Besides Arthur Morrison, another literary figure known for his writing on the East End slums at the end of the nineteenth century is Jack London, an American writer assigned by a newspaper to report on the degeneration and horror of the British
Empire. Jack London arrived in London in 1902 en route to report on the Boer War.9 When the war reporting project was canceled, he extended his stay in the slums of East End London to a stay of seven weeks. During his stay in London, the young journalist disguised himself and explored the darkest corner of the city slum, in spite of the warning from Thomas Cook’s, the famous traveler’s agents who could send him to “darkest Africa,”but refused to offer him help to get into the East End as they responded, “We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the East End; we receive no call to take them there, and we know nothing whatsoever about the place at all”
(London 3).
What Jack London wrote as he explored the darkest corner at the heart of the strongest empire on earth then was not merely an attempt to arouse voyeuristic interest on the part of his readers. What drew his attention were not just the almost grotesque figures and their miserable fates. Throughout the book, a particular
attention to the living environment and the health condition was always present. What Jack London saw was not merely wretched persons and their stories, but a setting that correlated to their fate, their filth, and their wretchedness:
And as far as I could see were the solid walls of brick, the slimy pavements, and the screaming streets; and for the first time in my life the fear of the crowd smote me. It was like the fear of the sea; and the miserable multitudes, street upon street, seemed so many waves of a vast and
malodorous sea, lapping about me and threatening to well up and over me.
(London 8)
9 Strictly speaking, Jack London visited London in 1902 and published his observations under the title The People in the Abyss in 1903. By the time Jack London wrote and published, the reigning monarch was no longer Queen Victoria but King Edward VII and the timing was no longer the nineteenth century. However, the shift in monarchs at the turn of the century did not offer a clear-cut divide; in many ways, the main concerns of his book were a continuation of themes from the previous century. In some ways, his book can even be regarded as the culmination of the concern over city slums by the end of the nineteenth century; that is why this book merits inclusion in my discussion.
Jack London soon found his attention drawn to the living environment as he set foot in this overcrowded part of the domestic domain. The experience accumulating from medical breakthroughs involving contagious diseases like cholera and new knowledge from medical experts such as Pasteur and Koch quickly found areas of application in the highly condensed population in East End London. Lack of space, lack of ventilation, ignorance of personal hygiene, lack of facilities for sustaining public health, all were included in his observations on the living environment:
Not only was one room deemed sufficient for a poor man and his family, but I learned that many families, occupying single rooms, had so much space to spare as to be able to take in a lodger or two. … Not only did the houses I investigated have no bath-tubs, but I learned that there were no bath-tubs in all the thousands of houses I had seen. … True, the sanitation of the places I visited was wretched. From the imperfect sewage and drainage, defective traps, poor ventilation, dampness, and general foulness, I might expect my wife and babies speedily to be attacked by diphtheria, croup, typhoid, erysipelas, blood poisoning, bronchitis, pneumonia, consumption, and various kindred disorders. Certainly the death-rate would be exceedingly high. (London 25–6)
By the time Jack London disguised himself in shabby clothes to explore the East End, transmission of many epidemics not previously understood had become clear to the general public. Cholera was a particularly prominent example. With decades of collaboration between medical knowledge and governmental policies, the reading public was now sufficiently educated about the transmission of diseases to regard unclean air, contaminated water, lack of sewage, ill-ventilated spaces, and even malnutrition as highly risky conditions leading to epidemic outbreaks. This sort of medical knowledge was known to London’s readers, and, of course, to the writer
himself. In Jack London’s narration, not only were the causes of contamination revealed, specific diseases were also associated with those causes. Thus in his description, we find a successful collaboration of medicine, public health, and
governmentality. Knowledge that had previously been owned exclusively by medical experts was now shared and transmitted with no clear origination. This sort of medical knowledge had been incorporated into the common-sense knowledge of a traveler like Jack London.
The city slum of London was described as organic in Jack London’s writing. Not only was the East End described as “the Abyss,”it was further termed as “a huge man-killing machine”where populations moving from surrounding rural areas around the metropolitan London were doomed to die corrupt at the bottom of the organic heap (London 47). According to London’s description, the young residents of slums would inevitably grow up into degenerate adults, “without virility or stamina, a weak-kneed, narrow-chested, listless breed, that crumbles up and goes down in the brute struggle for life”(London 47). The corrupting power of the slum was not visible, but, as in Morrison’s descriptions, to be smelled:
If nothing else, the air he breathes, and from which he never escapes, is sufficient to weaken him mentally and physically, so that he becomes unable to compete with the fresh virile life from the country hastening on to London Town to destroy and be destroyed. Leaving out the disease germs that fill the air of the East End, consider the one item of smoke. … And this sulphuric acid in the atmosphere is constantly being breathed by the London workmen through all the days and nights of their lives. (London 46)
A similar concern for living conditions, particularly ventilation, and reasonable space for each person, is also reflected in London’s observation. London noted the space allocated to each person in the city and worried about the lack of reasonable space for
individual activity: an implicit relationship of medical knowledge and practices of governmental control. Nearly through two-thirds of the book, Jack London quoted population statistics to support his observation:
There are 300,000 people in London, divided into families that live in one-room tenements. Far, far more live in two and three rooms and are as badly crowded, regardless of sex, as those that live in one room. The law demands 400 cubic feet of space for each person. In army barracks each soldier is allowed 600 cubic feet. Professor Huxley, at one time himself a medical officer in East London, always held that each person should have 800 cubic feet of space, and that it should be well ventilated with pure air.
