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STUDIES IN MOBILITIES,
LITERATURE, AND CULTURE
Medicine and Mobility in

Nineteenth-Century
British Literature,
History, and Culture
Edited by
Sandra Dinter
Sarah Schäfer-Althaus
Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture
Series Editors
Marian Aguiar
Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Charlotte Mathieson
University of Surrey
Guildford, UK
Lynne Pearce
English Literature & Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
This series represents an exciting new publishing opportunity for scholars
working at the intersection of literary, cultural, and mobilities research.
The editors welcome proposals that engage with movement of all kinds –
ranging from the global and transnational to the local and the everyday.
The series is particularly concerned with examining the material means
and structures of movement, as well as the infrastructures that surround
such movement, with a focus on transport, travel, postcolonialism, and/
or embodiment. While we expect many titles from literary scholars who
draw upon research originating in cultural geography and/or sociology in
order to gain valuable new insights into literary and cultural texts, propos-
als are equally welcome from scholars working in the social sciences who
make use of literary and cultural texts in their theorizing. The series invites
monographs that engage with textual materials of all kinds – i.e., film,
photography, digital media, and the visual arts, as well as fiction, poetry,
and other literary forms – and projects engaging with non-western litera-
tures and cultures are especially welcome.
Sandra Dinter • Sarah Schäfer-Althaus
Editors
Medicine and Mobility

in Nineteenth-
Century British
Literature, History,
and Culture
Editors
Sandra Dinter Sarah Schäfer-Althaus
University of Hamburg University of Koblenz
Hamburg, Germany Koblenz, Germany
ISBN 978-3-031-17019-5 ISBN 978-3-031-17020-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
Chapters ‘Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and
Culture: An Introduction’, ‘Embodied Interdependencies of Health and Travel in Henry
James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, ‘Upright
Posture and Gendered Styles of Body Movements in The Mill on the Floss’, ‘White Fluff/
Black Pigment: Health Commodity Culture and Victorian Imperial Geographies of
Dependence’ and ‘From Heroic Exploration to Careful Control: Mobility, Health, and
Medicine in the British African Empire’ are licensed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/). For further details see licence information in the chapters.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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Acknowledgements
The initial idea for this volume was born amid lively discussions at the
conference “Locating Intersections of Medicine and Mobility in
Nineteenth-Century Britain”, held back in October 2019 in the beautiful
historic library of the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-
Nuremberg (FAU). Little did we know that, for the time being, it would
be our last chance to welcome colleagues from Europe and the USA to
Germany in person, to listen to their presentations, and to enjoy food,
drinks, and even songs together at the conference dinner. This gathering
would have been impossible without the generous funding of the Fritz
Thyssen Foundation, and the Dean’s Office of the School of Humanities,
Social Sciences, and Theology at FAU, for which we are very grateful.
Many thanks go too to Doris Feldmann for her support and interest in the
project from its early stages, and to our former student assistants, Margret
Gareis and Nicolas Löw, for helping us with the preparations for this event.
We are especially obliged to Charlotte Mathieson, who, during one of
the coffee breaks, encouraged us to turn our ideas into a proposal for an
edited collection in the Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture series.
We would like to thank her and her co-series editors Marian Aguiar and
Lynne Pearce for the opportunity to publish our book as part of the series.
Our contributors, whose insights into medicine and mobility in the nine-
teenth century form the heart of this volume, have been brilliant to work
with, and we would like to thank them for their time, commitment, and
patience. Special thanks, moreover, go to Allie Troyanos, Paul Smith
Jesudas, Brian Halm, and Immy Higgins at Palgrave Macmillan for all
their work in producing this book. We would also like to acknowledge the
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
excellent feedback we received from our anonymous reviewer. We are

grateful to our editorial assistant, Marie Kluge, for her invaluable help in
preparing the manuscript.
When we planned our collaboration back in the summer of 2018, we
were blissfully unaware of the extent to which medicine and mobility
would not only keep us preoccupied as the themes of our volume but also
infiltrate our daily lives. First, two uncannily timed medical incidents
immobilised both of us simultaneously for several weeks, turning us into
the protagonists of two twenty-first-century medical case reports in need
of rest cures. If this did not remind us enough of the vulnerability of our
own bodies, the subsequent outbreak of the coronavirus certainly did.
The pandemic showed us more dramatically than ever before that as
mobile matter not only can disease bring even the most globalised world
to a sudden standstill but also that there are undeniable parallels between
the debates on medicine, mobility, and the body of the nineteenth and the
twenty-first centuries.
June 2022 Sandra Dinter

Sarah Schäfer-Althaus
Contents
1 Medicine
and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British
Literature, History, and Culture: An Introduction 1
Sandra Dinter and Sarah Schäfer-Althaus
Part I Travel and Health 27
2 Doctors’
Ships: Voyages for Health in the Late
Nineteenth Century 29
Sally Shuttleworth
3 Watering
Holes: Healthy Waters and Moral Dangers in
the Nineteenth-Century Novel 53
Pamela K. Gilbert
4 Embodied
Interdependencies of Health and Travel in
Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the d’Urbervilles 75
Natasha Anderson
5 (Mental)
Health and Travel: Reflections on the Benefits of
Idling in the Victorian Age 97
Heidi Lucja Liedke
vii
viii CONTENTS
Part II Pathologising Mobilities 119
6 Upright
Posture and Gendered Styles of Body
Movements in The Mill on the Floss121
Monika Class
7 The
Mobility of Water: Aquatic Transformation and
Disease in Victorian Literature145
Ursula Kluwick
8 A
“Feverish Restlessness”: Dance as Decadent Mobility in
Late Victorian Poetry165
Stefanie John
9 The
Wandering Irish: Mobility and Lunacy in Mid-
Nineteenth-Century Lancashire187
Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland
Part III Mobilities and Medical Regimens 211
10 Exposure,
Friction, and “Peculiar Feelings”: Mobile Skin
in Victorian Medicine and Literature213
Ariane de Waal
11 White
Fluff/Black Pigment: Health Commodity Culture
and Victorian Imperial Geographies of Dependence235
Monika Pietrzak-Franger
12 From
Heroic Exploration to Careful Control: Mobility,
Health, and Medicine in the British African Empire259
Markku Hokkanen
Index281
Notes on Contributors
Natasha Anderson is Doctoral Research Fellow at Johannes Gutenberg

University Mainz examining “The Body and the Book: Visceral Reading
Experiences in the Victorian Novel” as part of the project “The Visceral
Novel Reader,” funded by the German Research Foundation. She earned
her MA in American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University
Mainz and attained her BA in English and History at the University
of Stuttgart. She spent a year abroad at Marymount University in
Virginia and represented Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in
the Institute for World Literature 2019 at Harvard University. Most
recently, she co-organised two virtual international workshops, pub-
lished an article in the online Journal of European Periodical Studies,
and presented at conferences in Germany, Greece, and Ireland as well as
virtually in Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the USA.
Monika Class is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Lund University
and Principal Investigator of “The Visceral Novel Reader”, funded by the
German Research Foundation, which is the title of an article (Literature
and Medicine 34.2, 2016) and her second monograph in progress. She
acted as Junior Professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
and as Postdoctoral Researcher at Konstanz University and King’s
College London’s Centre for Medical Humanities. Her publications
include, as author, Coleridge and Kantian Ideas in England, 1796–1817
(2012); as editor, Nineteenth Century Literature and Philosophy, Vol. 1
(Routledge, forth. 2023), the special issues “Medical Case Histories
as Genre: New Approaches” in Literature and Medicine (2014), and
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
“Trace: Embodied Approaches to the English Novel” in English

Studies (forth. 2023); and as co-editor, Transnational England: Home
and Abroad, 1780–1860 (2009).
Catherine Cox is Associate Professor at the School of History, University
College Dublin, and was co-Principal Investigator with Hilary Marland on
a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award “Prisoners, Medical Care and
Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850–2000”. They
have published several joint articles on mental disorder in prisons and
migration and mental health, and their book Disorder Contained:
Mental Breakdown and the Modern Prison in England and Ireland,
1840–1900 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.
She has published on psychology and juvenile custodial institutions
in the twentieth century and on the history of psychiatry and medical
practices in nineteenth-century Ireland.
Ariane de Waal is Lecturer at University of Leipzig. Her research focuses
on British literature and culture of the nineteenth and twenty-first centu-
ries. Her book on post-9/11 theatre, Theatre on Terror: Subject Positions
in British Drama, was published by De Gruyter in 2017. She is currently
working on a monograph that investigates the epistemological inter-
sections of dermatology and the Victorian realist novel. She is the
author of the article “Looking Both Ways: Middlemarch, True Skin,
and the Dermatological Gaze” (Victorian Network, 2020) and co-
editor of the special issue “Victorian Materialisms” (with Ursula Kluwick,
European Journal of English Studies, 2022).
Sandra Dinter is Junior Professor of British Literature and Culture at the
University of Hamburg. After writing her first monograph, Childhood in
the Contemporary English Novel (2019), her research now focuses on
mobility, space, and gender in Victorian literature and culture.
Currently, she is working on another monograph on representations
of women walkers in the nineteenth century. Her work has appeared
in the journals Neo-Victorian Studies, Children’s Literature Association
Quarterly, Anglia, and English Studies.
Pamela K. Gilbert is Albert Brick Professor of English at the University
of Florida. She has published widely in the areas of Victorian literature,
popular culture, the body, and the history of medicine. Her most recent
monograph is Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History (2019). Other books
include Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
(1997), Mapping the Victorian Social Body (2004), The Citizen’s Body
(2007), and Cholera and Nation (2008). Her collections include
Imagined Londons (2002), Companion to Sensation Fiction (2011), and
the co-edited Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (2015).
Markku Hokkanen is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of
Oulu. His previous publications on medicine and colonialism include the
monograph Medicine, Mobility and the Empire: Nyasaland Networks,
1859–1960 (2017) and the co-edited collection Healers and Empires in
Global History: Healing as Hybrid and Contested Knowledge (with Kalle
Kananoja, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He is currently leading an
Academy of Finland-funded research project on histories of healers, poli-
tics, and development in sub-Saharan Africa (2019–2023).
Stefanie John is Lecturer in English Literature and Culture at Technical
University of Braunschweig. Her research interests include poetry from
the Romantic period to the present, literary form and influence, and inter-
sections of literature and material culture. Her first monograph Post-
Romantic Aesthetics in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry was published
with Routledge in 2021. She is currently working on a project on textile
objects in late Victorian British literature.
Ursula Kluwick is Senior Lecturer in Modern English Literature at the
University of Bern and Senior Researcher in the Project “The Beach in the
Long Twentieth Century” (Swiss National Science Foundation). Among
her main research interests are the Victorian period; the Environmental,
especially the Blue, Humanities, postcolonial literatures; and non-
realist forms of writing. Her books include the monograph Exploring
Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction (2011) and the co-edited
collection The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (with
Virginia Richter, 2015). She has co-edited the special issue “Victorian
Materialisms” (with Ariane de Waal, European Journal of English
Studies, 2022) and is currently preparing her monograph on Victorian
water writing for publication.
Heidi Lucja Liedke is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the
University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU). She was awarded her venia
legendi for British literary and cultural studies in 2021. From 2018 to
2020, she was Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary
University of London. Her research interests include Victorian travel
writing and idling, contemporary British performance and live
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
theatre broadcasting, and new forms of criticism. Recent publications

