dialogue I have ever been privy to. PAMLA 2012 was everything a conference should be—which, unfortunately, happens less often than it should.

After this engaging weekend of history, literature, and language, I returned to my reading on Harvey, which included a chapter by Jarmo Pulkkinen titled “The Role of Metaphors in William Harvey’s Thought” from volume two of the book Philosophies of Technology (Brill, 2008). As you might imagine, Pulkkinen’s discussion of metaphor in scientific thought fed right into the myriad of ideas about the generation of knowledge in early 17th c London swirling around in my head after the conference. The reading I do just seems to generate further questions (as well it should, I suppose): How exactly do we define metaphor and allegory? How are they different, and what is the relationship between them? What is the the function of allegory in early modern pre-scientific thought and protoscientific writing? Is allegory/metaphor absolutely necessary to the rhetoric of texts like Crooke’s and Harvey’s? How? Why? Are there other creative tropes at work in these texts? Are they also essential? How do these modes contribute to the development of scientific thought in the mid- to later 17th century? How is this tied to British national identity, as Spenser and Sidney work to build an English school of literature and Crooke, seemingly heavily influenced by such predecessors, strives to establish a distinctly English school of anatomy? How does it influence early modern concepts of individual identity, giving the intimately physically personal nature of anatomy and medical work? My “further reading” list at this point includes Max Black, Jon Whitman, Benedict Anderson, and Paul de Man, although if anyone has suggestions to add, I welcome them.

You may also notice that this line of questioning sounds something like a potential dissertation project. Which means that I seem to be pursuing two somewhat related but largely disparate lines of inquiry (see my previous post), one of which can become my diss and one which must be delegated to the proverbial “second book”/back-burner status. On one hand I have the prosopographical study of the early 17th c medical practitioners in London operating on the periphery of the College of Physicians; as an English literature disseration, I think this would essentially boil down to an exploration of literary representations of, and/or perhaps by, this group. (As one example, Middleton’s play The Changeling  features the character of a “mad” doctor named Alibius, for whom Crooke has been suggested as the inspiration.) On the other I go the daunting route of philosophy of language, exploring allegory and other literary tropes as means by which medical knowledge is discovered/developed/communicated, consequently contributing to the formation of English identity, both individual and national. Or perhaps these two seemingly divergent avenues are related in a way I haven’t yet recognized… I suppose only more reading (and writing, and talking!) will tell.

Looking ahead: This afternoon, before I leave Seattle, I am heading over to the Health Sciences Library at the University of Washington to view a 1651 copy of Mikrokosmographia – look for a blog post about it later this week!