“Let Me Die in Your House”: Cardiac Distress and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century British Medicine

Abstract

This essay examines the prevalence of a romantic discourse (e.g., associated with the genre of romance) in nineteenth-century British treatises on diseases of the heart. The nineteenth century brought remarkable changes to cardiac medicine, from the stethoscope to the sphygmograph, rendering medical practice increasingly clinical. However, case histories of cardiac disorders from this period maintain a surprising frequency of three affective elements: sensationalism (exaggerated, dramatic, and shocking events and language), sentimentalism (pathos and melancholy), and imagined experience, where the narrator projects himself imaginatively into the lived experience of his subject. British cardiac texts during these professionalizing decades repeatedly use the ambiguous term “distress” to describe the symptoms of heart disorders but also the observer’s subjective response to the patient’s evident suffering. These “distressing” texts demonstrate how nineteenth-century British physicians narrativized their sympathy during a period we usually associate with the distancing of the patient-physician relationship.

Nobody Dies Alone in the Electronic Patient Record—A Qualitative Analysis of the Textual Practices of Documenting Dying and Death

“…This induces society at large to focus on the likelihood that healthcare crises will be resolved by medical interventions, and "dying becomes a medical event rather than a natural event in which medicine plays a part" (Walter, 2017, p. 18). Previous research on genre has shown that the medical genre is shaped by current views of medicine and society (Kennedy, 2014;Aaslestad, 2016). We argue that this medicalisation (Walter, 2017) also influences the documentation of dying, a consequence of which is the alienation of human suffering.…”

“…Unlike literary texts, Pomata (2014) argues, medical texts are part of an epistemic genre that has evolved in relation to science because their main purpose is to transmit knowledge about a patient and treatment rather than producing meaning as such. Another relevant aspect of medical texts as a genre is found in Kennedy's analysis of medical cases from patients with heart failure in the nineteenth century (Kennedy, 2014). She discovered that although medical realism and clinical discourses are ubiquitous in medical texts, the genre sometimes "displays a range of discursive approaches beyond the clinical by expressing empathy towards the patient's condition" (p. 106).…”

Bloody technology: the sphygmograph in asylum practice

“…One of the tracings reproduced by Greenlees (1887 : 483) is striking in its inscription of the event of death itself, captioned ‘Dying from a series of Epileptic fits’. Here, the instrument takes on an almost supernatural quality, illustrating ‘the drama of the heart for Victorian physicians’ ( Kennedy, 2014 : 116). Patients with relatively rare diagnoses also provoked interest: in the 1880s a male West Riding patient diagnosed with locomotor ataxia had three tracings taken before being discharged.…”