with a focus on Victorian topics include a monograph on the cultural
history of sloths (with Tobias Keiling, Faultiere. Ein Portrait, Matthes
& Seitz, 2021) and a chapter on Victorian panoramas in Victorian
Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (edited by Sibylle
Baumbach and Ulla Ratheiser, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Hilary Marland is based at the Centre for the History of Medicine,
University of Warwick. She was co-Principal Investigator with Catherine
Cox on a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award “Prisoners, Medical Care
and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850–2000” and cur-
rently leads a Wellcome Trust-funded project on postnatal mental
illness in twentieth-century Britain. Together with Catherine Cox,
she has published several articles on mental disorder in prisons and
migration and mental health, and their book Disorder Contained:
Mental Breakdown and the Modern Prison in England and Ireland,
1840–1900 appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2022. Her
other research interests include the history of childbirth, girl’s health, and
household medicine in the nineteenth century.
Monika Pietrzak-Franger is Professor of British Cultural and Literary
Studies at the University of Vienna. Her areas of research range from
adaptation and transmediality to (neo-)Victorian studies and Medical
Humanities. Her publications include, as author, Syphilis in Victorian
Literature and Culture: Medicine, Knowledge and the Spectacle of Victorian
Invisibility (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); as editor, Women, Beauty, and
Fashion (2014); and as co-editor, Reflecting on Darwin (2014), Handbook
of the English Novel, 1830–1900 (2020), Transmedia Practices in the Long
Nineteenth Century (2022), and Literature and Medicine (Cambridge
University Press, forth. 2023), as well as of special issues on “Disease,
Communication, and the Ethics of (In)visibility” (2014), “Neo-
Victorianism and Globalisation” (2015), and “Transforming Medical
Humanities” (forth. 2023). Currently, she is co-leading the interuni-
versity cluster “Post-COVID-19 Care” and working on visiodemics and
viral theatre.
Sarah Schäfer-Althaus is Lecturer in Anglophone Literature and Culture
at the University of Koblenz. Her research centres on women, gender, and
sexuality studies with a focus on body theory, medical humanities, and the
history of childbirth. She is author of The Gendered Body: Female Sanctity,
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Gender Hybridity and the Body in Women’s Hagiography (2017) and co-
editor of Transient Bodies in Anglophone Literature and Culture (2020),
both published with Universitätsverlag Winter, and Traveling Bodies
(Routledge, forth. 2023).
Sally Shuttleworth is Senior Research Fellow at the University of
Oxford. She has published extensively on the interrelations of medicine,
science, and culture and, between 2014 and 2019, ran the large ERC
research project “Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century
Perspectives” (https://diseasesofmodernlife.web.ox.ac.uk/). Her most
recent books are the co-authored Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity
in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019) and the co-edited volume Science
Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Constructing Scientific
Communities (2020).
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 “Sobraon”. From the album of a passenger on the 1884 voyage
from London to Melbourne. Courtesy of the University of
Waikato Library 30
Fig. 2.2 “Our Voyage”. Title page of Sobraon Gossip (1875). Courtesy
of the National Library of Australia, nla.obj-441576471 40
Fig. 2.3 “Dear little ‘Bonnie’. ‘Sobraon.’” From the album of a
passenger on the 1884 voyage from London to Melbourne.
Courtesy of the University of Waikato Library 42
Fig. 2.4 Harold John Graham, “On the Sobraon”, October 1881.
Courtesy of the National Library of Australia, nla.obj-139421279 44
xv
CHAPTER 1
Medicine and Mobility

in Nineteenth-Century British Literature,
History, and Culture: An Introduction
Sandra Dinter and Sarah Schäfer-Althaus
On a bustling Monday morning, Mary Barton, the heroine of Elizabeth

Gaskell’s eponymous 1848 novel, leaves her home in Manchester to set
out for Liverpool, hoping to find the sailor Will Wilson to testify in favour
of her lover, Jem Wilson. Accused of murder, Jem is awaiting his court
trial, which is to take place the following day. Will’s alibi is his only hope
of escaping the death penalty. In her quest, Mary makes use of various
modes of transport. First, she boards a train. The narrator notes that
“[c]ommon as railroads are now in places as a means of transit, and espe-
cially in Manchester, Mary had never been on one before; and she felt
S. Dinter (*)
University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
e-mail: sandra.dinter@uni-hamburg.de
S. Schäfer-Althaus
University of Koblenz, Koblenz, Germany
e-mail: salthaus@uni-koblenz.de
© The Author(s) 2023 1

S. Dinter, S. Schäfer-Althaus (eds.), Medicine and Mobility in
Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture,
Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_1
2 S. DINTER AND S. SCHÄFER-ALTHAUS
bewildered by the hurry, the noise of people, and bells, and horns; the
whiz and the scream of the arriving trains” (Gaskell 2006, 273), evoking
an overwhelming visceral experience of modernity. In Liverpool, Mary
moves in more familiar ways, making her way through the streets on foot,
but this causes her even more distress. She briefly “stop[s] to regain her
breath, and to gather strength, for her limbs trembled, and her heart beat
violently” (275) and then feels how her chest “tightened, and her head
[was] throbbing, from the rate at which they were walking” (279). Shortly
thereafter, Mary hires a small boat to chase after Will on the John Cropper.
To Mary, who has never been on a boat before, the harbour, with its
“puffs and clouds of smoke from the countless steamers”, constitutes
another “new world of sight and sound” (281). The further she advances,
the more her constitution deteriorates. Mary feels “despair […] creeping
over her”, and “every minute her mind became more cloudy” (289), until
she is “sitting motionless” (290) on the boat. Taken in by one of the sail-
ors once back on shore, Mary collapses on the floor. In a distinctly
Victorian fashion, the boatman and his wife attempt to nurse her back to
health: they burn feathers, give her “Golden Wasser”,1 and place her in a
chair (302). Mary briefly regains her strength when she testifies in court
but then falls ill with a fever. Her accelerated journey ends with weeks of
stasis in a sickroom.
As this episode suggests, medicine and mobility are significant and
meaningful concepts in Mary Barton. Referring to Gaskell’s depictions of
illness, substance abuse, medical treatments, and death, Meegan Kennedy,
for instance, notes that “Mary Barton provides a good example of how
ailments can pile up in a Victorian novel” (2013, 464). Highlighting char-
acters’ movements in and beyond Manchester, Alan Shelston, in turn, pro-
poses that it “is a novel full of journeys” (2006, 95). While these are two
pertinent approaches to Gaskell’s novel, they have not informed each
other. Mary Barton has mostly been read as a work that is either con-
cerned with medicine or with mobility, which is remarkable given how
evidently Mary’s motions and health are linked.
Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature,
History, and Culture, in contrast, proposes that new insights can be gained
by analysing the cultural and literary histories of medicine and mobility as
entangled processes whose discourses and practices constituted, influ-
enced, and transformed each other. With this bidirectional perspective,
this collection of essays makes a methodological and interdisciplinary
intervention. It initiates a dialogue between mobility studies and the
1 MEDICINE AND MOBILITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH… 3
medical humanities, two emerging fields that have rarely been discussed in
relation to one another. Presenting case studies of novels, poetry, travel
narratives, diaries, ship magazines, skin care manuals, asylum records,
press reports, and various other sources, the contributions in this volume
identify and discuss diverse literary, historical, and cultural texts, contexts,
and modes in which medicine and mobility intersected in nineteenth-
century Britain, its empire, and beyond, whereby they illustrate how the
paradigms of mobility studies and the medical humanities can comple-
ment each other. Setting the scene, this introduction charts the major
historical and cultural transformations of medicine and mobility and their
entanglements in nineteenth-century Britain and surveys current positions
and crossovers in mobility studies and the medical humanities.
Historical Coordinates: Medicine, Mobility,

and Their Entanglements
in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Britain witnessed a pervasive professionalisation, institutionalisation, and