Yet in London there are 900,000 people living in less than the 400 cubic feet prescribed by the law. (London 213)
If medicine was implicitly included in formulating the discourse about slums, then, by the end of the book, Jack London was demonstrating medicine as a solid component of the discourse of contagions. By the turn of the century, medicine had become a dominant force stimulating the exchange, interchangeability, and
transformation of discourses of disease. In a way, housing reform, disease prevention, and literary creation went hand-in-hand to form a seamless whole of the
late-nineteenth century medical discourse of contagions.
Conclusion
Narratives of contagions were not unique to the Victorians, nor were they phenomena exclusive to any historical period. Quite the contrary, contagions are as old as human civilization. To follow Foucault, discursive formations during certain periods of history were never merely a result of a sudden change in any one field of
study. At the center of Foucault’s concern is “a whole exact and articulated
knowledge”involved in “complex institutional systems.”Following Foucault, this chapter takes into account the history of medicine, the confrontation of different political sensibilities, the evolution of understandings of contagions, and the
interaction and associations between medicine, governance, and public imagination as they were shapedinto a“discursivepractice”(Foucault, Birth 11). Comparative study of the development of medicine, the burgeoning growth of London after the Industrial Revolution, the birth of public health, the advancement of bacteriology, should be combined with literary, journalistic, and sociological accounts of the slum areas of London, in order to provide a more comprehensive look at discursive practices of
“regularity”or “normality”in the late-nineteenth century medical discourse.
While reading about the exchange, interchange, and transformation of the discourses of contagions and governance in late Victorian London, I hope to explore the narratives of contagions in relation to medical advancements, social movements, and works of sociology and literature. With the formation of polarities of health and disease, empire and colony, and literary conceptions of self and other, an evolution of an episteme in contagions within and across the boundaries of late Victorian London was also formed. The rampant filth that boosted contagion in East End slums is not merely a background for analysis but, rather, a topic that involves a synthesis of medicine, literature, and cultural and social narratives. The model of polarity between health and disease sustains the formation of normalcy and abnormality in slum
narratives.
The perceiving subject at the center of medical discourse in the nineteenth century shifted from an awareness of dichotomy to that of transgression and
transformation. The previous model of confrontation between the observing subject and the observed object, which had been central in western culture since the time of
Socrates, was challenged and changed. The subject of cognition was now vulnerable to invisible and pervasive invasions, or at least attempts at invasion. What was at stake was no longer a concern over whether the subject could be shielded from possible attacks from without; it now became a question of to what degree the subject was influenced and transformed by externally imposed forces.
Chapter Four Ways of Seeing:
Sherlock Holmes, Contagionism, and the Medical Detective
“Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.”
—Louis Pasteur
“It is my business to know things. Perhaps I have trained myself to see what others overlook. If not, why should you come to consult me?”
—Sherlock Holmesin “A Case of Identity”
At the first floor exhibition room of Muséed’Orsay, a huge portrait always
attractsvisitors’attention.I,too,wasamong thecrowd worshiping thiswork ofart.In the center of this portrait is a bearded man in three-piece black suit, with a black bow tie, leaning gently against a laboratory desk. The man is well-dressed, different from the stereotyped crazy scientists in the tradition of literary narrations and the
presentation in media representation. His hair is nicely coiffed and moustache neatly kept. Viewers gathering in front of this portrait are attracted by theman’spenetrating gaze focusing on the test tube in his hand. He is holding a jar containing the spinal cord of a rabbit, which he used to develop a vaccine against rabies. Abundant light falls on the man in the portrait, and all his glistening glass scientific instruments lay outon thedesk,highlighting theman’spoiseand devotion on hispensiveface.The sign provided by the museum indicates that the man in the portrait is Louis Pasteur.
Pasteur has been widely considered one of the intellectual heroes that changed the path of human civilization. He is most well-known today for his invention of a
technique called “pasteurization,”the sterilization process widely applied in the wine and dairy industry. He was also the key person in the establishment of the theory and practice of vaccination. His discovery of micro-organisms and the confirmation of the link between certain microbes and infectious diseases sparked a series of great
discoveries and advancement of medical technology which is generally referred to as
“the golden age of bacteriology.”