commercialisation of medical practice and research in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Surveying the period’s impressive scope and range of medical innova-
tions, Lawrence Rothfield notes that “[i]n the course of Victoria’s lifetime
(1819–1901), smallpox vaccination was made compulsory; the postmor-
tem autopsy became routine; anatomy and pathology were established as
standard elements of a medical school education; inhalation anaesthesia
was introduced; physicians discovered that at least some diseases were
transmitted not by atmosphere-corrupting poison seeping from decom-
posing organic matter but by germs; antiseptic surgery began to be prac-
ticed; preventive and occupational medicine as well as public health and
sanitary medicine were founded. The general practitioner appeared, along
with the professional nurse and a range of specialists in fields such as psy-
chiatry, neurology, sexology, and obstetrics” (2014, 175).2 With the
expansion of the British Empire, medicine extended its territorial bound-
aries, leading to the formation of the International Red Cross in 1864 and
the establishment of tropical medicine as a new branch of medicine (Porter
2011b, 163). As medical knowledge and practice became more sophisti-
cated, and technological developments such as the stethoscope (1816)
and the discovery of X-rays (1895) enhanced medical examination
methods, medical care became more accessible to all social classes, mark-
ing the nineteenth century as an “age of improvement” (Porter 1999, 348).
Despite these advancements, it would be inaccurate to give an exclu-
sively progressivist account of the period’s health and medical practices.
Poor sanitation remained a major concern, particularly in the crowded
streets of the growing metropolises, significantly increasing the spread of
infectious diseases (Allen 2008, 1–23). Between the 1830s and 1860s, the
cholera epidemics, for instance, “generated terror and panic” among the
population due to a lack of effective remedies and its “frighteningly rapid
course: victims could be well in the morning and dead by nightfall”
(Brunton 2019, 16; see also Gilbert 2009; Wilson Carpenter 2010,
34–53). New scientific concepts did not gain authority immediately but
emerged “alongside other and older systems of medicine” (Brunton 2019,
3). The older miasma model of disease, for example, remained influential
despite the growing authority of germ theory. Understandings of disease
transmission linked to heredity, (immoral) behaviours, and environmental
factors were equally enduring, as William Buchan’s popular health guide
Domestic Medicine (1848 [1769]) demonstrates; Buchan lists exposure to
“unwholesome air” (152), “frequent and excessive debaucheries”, and
“violent passions” (153) as possible causes for tuberculosis (phthisis).3 As
effective medicines were rare, traditional therapies persisted, and doctors
continued to advise bloodletting, moderate exercise, “taking the waters”,
or a “change of air” for various diseases and ailments, including tubercu-
losis and other pulmonary and respiratory illnesses, as well as nervous dis-
orders and sedentary behaviours (Buchan 1848; see also Porter 1999, 674).
The institutionalisation of medical practice began in the mid-nineteenth
century. Doctors, nurses, and other health officials were now licensed and
publicly registered, and patients were documented and classified.4 This
bureaucratisation forged new power structures, sometimes with severe
consequences for individuals, including “women, the poor, those with dis-
tinctive sexual habits or emotional makeups or cognitive capacities – whose
difference could be defined as pathology in need of monitoring, therapy,
regulation: in need, in short, of discipline” (Rothfield 2014, 176). Diseases
were often moralised, stigmatising groups and individuals, which led to
the strict isolation and control of “patients” in hospitals, sanatoriums,
mental asylums, and their homes.5 The cholera outbreaks were, for exam-
ple, “blamed […] on the low morals and drunkenness of the poor”; other
ailments were considered exclusively female (Porter 2011a, 90). As the
representation of Mary Barton’s frailty, anxieties, and melodramatic
breakdown indicates, being a woman was considered “inherently patho-

logical”, resulting in many “sexual atrocities committed on female patients
in the name of medicine” (90), among them ovariotomy and even clitori-
dectomy to cure alleged “female conditions” like hysteria and nymphoma-
nia (Laqueur 1992, 176; see also Porter 1999, 364). This medicalisation
installed an authoritative system of “medico-moral policing” and “medical
surveillance” of the social body (Rothfield 2014, 178).
With the rise of consumerism and market society, the self-monitoring
of British citizens’ physical and mental constitutions became a matter of
civic responsibility. Along with new systems of knowledge production and
dissemination, the severe contagions of the period made people aware of
the numerous health hazards that could affect their bodies (Haley 1978,
5–6). It is no surprise then that “[n]o topic more occupied the Victorian
mind than Health” (3). Good health was promoted as achievable for, and
thus controllable by, the individual through sensible behaviour and con-
sumerism, and people began to invest more time and money in their health
and well-being. As Bruce Haley resumes, “[i]n the name of Health,
Victorians flocked to the seaside, tramped about in the Alps or Cotswolds,
dieted, took pills, sweated themselves in Turkish baths, adopted this ‘sys-
tem’ of medicine or that” (3). By the end of the century, “health became
something that could be built up by pursuing a range of activities, to reach
a state of vigour and overflowing vitality” (Brunton 2019, 47). When
holistic health emerged as a new ideal, if not norm, medical regimens—
including homoeopathy, gymnastics, and skincare routines—enjoyed
unprecedented popularity, as several contributions in this volume confirm.
As well as playing host to these transformations in medicine, the nine-
teenth century in Britain is also remembered as the age of the transport
revolution, generating a range of new mobile practices. The perfection of
the steam engine, for example, initiated the shift from a maritime industry
of sailing ships to that of steamships. “For the first time [in British his-
tory]”, David M. Williams and John Armstrong assert, “vessels were not
at the mercy of wind or tide and this, together with the ability to make or
leave port at will, permitted scheduled services” (2012, 43). Itself a prod-
uct of capitalism and industrialisation, steamship technology in turn facili-
tated these systems by making global trade and transport more efficient
and profitable. On land, steam engine technology initiated “huge historic
shifts away from travelling by feet (and indeed by horse), to travelling by
train, bus and coach” (Urry 2007, 90). From the opening of the first rail-
way connection between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830—the same
line Mary Barton uses to find Will Wilson—to the peak of the railway
system in 1913 when “1.5 billion passengers travelled every year on
20,000 miles of track, [and] railways carted almost three quarters of the
goods that circulated in the economy” (Steinbach 2017, 102), Britain
witnessed a rapid expansion of local and national railway lines and
networks.
Mobility scholars have discussed the complex social and cultural effects
of this tremendous national endeavour.6 The most fundamental impact of
the railway was that “[t]he populace generally became much more mobile,
and they also journeyed over far greater distances: railways both contracted
and expanded space” (Freeman 1999, 86). Charlotte Mathieson suggests
that, in conjunction with the previous improvement of national road and
canal networks, this new infrastructure was essential to nation-building by
enabling larger sections of society to “experience themselves as part of a
more connected nation” (2015, 7; see also Urry 2007, 91–92). This prin-
ciple also applied to Britain as a colonial power. New modes of travel and
transport recalibrated Britain’s geopolitical position in the world.
Nineteenth-century colonialism “was both a product and a driver of these
new technologies [of mobility]. The intensification of colonial and impe-
rial conflicts and the changing nature of ideas about race and governance
meant that Europeans were both more likely to encounter the world
beyond Europe themselves and […] to consume representations of that
world” (Hill 2016, 2). The expansion of transport networks shaped the
nation’s concepts of self and other. At the same time, it served as a distinct
mechanism of colonial oppression and exploitation. As David Lambert
and Peter Merriman remind us, “imperial migration was not only a matter
of voluntary population movements” but also meant that millions of
“African men, women and children [were] forcibly transported to
European colonies” (2020, 4).
Although poverty persisted in Britain, the transport revolution attenu-
ated social inequality as new modes of mobility “allowed people of all
classes to travel across the country more rapidly and less expensively than
ever before” (Byerly 2013, 289). Again, Mary Barton’s journey is a case in
point. As a working-class woman, Mary experiences the democratising
effects of the transport revolution first-hand—her geographical scope
increases tremendously due to the option of travelling by train and boat.
Yet her inability to cope with these new possibilities also points to the anxi-
eties and ambiguities caused by this social shift. Nonetheless, one long-
term result of this process was that “[n]ew forms and purposes for
journeying were emerging” (Mathieson 2015, 3). Domestic tourism in

particular—available only to a privileged few prior to the railway—now
became an option for more Britons. Susie L. Steinbach maintains that
“[r]ailways stimulated the growth of seaside resorts, first by making the
journey to the coast cheaper, faster, and more comfortable for those
already taking it, and later by making the seaside accessible for working-
class holidaymakers” (2017, 155). In this manner, mobility also attained
new cultural connotations, more often than previously signifying recre-
ation, pleasure, and freedom, particularly for the middle classes (Mathieson
2015, 89). These effects intensified as more new modes of transport
appeared. The 1890s alone witnessed “the completion of the first ever
deep-level Tube-railway” in London (Ashford 2013, 2), the first British-
built motor car (Bagwell 1988, 187), and the commercial success of the
safety bicycle. As Lena Wånggren notes, cycling in particular made it pos-
sible that “women could travel further without chaperones and advocate
the less restricting rational dress” (2015, 125). New forms of mobility
were thus integral to the restructuring of British society in terms of class
and gender.
As these two overviews indicate, the cultural histories of nineteenth-
century medicine and mobility developed analogously. In both realms,
Britain entered capitalist modernity. New forms of technology transformed
or eradicated older mobile and medical practices, making transport and
medical services more accessible. Yet with new mentalities and possibilities
came new cultural anxieties and forms of control, marking both “revolu-
tions” as inherently ambiguous processes. Moreover, the more medicine
and mobility developed individually, the more the two fields merged, sym-
biotically influencing, conditioning, and modifying each other—a devel-
opment also mirrored in nineteenth-century British literature and culture.
Most significantly, mobility took on a crucial role in medicine as an
epistemological entity, shaping the basic scientific understandings of dis-
ease and hygiene. With the transition from miasma to germ theory and the
realisation that poor sanitation was the main cause of epidemics, medical
authorities gradually discerned that infectious “[d]isease (and its cultural
construct, illness) is a mobile entity” (Hokkanen 2017, 8). By the second
half of the nineteenth century, “[p]eople were increasingly seen as carriers
of disease, and new methods were designed to prevent them from spread-
ing infection” (Cole et al. 2015, 50–51), leading, for example, to the
construction of modern sewer systems and the adoption of antisepsis prin-
ciples. At the same time, people began to notice that due to Britain’s vast
shipping routes diseases could easily travel the globe and that movements
of people and commodities had medical consequences. Cholera, in par-
ticular, was understood as a disease connected to “global traffic. The idea
that something invisible to the naked eye could spread around the world
and was more potent than humans, states, and empires shook the sense of
security of Western powers and exposed their vulnerability” (Huber
2020, 395).
Simultaneously, new modes of transport and infrastructure transformed
the provision of medical care and the production of medical knowledge,
affecting especially the mobilities of patients and doctors. In the 1880s,
for example, local authorities installed an ambulance network with horse-
drawn vehicles in London to transport patients discreetly, safely, and
quickly to municipal hospitals, which improved their chances of survival.
The first motor ambulances and aero-ambulances followed around the
turn of the century (Corbett Bell 2009, 23–29, 146–166). Travelling fam-
ily doctors and surgeons were thus slowly replaced by travelling patients.
Similar synergies evolved in colonial contexts. As Markku Hokkanen
emphasises, “Western medicine […] developed alongside and in interac-
tion with religious and folk conceptions of illness, morality and health”
(2017, 6). In Southern Africa, for instance, British explorers and colonis-
ers were exposed to indigenous medical practices and brought along their
own medical conventions, which forged reciprocal networks of medical
knowledge and practice within complex imperial power structures
(16–17).
Medicine and mobility became entangled not only in professional med-
ical research and practice but also in the wider public sphere. Publications
like James Johnson’s Change of Air or the Pursuit of Health and Recreation
(1832) promoted the concept of “travel for health”, claiming that such
mobility would alleviate the suffering of the middle class caused by “the
over-strenuous labour or exertion of the intellectual capacities, rather than
of the corporeal powers, conducted in anxiety of mind and bad air” (2). In
a similar vein, Buchan advises his readers that “[i]f the patient has it in his
power, he ought to travel either by sea or land. A voyage or a long journey,
especially towards a warmer climate, will be of more service than any med-
icine” (1848, 325). In the second half of the nineteenth century, steam-
ships and the railway drove medical and recreational tourism. Seaside
resorts like Bournemouth and Blackpool became popular (Hassan 2003,
39–42). At the same time, spa towns in Britain and continental Europe
like Bath or Baden-Baden continued to offer specialised treatments like
hydrotherapy (water cures) and galvanism (electric therapy), combined

with socialising and other pastimes to divert the mind (Porter 1999, 267).
While travelling and a change of scenery were deemed healthy in them-
selves (Andrews 2000, 45), medical experts often recommended addi-
tional physical exercise. In The Influence of Climate in the Prevention and
Cure of Chronic Diseases (1829), James Clark reminds his readers that “the
beneficial influence of travelling, or of sailing, and of climate, requires to
be aided by such a regimen and mode of living and by such remedial mea-
sures, as would have been requisite in his case, had he remained in his own
country” (2021, 132, see also Buchan 1848, 305). However, despite the
century’s focus on corporeal exercise and mobility, stasis remained a popu-
lar therapeutic measure. An infamous example is the rest cure, which pre-
scribed extended periods of physical inactivity, often targeting women.
The rest cure was one of many intrusive control mechanisms regulating
women’s supposedly frail bodies and minds: “Under the paternalistic,
authoritarian control of a male physician, the Victorian woman regressed
physically and emotionally. Isolated from her family and children and her
usual responsibilities, she was put to bed and taught complete submission;
even her arms and legs were moved for her” (Bassuk 1986, 146).
Accordingly, this collection acknowledges the dialectics and synchronici-
ties of mobility and immobility in medical contexts, demonstrating how
both states often compete, as the alternatingly mobile and immobile Mary
Barton suggests.
Furthermore, the century’s new modes of transport became objects of
the medical gaze and were either pathologised as potential health hazards
or championed as healthy activities. A notorious medical diagnosis of the
time was “railway spine” or “railway shock”, the “traumatization of a vic-
tim without discernible injury” after a railway accident (Matus 2009, 87),
which caused countless pleas for compensation in British courts from the
1840s onward (Harrington 2003, 212). The idea that new forms of
mobility threatened people’s health also informs the narrator’s account of
Mary Barton’s excursion to Manchester, which links it, if not causally then
at least chronologically, to illness and medical interventions. Recognising
the novel’s interplay of medicine and mobility, Mathieson explains that it
“shows the latent uncertainty around the vulnerability of the travelling
body that would give rise to more substantial attention throughout the
1850s” (2015, 61). Such medical perceptions were subject to change and
debate, as the example of the bicycle shows. Although the bicycle was met
with similar medical scepticism as railway travel, especially when ridden by
women, various medical experts advocated cycling. An article in Chambers’s

Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts from 1886, for example,
praises the bicycle because “[i]n the gentle swinging motion above the
wheel there is nothing to disturb the muscular or nervous system once
accustomed to it; indeed it is the experience of most cyclists that the
motion is at first tranquilising to the nerves and eventually becomes a
refreshing stimulus” (“Cycling as a Health Product” 1886, 558). This
belief in the physical and mental stimulation of health through mobility
led to the invention of new gadgets in the health industry, most famously
Vigor’s Horse-Action Saddle, an exercise machine designed for “all ages,
and both sexes”, which imitated “the various paces of the horse” to ease,
prevent, and cure a variety of nervous and physical ailments (“Don’t Ride
Horses” 1894, n. pag.). The example of Vigor’s saddle “manifest[s] how
intimately contemporary medicalisation and commercialisation of trans-
port and exercise were entering into people’s lives” (Andrews 2000, 66).
Finally, the translation of medical discourse into functional material
objects is also reflected in the century’s increasing effort to mobilise the
impaired. The “bath chair” became a popular medical device in the
Victorian era to enhance the mobility of “injured, sick, or disabled per-
sons” (Woods and Watson 2015, n. pag.). Moreover, thanks to antiseptic
surgery and anaesthetics, by the mid-nineteenth century, more people sur-
vived amputations, and alongside wheelchairs, “prosthetic devices began
to saturate the marketplace and occupy a greater place in the social con-
sciousness than ever before” (Sweet 2022, 128; see also 12). Wheelchairs
and, later on, real-life prosthetics contributed to more social inclusion;
however, it must be noted that for most invalids “independent mobility
[…] remained limited to the confines of indoor environments” (Woods
and Watson 2015, n. pag.). Like other medical and mobile innovations,
the effects of such new technologies were manifold and ambivalent. On
the one hand, real-life prosthetics reduced the stigmatisation and margin-
alisation of the amputee by simulating “physical completeness” (Sweet
2022, 38). On the other hand, artificial limbs “came to the fore as devices
that could supposedly standardize aberrant bodies, making them aestheti-
cally acceptable and useful”, thus buttressing the century’s increasingly
dominant cultural ideology of “physical normalcy” (38). In a manner
comparable to that of the new health imperative, medical mobility devices
thus enforced Britons’ individual responsibility for their bodily
constitutions.
This overview has shown that entanglements of medicine and mobility

in the nineteenth century were diverse and far-reaching. Originally evolv-
ing in scientific discourse, their intersections soon affected everyday prac-
tices, raising awareness of diseases and potential health hazards and thereby
producing new anxieties and ideologies. The following section maps this
volume’s theoretical contexts: mobility studies and the medical humanities.
Theoretical Cornerstones: Mobility Studies

and the Medical Humanities
Mobility studies and the medical humanities define themselves primarily

through their objects of research: mobility and medicine. This thematic
orientation might suggest that they have little in common, yet the oppo-
site is true. Having emerged out of established disciplines, the fields are
connected by similar academic histories; mobility studies evolved out of
geography, sociology, and transport history (Adey 2017, 23–26), while
the medical humanities have their origins in the history of science and in
bioethics (Hurwitz 2013, 672; Bleakley 2020, 5). Since the early 2000s,
both fields have gained ground and now constitute vibrant inter- and
transdisciplinary realms with their own journals, companions, book series,
research centres, and associations. Even more importantly, mobility stud-
ies and the medical humanities share scholarly paradigms and modes of
critical enquiry.
When Mimi Sheller and John Urry proclaimed a new mobilities para-
digm in 2006, they sought to challenge “the ways in which much social
science research has been ‘a-mobile’” because they saw at the core of this
research a sedentarist logic that “treats as normal stability, meaning, and
place, and treats as abnormal distance, change, and placelessness” (208).
As a result of the new paradigm, mobilities have been studied in ways that
mean they no longer “appear as […] functional tasks to simply overcome
spatial detachment” but instead are “acknowledged as part of the ener-
getic buzz of the everyday […] and seen as a set of highly meaningful
social practices that make up social, cultural and political life” (Adey et al.
2014, 3). In this context, Tim Cresswell’s notion of the production of
mobilities has been influential. Cresswell differentiates between “move-
ment” as a neutral form of material “displacement—the act of moving
between locations” (2006, 2) and “mobility” as “socially produced
motion” (3), that is, its cultural, social, and political dimensions and
manifestations. Accordingly, mobility studies go beyond mobility as an

empirical fact, scrutinising how it “is invested with particular values, and
[how] those values come to matter” (Adey 2017, 34; see also 66). This
constructivist perspective acknowledges that “unequal relations of power
shape, and are shaped[,] through mobility” (Nicholson and Sheller 2016,
5), be it with respect to race, gender, sexuality, class, age, or (dis-)ability,
implying that as a social phenomenon, mobility is far from universal.
Given this emphasis on the contingent cultural meanings of and accesses
to mobility, it comes as no surprise that mobility studies have become a
vibrant field of enquiry in the humanities too, especially in literary and
cultural studies and history, the disciplines represented in this volume.
As Merriman and Lynne Pearce outline, in the humanities, a distinct focus
has been the “concern with tracing the historical emergence, transforma-
tion and significance of practices, sensations, spaces and experiences of
movement and mobility” (2017, 499). The humanities have embraced a
deliberately broad and inclusive notion of mobility, which “encompasses a
wide range of movements, from the largescale technologies of global
travel, to transnational interconnections, to everyday local mobilities—
including journeys by foot, road, rail, air, and sea, at local, regional,
national and transnational levels” (Aguiar et al. 2019, 2). The principles of
the production, historicity, and inclusivity of mobilities also inform our
volume, which examines a wide range of mobilities—including walking,
horse riding, and railway and steamship travel—and their contingent liter-
ary, historical, and cultural meanings while always also considering the
discursive and material circumstances in which they evolved.
Just like mobility studies, the medical humanities have undergone epis-
temological shifts. Coined by George Sarton in the late 1940s, the term
“medical humanities” “stems from a desire to situate the significance of
medicine as a product of culture” (Hurwitz 2013, 672). Although Sarton
envisioned the medical humanities as concentrating “on the task of under-
standing science and medicine in all cultures and all periods through a
disciplined study of its working methods, assumptions, language, litera-
ture and philosophy” (672), medical humanities initially reflected upon
medical practices and their ethical implications in educational contexts
(672). Its core focus was “the human side of medicine”, i.e. “the nature,
importance and role of human experience on the part of the patients and
practitioners alike, including their experience of the patient-practitioner
relationship” (Arnott et al. 2001, 104–105; see also Whitehead and Woods
2016, 3–4). As a counterpoint to the empirical orientation of medicine,
the medical humanities originally foregrounded the doctor’s responsibility