Pasteur was considered a living legend in his lifetime. The portrait in the Musée d’Orsaydepicts a national pride for the French and an intellectual hero for others in many parts of the world. In 1885, a rabid dog ran loose in the streets of Newark, New Jersey, which mauled six children before it was killed. Devastated parents witnessed early signs of rabies in their children—hydrophobia, the compulsive and involuntary fear of water—and cried out for help. These words in despair reached Pasteur, who had just developed a method to treat and prevent this abomination and was more than willing to help. Donations flooded in for these parents and four of the children were sent to Paris for treatment. They were vaccinated with a strong dose of dried rabbit spinal cord tissue, the very material stored in the jar found in the portrait. One month later, the four children fully recovered and returned to Newark. As a result of this medical miracle and follow-up discoveries in microbiology, Pasteur was hailed as an advocate of the experimental method, his discoveries a triumph of intellectual pursuit, and a benefactor to mankind.
In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault demonstrates a research heavily dependent on the archives of medical development. The basic assumption of this book is that in the late eighteenth century, a new form of medical examination came into being which Foucault calls “anatomo-clinical”that led to a shift in the medical episteme at the turn of the century. This new form of medical examination was dependent upon two new forms of medical practice: the clinic as the site of medical education, and pathological
anatomy as the foundation of medical knowledge. He analyzed the birth of the clinic space where human bodies and diseases are examined under the gaze of the doctor;
hence the space of clinical diagnosis became one of power. Medical discourse started to be used to decipher symptoms as the text of an invisible disease disappeared and was replaced by a medicine of lesions and dissection. As a result, the anatomy of human bodies led to a change in the conception of the relationship between life and death: life was regarded at the invisible level and death observed at the visible level.
As Foucault terms this phenomenon as the “visible invisible,”he describes death as the vantage point of the medical gaze, from which disease can be seen. What Foucault indicates is not only a change in the episteme. The central concern is the assumption that as the episteme changed, the way human bodies were examined and the way human beings looked at their own bodies also changed. Here in the discovery and establishment of bacteriology, we witness a prominent example of how the invisible is seen under the medical gaze.
What Foucault terms as the “visible invisible”that occurred by the eighteenth century did not, however, change the way micro-organisms were imagined or observed, mostly because Foucault talked at the “anatomo-clinical”level instead of the micro-organic one. It was only with the breakthrough in “the golden age of bacteriology”that Victorians began to see things differently. My discussion here demonstrates another example of what Foucault describes as the change in the episteme.
Although visualizing the invisible threat to human health was not a new experience for the Victorians, it was beheld in a traditional humorist theory with a persistent urge to seek for balance between the inner self and outer elements. The maintenance of health had to be attained by an exclusionist assumption of curbing and preventing all possible miasmas from disturbing the perfect balance. All materials
regarded as harmful or at least threatening to human health, either visible or invisible to the naked eyes, were to be visualized and then cleansed promptly and pervasively.
In order to achieve and maintain the health of its population, Victorian England launched a series of slum cleansing and rebuilding projects at the governmental level.
Such sanitary narratives of sanitationism peaked with the enactment of the Contagious Diseases Acts and a series of urban cleansing policies and public health reforms beginning in the 1860s. As I argue in previous chapters, narratives drafted in this period bore evident traces of sanitationist health theory, in which human health threats were regarded as tangible. In order to highlight the uncleanliness of health threats, all susceptible sources of contamination and transmission were presented in forms perceivable to the observer, such as the smell and the filth in the city slums.
However, Pasteur illustrated a new way of seeing. If the previous ways of seeing emphasized a visualization of filth and foulness, then the new way of seeing inspired by Pasteurwasoneofpicturing theinvisiblematerials.Pasteur’sway ofseeing was, therefore, a form of imagination in the penetrating perception of substances invisible to human eyes and of an expectation of an intellectual hero safeguarding the
commonwealth of human health. The way to visualize and conceptualize threats to human health experienced a major breakthrough as the great golden age of
bacteriology launched a wave of transformation in the concept of contagions. It is generally agreed that after the great discovery of bacteria and a series of related breakthroughs from the 1880s onward, medical discourse was forced to undergo a transformation. Medical experts not only recognized the balance between man and the environment that contributed to public health, but also discovered the role of antigens which, intentionally administered, could induce acquired immunity. Ideas of
immunity largely enhanced the idea of a state of having sufficient biological defenses to avoid infection, disease, or other unwanted biological invasions. Such discoveries
of immune components acting as barriers or as eliminators of wide range of pathogens irrespective of antigen specificity sparked a collective imagination of a biological and social antibody that safeguarded the health of the public from any exterior
contamination. As a consequence, the causes behind visible symptoms were recognized and the discipline generally known as contagionism began to develop.
Doctors and medical scientists decisively changed medical evaluations and, with the help of medicine, man was able to see the once invisible with the naked eye and explored the once unreachable with their hands. Slum narratives in the 1880s and the
Doctors and medical scientists decisively changed medical evaluations and, with the help of medicine, man was able to see the once invisible with the naked eye and explored the once unreachable with their hands. Slum narratives in the 1880s and the