and, conversely, the patient’s dignity, vulnerability, and subjectivity. The
first wave of medical humanities research was thus more exclusive than
inclusive in its undertaking, working along traditional disciplinary frame-
works and focusing on individuals and their relationships in a humanist
tradition.
While this early ethical impetus has its own raison d’être and continues
to be influential, it was recently criticised for neglecting the contingent
cultural and historical dimensions of medicine and the decisive factors of
class, race, gender, and sexuality. Encouraging inter- and transdisciplinary
exchange, the second wave of medical humanities research recognises the
“intersections, exchanges and entanglements between the biomedical sci-
ences, the arts and humanities, and the social sciences” (Whitehead and
Woods 2016, 1). As such, “critical medical humanities”7 “follow social
constructionist orthodoxy in promoting multiple, complex and sophisti-
cated examples of how science ‘facts’ are historically and socially produced,
manipulated and framed” (Bleakley 2020, 14). This inclusion of historical
and cultural dimensions is another productive vantage point for this col-
lection because it stresses that just as culture informs discourses on health
and illness, medicine and its practices and proposed cures are also socially
constructed “products of a particular time and space” (Brunton 2019, 4).
In tune with Cresswell’s notion of the production of mobilities, medical
humanities conceive of medicine, health, and illness as empirical phenom-
ena invested with cultural meanings that need to be critically unpacked.
Combining these paradigms of mobility studies and medical humanities
allows us to untangle the complex meanings of journeys like that of Mary
Barton in Gaskell’s novel, which pathologises the heroine’s mobility, sanc-
tions it with illness, and presents her time of stasis in the sickroom as a rite
of passage, preparing her physically and ideologically for her future domes-
tic role as Jem’s wife.8
Dissecting Medicine and Mobility

in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Contributions
The proliferation of the medical humanities and mobility studies has led to
a growing number of studies on representations of medicine and mobility
in nineteenth-century Britain and its empire. Complementing earlier
works by Rothfield (1992), Miriam Bailin (1994), and Athena Vrettos
(1995), further comprehensive studies of illness and medicine in Romantic

and Victorian literature and culture followed in the 2000s by Janis
McLarren Caldwell (2004), Kennedy (2010), and most recently by Clark
Lawlor and Andrew Mangham (2021), for example. Scholars have also
examined the literary, historical, and cultural dimensions of individual ill-
nesses, including cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis, and malaria,9 as
well as a range of medical phenomena like pain, contagion, hygiene and
sanitary movements, and anatomy,10 to name but a few examples.
Scholarship on mobilities in nineteenth-century Britain has been equally
vibrant. Following seminal studies on travel, tourism, and transport,11 lit-
erary critics and cultural historians began working with the contentions of
the new mobilities paradigm in the late 2000s. Mathieson (2015), Ruth
Livesey (2016), and Chris Ewers (2018) have delivered readings of mobil-
ities, including walking, seafaring, carriage and stage coach rides, and rail-
way travel, in early and mid-nineteenth-century British literature. Focusing
on women’s empowering yet precarious movements, Wendy Parkins
(2009) and Ingrid Horrocks (2017) have devoted attention to the ways in
which mobilities intersect with gender, while Alistair Robinson (2022) has
stressed the impact of social class and economic capital on mobilities.
This body of criticism demonstrates how productive mobility studies
and the medical humanities have each been individually. A rare exception
that interwove the two perspectives prior to Sheller and Urry’s famous
essay was Richard Wrigley and George Revill’s edited collection Pathologies
of Travel (2000), which discusses the medicalisation of travel against the
backdrop of the transport revolution. Most other research to date has
centred either on the intersections of medicine and mobility in colonial
contexts and colonial contact zones12 or on domestic travel for health,
medical tourism, spa culture, and the cultural construction of physical
exercise and health, as well as disability, (im-)mobility, and protheses.13
The case studies and close readings in our collection complement and
expand upon existing research with new perspectives and insights on the
entanglements of medicine and mobility in British literature, history, and
culture.
The volume opens with a section on “Travel and Health”, which
assembles contributions on domestic and international medical tourism in
the nineteenth century, ranging from stays at spas and seaside resorts to
transnational journeys to America and Australia. Its four chapters explore
nexuses of travel, (im-)mobility, illness, and health in a variety of texts and
revisit the century’s growing emphasis on the benefits of slow and mindful
travel to escape, prevent, or cure a variety of ailments associated with

modernity. They also register the ambiguities resulting from the institu-
tionalisation and commodification of medical tourism, including xeno-
phobia, the power of medical authorities, and the limitations of travellers’
agency and scopes of mobility.
The section starts with Sally Shuttleworth’s contribution “Doctor’s
Ships: Voyages for Health in the Late Nineteenth Century”, which inves-
tigates how the ocean was used as a health resort. Invalids suffering from
consumption, nervous disorders, and the pressures of modern life were
encouraged by their doctors to go on lengthy sea travels prophylactically
and as a cure for existing ailments. Focusing on first-hand accounts, dia-
ries, and ship-board newspapers from the most famous of the “Doctor’s
Ships”, the Sobraon, a luxury clipper which sailed from Britain to Australia
between 1866 and 1891, Shuttleworth explores life within this floating
community of invalids, thereby honing in on slow travel, a form of mobil-
ity that has rarely been discussed in nineteenth-century studies, where the
focus still lies on the acceleration of mobility in the wake of the transport
revolution.
Moving on to spa and seaside tourism, Pamela K. Gilbert’s “Watering
Holes: Healthy Waters and Moral Dangers in the Nineteenth-Century
Novel” examines another popular mode of medical mobility. While many
Victorians visited spas and seaside resorts for health benefits, “taking the
waters” made their bodies vulnerable to external harm. Offering plenty of
opportunities for gambling and flirtation, spa towns were often imagined
as dubious places, a view which perpetuated xenophobia and antisemitism.
Gilbert’s chapter shows how these dynamics pervade the Victorian novel.
After an analysis of sensationalist representations of spas and seaside resorts
in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Ellen Wood’s East
Lynne, and Ouida’s Moths, Gilbert considers how George Eliot and Guy
de Maupassant critique the xenophobic association of spas with Jewishness
in their novels Daniel Deronda and Mont-Oriol.
In the following chapter, “Embodied Interdependencies of Health and
Travel in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Thomas Hardy’s Tess
of the d’Urbervilles”, Natasha Anderson draws attention to Isabel Archer’s
and Tess Durbeyfield’s travels, reconstructing striking parallels between
Isabel’s transnational and Tess’s local mobilities, which both operate as
complex nexuses of health and illness and agency and dependency. Even if
the two protagonists may not seem to have much in common at first sight,
their motions, Anderson argues, connect as they are similarly determined
and limited by their relatives’ illnesses, their children’s premature deaths,

and their own mortality. Anderson’s close readings of Hardy’s and James’s
novels—which could also be compared with the episode in Gaskell’s Mary
Barton—outline how gender, medicine, and mobility were conflated in
nineteenth-century literature and culture.
Like Shuttleworth, Heidi Lucja Liedke examines the contexts and rep-
resentations of an alternative slow form of mobility discovered, practiced,
and represented by British writers of the nineteenth century: idling. Her
chapter, “(Mental) Health and Travel: Reflections on the Benefits of
Idling in the Victorian Age”, discusses Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany
and Italy, 1840, 1842, and 1843, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens’s The
Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, and George Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea
concerning their varying attitudes towards idling and its potential effects
on mental and physical health. While all four authors recognise idling as a
form of self-care, their writings differ in objective and tone. Whereas
Shelley employs idling as a mode of social critique, Collins and Dickens
present a humorous account of idling that nonetheless acknowledges the
necessity of rest at a time when discourses of efficiency were gaining
authority in the wake of industrialisation. Gissing, in turn, embraces idling
as allowing him to reach a state of mental peace.
The second section, “Pathologising Mobilities”, centres on the social
norms placed on the (gendered) body and its posture, mobility, and stasis
in the nineteenth century. The chapters explore narrative and poetic rep-
resentations as well as medical documentations of health and disease in the
context of orthopaedics, health and sanitary reforms, discourses of deca-
dence, and expanding asylum systems. While all of the chapters emphasise
how medical discourse pathologises and regulates certain motions, thereby
frequently producing “deviant” mobilities, they also accentuate subversive
moments of bodily resistance. These contributions show that although the
body is a vulnerable and fragile construct, constantly juggling between
losing and (re-)gaining control, it has the potential to disrupt disciplin-
ary power.
The first chapter, Monika Class’s “Upright Posture and Gendered
Styles of Body Movements in The Mill on the Floss”, is concerned with
George Eliot’s complex narrative engagement with gendered norms of
bodily movement and posture. Analysing the ways in which the protago-
nists Tom and Maggie Tulliver hold and move their bodies when they row,
walk, or run as children and young adults, Class demonstrates that Eliot’s
novel represents and occasionally affirms the disciplinary effects of these
norms yet also questions them, particularly by showcasing how Maggie’s

“deviant” mobilities defy hegemonic femininity and Tom’s posture per-
petuates masculine violence.
Focusing on the mobility of matter in the context of nineteenth-century
sanitary reforms, the next contribution, “The Mobility of Water: Aquatic
Transformation and Disease in Victorian Literature” by Ursula Kluwick,
discusses the roles of water in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and
Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. Kluwick contrasts the novels’
approaches to the mobility of aquatic matter and disease aetiology.
Whereas Collins’s novel links disease to nineteenth-century miasmatic dis-
course, Jerome presents a vision of disease which draws on germ theory.
In her analysis, Kluwick uses new materialism and the blue humanities to
theorise disease and water as mobile matters, claiming that Victorian writ-
ers considered water’s inherent mobility and transformability as uncanny
and potentially harmful to the human body.
Following on from Kluwick, Stefanie John provides an insight into
poetic renditions of dance as an erratic and anti-progressive form of mobil-
ity in her contribution “A ‘Feverish Restlessness’: Dance as Decadent
Mobility in Late Victorian Poetry”. John outlines the pathological termi-
nology of fin-de-siècle critics such as Max Nordau and Arthur Symons and
introduces dance as a form of mobility and trope of “Decadence”.
Analysing selected poems by Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Michael
Field, she explores the nexus of mobility, the maladie fin de siècle, and
health as depicted in these poems in both content and form. With their
interplay of agitation, paralysis, and circularity, as John argues, these dance
poems challenge Victorian paradigms of acceleration, regularisation, and
progress.
Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland’s contribution takes us to North
West England in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bringing
together medicine and mobility in the form of mental health and migra-
tion, “The Wandering Irish: Mobility and Lunacy in Mid-Nineteenth
Century Lancashire” traces how mentally disturbed Irish migrants entered
and moved through the asylum system in Lancashire and how their move-
ments were documented and often pathologised across official papers,
press reports, and asylum and prison records. Demonstrating how discur-
sive constructions of mobilities informed specific medical practices, Cox
and Marland suggest that negative stereotypes of Irish poverty and root-
lessness determined medical diagnoses and treatments for patients in the
asylums.
“Mobilities and Medical Regimens”, the third and final section of the
volume, examines how different kinds of mobility in the Victorian era
became medically relevant practices that required travellers to actively
anticipate, monitor, and manage the medical implications and alleged
health risks for their own bodies caused by their travels, be it by adopting
or avoiding specific behaviours, purchasing consumer products, or moving
in distinct ways. The section’s three contributions discuss how these regi-
mens unfolded in Britain and its colonies.
The chapter “Exposure, Friction, and ‘Peculiar Feelings’: Mobile Skin
in Victorian Medicine and Literature” by Ariane de Waal gives an insight
into the various ways the emerging discipline of dermatology involved
conceptions of mobility. De Waal suggests that with its ability for constant
renewal and perspiration, skin was understood as moving matter by the
mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, medical experts warned against cer-
tain forms of transport such as railway travel, walking, and horseback rid-
ing because of their supposedly damaging effects on the skin. Bringing
together medical and literary writings, she illustrates that such ideas also
pervade the Victorian novel, which alternatingly reproduces and under-
cuts the dermatological discourses of the age, especially in its representa-
tions of mobile women.
Sharing de Waal’s emphasis on materiality, Monika Pietrzak-Franger’s
chapter “White Fluff/Black Pigment: Health Commodity Culture and
Victorian Geographies of Dependence” scrutinises a prescriptive regime
for Victorians to ensure their health during travels in the “tropics” in
Africa. Pietrzak-Franger documents the material and symbolic roles
assumed by commodities transported globally in the nineteenth century.
Focusing on tropical clothing, Pietrzak-Franger uncovers a hitherto often
neglected dimension of health commodity culture; while tropical clothing
was usually purchased to ensure travellers’ health, comfort, and national
superiority abroad, its domestic sites of production, cotton factories in
Manchester, for example, often posed health hazards to workers.
Approaching health commodity culture with respect to its consumption
and production against the backdrop of imperialism, Pietrzak-Franger
reminds us how the very same textile materials could simultaneously pre-
vent and cause illnesses.
The volume closes with Markku Hokkanen’s “From Heroic Exploration
to Careful Control: Mobility, Health, and Medicine in the British African
Empire”. Discussing the writings of British explorers like David
Livingstone, Horace Waller, John Buchanan, and Mary Kingsley in travel
books, health advice pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, and personal cor-

respondence, Hokkanen reconstructs how medicine and mobility became
conceptually and materially entangled in colonial contexts and, in turn,
informed Western representations of Africa and the British colonisers. He
examines how the notion of physical exercise as a therapeutic and prophy-
lactic measure for explorers in a fever-stricken Africa went hand in hand
with the idealised image of the enduring, heroic, and risk-taking coloniser
during the phase of early settlement and colonisation, which, however,
gave way to an ideal of the coloniser as more controlled, disciplined, and
careful towards the end of the century.
While the literary, historical, and cultural intersections of medicine and
mobility, in nineteenth-century Britain discussed in this volume cover a
broad spectrum of texts, genres, and phenomena, it does not offer a com-
plete survey. Nexuses such as that of war, mobility, and medicine, includ-
ing the mobility and mobilisation of doctors and nurses, patient care, and
hygienic precautions on the battlefield or the concept of sacrificing one’s
health for the empire, could not be considered. Disability and aging stud-
ies constitute another promising avenue for future interdisciplinary
research on the interconnectedness of medicine and mobility with respect
to literary and cultural representations of geriatrics, the lack of mental and
physical mobility caused by old age, mental and physical disabilities, and
forms of concomitant (temporary) paralysis and immobility. Recognising
that more research into the intersections between medicine and mobility
remains to be done, we hope that this collection will inspire scholars to
investigate the fields’ reciprocities not only in the nineteenth century but
also in other historical periods and cultural contexts.
Notes
1. “Golden Wasser” is a root and herbal liqueur. The name comes from the
flakes of gold leaf suspended in it (Gaskell 2006, 435).
2. This introduction lists only some of the major medical innovations and
developments of the nineteenth century. More extensive surveys have, for
instance, been provided by Porter (1999, 2004) and Bynum (2008). For
medical histories of Britain since the eighteenth century, see Porter (1995,
2001), Lane (2001), Wilson Carpenter (2010), and Brunton (2019).
3. Published between the 1770s and 1870s, Buchan’s work went through
more than 140 editions. According to Charles E. Rosenberg, no other
“health guide before the twentieth century enjoyed a greater popularity”

(1983, 22; see also Brunton 2019, 49).
4. The British Medical Association (BMA), for example, was established in
1832; the General Medical Council (GMC) was formed in 1858 (Porter
1999, 355–356).
5. For more on nineteenth-century British asylums and sanatoria, patients,
and therapeutic measures, see, for example, Shepherd (2016), Taylor
(2017), and Burtinshaw and Burt (2017).
6. It is beyond the scope of this introduction to include all ramifications of
the expansion of the railway and related transport technologies in
nineteenth-century Britain. For a succinct summary of these effects, see
Thomas (2014, 215–216).
7. For recent discussions on what constitutes the “critical” medical humani-
ties, see, for example, Bleakley (2014, 2020), Viney et al. (2015), and
Atkinson et al. (2015).
8. The illness even infantilises Mary. Upon her recovery, her “mind was in the
tender state of a lately-born infant” (Gaskell 2006, 302). For a discussion
of the entanglements of fever and gender in nineteenth-century literature,
see Brunton (2019, 41).
9. See, for example, the works by Gilbert (2009), Shuttleton (2012), Byrne
(2011), Pietrzak-Franger (2017), and Howell (2014).
10. For recent scholarship, see Christensen (2005), Allen (2008), Ablow
(2017), Gasperini (2019), Nixon (2020), and Chen (2020).
11. Among these early studies are, for instance, Bagwell (1988), Schivelbusch
(1977), Wallace (1993), Buzard (1993), Freeman (1999), and
Carter (2001).
12. See, for example, the works by Hassan (2011), Foxhall (2012), Howell
(2014), and Hokkanen (2017).
13. See, for example, Vertinsky (1990), Hassan (2003), Wood (2012), Marland
(2013), and Sweet (2022).
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PART I
Travel and Health

CHAPTER 2
Doctors’ Ships: Voyages for Health

in the Late Nineteenth Century
Sally Shuttleworth
In 1925, various newspapers lamented the “passing” of the famous clipper

ship, the Sobraon.1 Built in Aberdeen in 1866, one of the fastest and largest
“composite ships” of teak on an iron frame ever made, she had sailed annu-
ally between London and Australia until 1891. Known also as “The Doctors’
Ship”, her celebrity status was due in part to the fact that she specialised in
carrying one particular category of passengers: invalids (“‘Doctors’ Ship”
1925). In the field of mobility studies, there has been considerable work on
emigrant voyages, but little on the intersecting area of voyages for health.
Some of the Sobraon’s passengers from London to Sydney, or Melbourne,
were indeed migrating to Australia on doctor’s orders, in quest of a more
suitable climate for their health. Others, however, were also following medi-
cal advice and undertaking the 3-month voyage simply for the therapeutic
qualities of the voyage itself. They would spend the minimum time possible
in Australia and return to England on the ship’s homeward trip. In this
S. Shuttleworth (*)
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
e-mail: sally.shuttleworth@st-annes.ox.ac.uk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 29

Switzerland AG 2023
S. Dinter, S. Schäfer-Althaus (eds.), Medicine and Mobility in
Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture,
Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_2
30 S. SHUTTLEWORTH
chapter, I explore the medical and cultural debates in the last decades of the
nineteenth century around the benefits for health of lengthy sea voyages.
Invalids, even when potentially infectious, were not enjoined to isolate at
home but to travel to the other side of the earth in quest of a cure. Taking
the Sobraon as my primary case study, I also examine diaries, ship-board
newspapers, and other first-hand accounts of voyages in order to build a
detailed picture of life within these floating worlds of invalids (see Fig. 2.1).2
Fig. 2.1 “Sobraon”. From the album of a passenger on the 1884 voyage from
London to Melbourne. Courtesy of the University of Waikato Library
2 DOCTORS’ SHIPS: VOYAGES FOR HEALTH IN THE LATE NINETEENTH… 31
The value of sea travel for health had been recognised from classical
times but appears to have faded generally from medical practice until the
eighteenth century, when interest in sea bathing developed and several
works were published on the therapeutic value of taking a sea voyage
(Gilchrist 1756, 1771; Sutherland 1763). As Jan Golinski and others have
noted, the eighteenth century witnessed a huge rise of interest in the
impact of climate on health, with the rapid development of spa culture3
and also the Grand Tour, which often had an element of travel for health
(2007; see also Janković 2000, 2010). The foundations of what came to
be known as medical climatology were laid by James Clark in the 1820s
and 1830s, with the first detailed meteorological studies of principal con-
tinental resorts (Clark 1820, 1830, 1835). By the 1860s, there were an
almost bewildering number of guides published, with resorts vying with
each other to produce the most attractive climatological statistics, and
assurances about sanitary conditions, in order to attract customers. The
idea that consumption could be best handled by a winter abroad, or in an
English seaside resort which could boast a mild climate, had firmly taken
hold, and the next major work in the field, Robert E. Scoresby-Jackson’s
encyclopaedic Medical Climatology (1862), adopted this belief as its fun-
damental premise.
The Ocean as a Health Resort

In the massive emerging literature on travel for health, sea voyages seemed
to be more of a means to an end, rather than a destination in themselves.
Such thinking was challenged, however, with the publication of William
Wilson’s The Ocean as a Health Resort (1880), which, as its title proclaims,
transformed the voyage into a form of floating resort. Medical publication
was in fact trailing behind practice since, as Wilson notes, it would have
been unusual, 10 to 15 years before, to encounter anyone taking a voyage
solely for health, but “now the favourite passenger-ships, especially in the
autumn, are half-filled with invalids of every kind and degree, who are
looking forward hopefully to testing the restorative influences of the ocean
climate” (2). The kind of voyage he has in mind is not that endured,
below deck, by the passengers in emigrant ships, crammed together with
little concern for their welfare. He is thinking, rather, of luxurious sailing
ships, with their spacious cabins opening out onto the deck, and solicitous
attention given to individual passengers’ desires and needs. Wilson, whose
letters after his name on the title page, LRCP, MRCSE, loudly proclaim
Another random document with
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omdat, als je het wèl doet, je inplaats van het woord, dat ik je geleerd
heb, den naam van de vrucht, die je gegeten hebt, herhalen zult”.
Welgemoed ging Nansi huiswaarts, maar al weêr bedroog hem zijn

gulzigheid, evenzoo als zij hem in den tamarindeboom parten gespeeld
had; hij bereikte nauwelijks den guaveboom of hij nam er een vrucht
van, en at die op.
Het is wel niet noodig te zeggen, dat alles gebeurde, zooals God
voorspeld had: toen de man de gebruikelijke woorden had uitgebracht,
wilde Nansi het woord zeggen, dat God hem geleerd had, maar in
plaats van „Temebè”, riep hij „guave!”
„Hoe is het mogelijk, dat je zoo dom kon wezen: ga maar weêr bij God
en vraag het woord te mogen weten, dat je zeggen moet”, zei Shi
Maria, toen hij maar niet op het woord kon komen.
Nog eenmaal ging Nansi bij God, die hem hetzelfde als den vorigen
keer herhaalde, maar weêr at hij onderweg een van de verboden
vruchten; wel was hij den guaveboom voorbij geloopen, zonder een
vrucht er van te plukken, maar hij bezweek voor de verleiding van een
zuurzak: hij nam er van en at de vrucht. Dezelfde geschiedenis als met
de guave herhaalde zich: Nansi riep „zuurzak” in plaats van „Temebè”.
Nansi kon zich de haren uit het hoofd rukken van [358]kwaadheid, maar
er viel niets anders te doen, dan voor de derde maal bij God te gaan.
Shi Maria wanhoopte reeds; want zij wist, dat Nansi’s gulzigheid hem
weêr er toe zou brengen, een van de vruchten te eten. Dit begreep ook
Nansi’s jongste spruit, die even bij de hand was als zijn vader: daarom
zon hij op een middel, om bij God te gaan met zijn vader, zonder dat
deze er iets van merkte; hij besloot nl. de gedaante van een klis aan te
nemen, en hechtte zich aan ’s vader’s broek, toen Nansi weêr bij God
ging.
Bij God komende, vertelde Nansi zijn ongeluk: met een flinke berisping,
zooals hij zulks verdiend had, kreeg Nansi voor de derde maal te
hooren, wat hij doen en voornamelijk wat hij laten moest. Ook het
zoontje hoorde alles.
Wat Shi Maria verondersteld had, gebeurde: Nansi at weêr een vrucht:
twee van de drie boomen ging hij voorbij maar de schopappels waren
zóó verlokkend, dat hij er een vrucht van plukte en deze opat.
Op etenstijd geschiedde weêr hetzelfde; maar toen Nansi riep:

„schopappel!” schreeuwde zijn zoontje boven vaderlief uit: „Temebè!”
en op hetzelfde oogenblik werd de man volkomen machteloos. Nansi
smeet hem nu op den grond, en doodde hem. Maar in plaats dat Nansi
nu voldaan was, daar hij immers van den man bevrijd was, nam hij een
mes, sneed een stuk vleesch uit ’s man’s lichaam en at het op.
Nauwelijks was het vleesch in zijn keel verdwenen, of zijn mond
veranderde in een snoet, zooals de varkens dien heden ten dage
hebben; want toen ter tijd hadden de varkens mooie snoetjes.
„Je hebt je verdiende loon”, zei Shi Maria tot haar man, „wie dreef je er
toe, om van het vleesch van dien man te eten”?
Nansi was zeer neerslachtig, zooals wel te begrijpen was: met zijn
varkenssnoet durfde hij nu alleen ’s avonds laat of [359]in den vroegen
morgen vòòr het licht was, uit te gaan, daar hij bang was, dat zijn
vrienden hem zouden uitlachen.
Eens op een morgen wandelde hij aan den kant van een breed water,
toen hij daar dichtbij een varken zag, dat een mooien snoet had. Hij
dacht bij zich zelf: och, kon ik ook zoo’n snoet hebben! Meteen kwam
de gedachte bij hem op, om met Varken van gelaat te verwisselen.
„Heer Varken”, zoo begon hij, „wat lijkt dit water schoon en frisch; een
bad daarin zal lekker zijn. Zou u niet een bad met mij willen nemen?”
„Waarom niet”, antwoordde het varken. „Maar weet u wel, heer Varken”,
zoo ging Nansi voort, „dat we, voordat we te water gaan, onzen snoet
moeten afnemen, daar ik gehoord heb, dat water niet goed is voor den
mond van mensch en dier”. „Ik heb er niets tegen”, zei het Varken.
Daarop namen nu Nansi en Varken beiden hun snoet af en gingen te

water. Het water was zóó frisch, dat Varken naar het midden zwom.
Toen Nansi nu zag, dat vriend Varken ver genoeg was, liep hij het water
uit, pakte den snoet van Varken, zette hem op, voordat Varken aan land
was en liep weg. Zoo moest Varken den snoet van Nansi aandoen.
En van toen af is het, dat de varkens in den grond wroeten, om den

snoet te zoeken, dien zij voorheen hadden. [360]
Creoolsche folk-lore van St.-Eustatius.
St.-Eustatius, het voornaamste der drie aan Nederland toebehoorende

Bovenwindsche eilanden, vormt een deel der vulkanische
eilandenreeks, die, bij Saba beginnend, in Zuid-waartsche richting zich
tot het Engelsche eiland Grenada uitstrekt. Niet alleen door zijn
bodemgesteldheid, voor een groot deel uit los, zeer doorlatend en
vruchtbaar vulkanisch materiaal opgebouwd, maar ook door zijn ligging
onder den invloed van de N.O. Passaat wijkt dit eiland geheel af van
het voornaamste der Benedenwindsche eilanden, het op 800 kilometers
in Z.O. richting verwijderd liggende eiland Curaçao.
Wanneer op ruime schaal voor het vasthouden van het regenwater en

voor den aanleg van een beter wegenstelsel werd zorg gedragen, zou
de bodem van dit eiland, dat van oudsher een broeinest voor den
smokkelhandel is geweest, meer dan thans het geval is, kunnen
opleveren, en zou de armoede, die er nu overheerscht, voor betere
economische toestanden plaats maken.
De bevolking, gedeeltelijk Nederlanders en hunne afstammelingen,

gedeeltelijk uit de nakomelingen van de Negerslaven en hunne
onderlinge kruisingen voortgekomen, spreekt er algemeen Engelsch,
zoodat het heel wat moeite kost, het Nederlandsch ingang te doen
vinden. Over het algemeen staat de bevolking er op een hooger peil
van ontwikkeling dan bijv. op Curaçao, waartoe de ligging van het
eiland en de toenemende Engelsche invloed in W.-I. door de verbinding
met Noord-Amerika belangrijk heeft bijgedragen. Terwijl nl. de bevolking
naast den kleinen landbouw, waarin de toekomst van St.-Eustatius
ligt, 224 [361]het visschersbedrijf uitoefent, doen niet weinigen dienst op
vaartuigen op Noord-Amerika, welke omstandigheid aan het peil der
ontwikkeling ten goede is gekomen en waardoor het Engelsch wel altijd
de voertaal zal blijven, hoezeer de bewoner zich steeds Statiaan (d.i.
bewoner van St.-Eustatius) en Nederlandsch onderdaan blijft voelen.
Dat door de genoemde omstandigheden het karakter der door de

Negerslaven uit Afrika medegebrachte mondelinge overleveringen hier
nog meer door vreemde invloeden zal geleden hebben, was te
verwachten.
Tot voor zeer korten tijd, toen nl. het grootste deel van dezen bundel
reeds afgedrukt was, had het onderzoek naar publicaties over folk-lore
van St.-Eustatius niets opgeleverd, totdat ik door een gelukkig toeval
kennis mocht maken met den oud-gezaghebber van het eiland, die er
18 jaren heeft doorgebracht en wiens echtgenoote, Mevrouw Jo van
Grol, er een verzameling vertellingen bijeen heeft weten te brengen,
waarvan ik een der meest karakteristieke, d.w.z. een nog weinig
beïnvloede spinvertelling, in dezen bundel heb mogen opnemen 225. De
bedoelde vertellingen zijn afkomstig van een kleurlinge, die „nurse” 226
was bij het dochtertje van den Heer en Mevrouw van Grol, en ze in het
Engelsch heeft verteld.
Ook op St.-Eustatius behoeft de folk-lorist niet voor negatief resultaat te

vreezen; want ook hier wordt de vertelling bij allerlei gelegenheden nog
steeds in eere gehouden. Bij feesten bijv., zoo werd mij verteld, waarop,
bij fakkellicht, nog de echte ouderwetsche dansen worden uitgevoerd,
wordt de tijd ook aangenaam doorgebracht [362]met zang en met
vertellingen „van toen en toen, waarin vooral de praatgrage oudjes
onuitputtelijk zijn”.
De spinvertelling, die hieronder volgt en getiteld is: „Braha 227 Nanci 228
en Braha Toekema” is, merkwaardig genoeg, een variant op de onder
No. 4 van den Surinaamschen stadsneger-bundel opgenomen anansi-
tori, getiteld: „Anansi, Tijger en de doode Koe” en is blijkbaar van
denzelfden oorsprong. Opmerking verdient het, dat een rivier, waarvan
de vertelling gewaagt, op St.-Eustatius niet voorkomt. De vertelling, of
het motief voor deze, moet dus òf door slaven in de eerste tijden der
kolonisatie uit Afrika medegebracht, òf in later tijden uit Suriname
overgebracht zijn.
Braha- 227 Nanci en Braha-Toekema.
Er waren twee vrienden; de een heette Braha Nanci, de ander Braha

Toekema. Allebei waren zeer lui. Ze wilden niet werken, maar leefden
liever van wat ze door stelen machtig konden worden.
Op zekeren dag zei B. N. tot B. T.: „kom, laat ons naar ’s konings weide
gaan; daar is een lekker stukje vleesch te krijgen.”
„Goed”, zei B. T., „dan moeten we in twee van de vetste ossen kruipen
en daaruit de lekkerste en vetste stukjes snijden; maar denk er om, B.
N., wanneer je bij dat stuk komt, dat zegt: tik! tik! tik!, snijd dat er dan
niet uit want dat tik! tik! tik!-stukje is het hart en zoodra je dat er uitsnijd,
valt de os dood onder je neêr”.
„Goed, B.T., ik zal oppassen”… en de beide vrienden namen hun

zakken op en begaven zich terstond op pad. [363]Toen ze in de weide
kwamen, zagen ze verscheidene vette ossen rondloopen. „Ha! Ha! Ha!”
zei B. N., „zie je dien rooden vetten os daar, dien neem ik voor mij”.
„Ha! Ha! Ha!”, zei B. T., „in dien mooien grijzen daar kruip ik binnen!”
Zoo gezegd, zoo gedaan; de beide vrienden kropen in de twee vetste
ossen.
B. T. sneed de mooiste en vetste stukjes uit en was zeer voorzichtig,

wanneer hij bij het tik! tik! tik!-stukje kwam, en toen hij naar zijn zin
genoeg had uitgesneden, kroop hij uit den os, deed het vleesch in den
zak en keek hij rond naar B. N.
Maar deze was nog niet te zíen, daar hij zeer gulzig van aard was en
niet met weinig tevreden was, zoodat hij nog niet genoeg naar zijn zin
had kunnen uitsnijden.
B. T. werd ongeduldig en riep: „B. N., kom naar buiten”. „Ja, Ja, Ja”,
antwoordde zijn vriend, „nog dit eene vette, heerlijke stukje en dan zal
ik komen.”
Maar weêr verliepen minuten en nog kwam B. N. niet te voorschijn.
„B. N., ik zeg je, kom er uit!” riep B. T., nu werkelijk boos wordend.
„Ja, Ja, Ja, man, dit eene vette stukje nog, dan kom ik”, was het
antwoord, doch kort daarop viel de os plotseling dood neêr, want dat
eene vette stukje was het tik! tik! tik!-stukje geweest, het hart.
Toen de os dood neêrviel, wist B. N. eerst niet, wat gebeurde en van

schrik kroop hij in de pens en bleef hij daar ineengedoken en doodstil
zitten. B. T. bij den dooden os neêrhurkende, riep toen: „Ja, man, daar
zit je nu, dat komt nu van je gulzigheid; had je net als ik gedaan en was
je met weinig tevreden geweest, dan was je nu zoo ongelukkig niet en
had je het niet zoo doodsbenauwd”. Nauwelijks had hij dit gezegd, of hij
zag, tot zijn schrik, [364]de koeienjongen van den Koning in de verte
aankomen. Hij nam zijn zak met vleesch op en liep zoo hard hij loopen
kon, weg.
De koeienjongen, den mooisten os van den Koning dood vindende,

holde dadelijk naar den Koning, om Hem het gebeurde mede te deelen.
De Koning gelastte hem, den os te slachten en Hem de stukken te
brengen. Dit gebeurde; alleen de ingewanden enz. enz. gaf de
koeienjongen aan een arme, oude vrouw.
Deze vrouw ging met alles naar de dicht bijzijnde rivier, om het schoon
te maken. Toen ze nu de pens opensneed, sprong B. N. met zóó groot
lawaai en geschreeuw er uit, dat het arme vrouwtje van schrik op den
grond viel. „Jou, leelijk oud wijf!” schreeuwde B. N., „daar zit ik kalm en
rustig aan den oever een dutje te doen en daar kom jij met je vuile boel
en bespat mijn mooie kleeren … Schaam je je niet—geef hier dien
viezen rommel en ga terstond naar huis, anders zal er nog wat met jou
gebeuren”.
En de arme, oude vrouw, bang voor den grooten barschen man, liet
alles op den grond liggen en liep, zoo hard zij loopen kon, weg.
Toen de vrouw uit het gezicht was, begon B. N. hartelijk te lachen, nam
de boel op, wiesch alles goed schoon, stopte het in den zak en ging zijn
vriend opzoeken. Eindelijk vond hij deze, en vertelde hem, hoe hij
ontsnapt was en bovendien, hoe hij dat arme vrouwtje voor den gek
had gehouden, en haar alles ontnomen had.
„Je bent me een slimme kerel!” zei B. T.; „maar neem een goeden raad
van mij aan, en laat je voortaan nooit meer door je gulzigheid
verleiden.”
De twee vrienden gingen nu verder en kwamen voorbij een huis, waar

zoo juist een oude vrouw gestorven was. Zij traden er binnen en
dadelijk begonnen zij met de [365]familie meê te huilen en te
schreeuwen, alsof de dood van die oude moeder ook hen ter harte ging
en zij ook veel van haar gehouden hadden.
Ja, ze dreven de schijnheiligheid zóó op, dat ze zeurig eentoonig

begonnen te zingen:
„Een goede vrouw is zij geweest,

De grootste eer zij haar gebracht!”
„Kom!”, lieten ze er op volgen, „trek haar beste, zwart-zijden japon aan;

omhang haar met al haar goud en zilver, dan zullen we allen te zamen
roepen om haar, zoo rijk versierd, aan hen te toonen en zullen we voor
haar zingen en bidden. Doch”, zoo gingen ze verder, „om haar alle eer
te bewijzen, haal dan ook nog een ham, een blik boter, reuzel, kaas,
suiker, twintig pond varkensvleesch, sigaren, twee flesschen wijn, twee
flesschen rum, twee flesschen jenever, twee pond koffie en … zet dat
alles op groote tafels om haar heen”.
De familie, die zeer rijk en zeer bijgeloovig was, en daarbij het prettig
vond, om aan vrienden en kennissen al haar moois en sieraden te
kunnen vertoonen, deed, wat B. N. en B. T. zeiden. En toen alles klaar
was, schaarden allen zich om de doode heen.
De twee vrienden vingen toen weêr met hun eentoonig liedje aan:
„Een goede vrouw is zij geweest;

De grootste eer zij haar gebracht!”
Ach, zoo besloten zij, die arme vrouw was zoo’n goede moeder, laten
we voor haar zingen en bidden en zorgen, dat de booze geesten 229
haar niet komen halen!” En zoo bleven zij uur aan uur doorzingen, geen
vermoeienis kennende. [366]
Eindelijk vielen een paar gasten in slaap, zoodat de beide vrienden

steeds zachter en eentoniger begonnen te zingen, totdat op het laatst
allen in zoete rust waren gezongen.
Steeds doorzingende, stonden de beide vrienden eindelijk op, namen

de doode de gouden en zilveren sieraden af, die zij in hun wijde zakken
borgen en stopten vleesch, wijn, kortom al wat op de tafel stond in een
grooten mand, en gingen ten slotte, steeds doorzingende, de kamer en
de deur uit. Eenmaal buiten zijnde, vluchtten zij met mand en al het
bosch in, waarin ze in een oogwenk verdwenen waren.
De familieleden en kennissen, die den geheelen dag reeds bij het lijk
hadden gezongen en ook daarbij veel gegeten en gedronken hadden,
bleven rustig doorslapen en werden eerst tegen den morgen wakker.
Nog half slapende, keken ze naar de doode en van de doode naar de

tafels, en tot hun grooten schrik zagen ze, dat alles, alles gestolen was.
Een algemeen gejammer brak los; men verweet elkander, die twee
vreemde mannen geloofd te hebben en men begon bij het lijk van de
oude moeder te vechten en te schelden.
En … onderwijl, op een veilige plek in het bosch, zaten B. N. en B. T.,

onder den grootsten pret, zich te goed te doen aan de gestolen
eetwaren en bewonderden zij de fraaie gouden en zilveren sieraden!
[367]
[Inhoud]
Neger-vertellingen van Jamaica.
Nancy-Stories.
Het West-Indische eiland Jamaica heeft een zeer belangrijke rol

gespeeld in de geschiedenis van het negerras in de nieuwe wereld
(Joh.). Het schijnt, dat reeds in 1517 Negerslaven naar Jamaica zijn
overgebracht, toen de Spanjaarden er zich op de suikerriet-cultuur
gingen toeleggen. Toen het eiland in 1655 in het bezit van de
Engelschen kwam, vluchtten zeer vele negers naar de bergen. Aan
deze wegloopers gaf men den naam van „Cim arrones” (= bewoners
der bergen), waaruit later de naam Marrones 230 werd. Toen men in
1673 de riet-cultuur meer systematisch begon te drijven en er zich niet
minder dan 1 200 Engelsche kolonisten (uit Suriname) op het eiland
kwamen vestigen, zoodat zeer vele zwarte werkkrachten noodig waren,
ontwikkelde zich van lieverlede een uitgebreide slavenhandel op Afrika.
In 1673 waren ongeveer 1905 negers op Jamaica werkzaam, de

marrones niet meegerekend, een getal dat in 1690 reeds tot 40,000
gestegen was. De behoefte aan zwarte arbeidskrachten deed zich nog
meer gevoelen, toen in 1721 de koffie werd ingevoerd, zoodat in 1807,
toen de slavernij er werd opgeheven, zich reeds 323,827 negers op
Jamaica bevonden.
Deze waren bijna uitsluitend uit West-Afrika aangevoerd. De marrones

(„marroons” in het Engelsch) kwamen van Guinea tusschen de
Gambia-rivier en Sierra Leone en van de Goudkust; de Koromantijnen,
eveneens van de Goudkust, terwijl er ook van het Niger-delta, [368]van
Lagos en Dahomey en van de Congo en Angola zijn aangevoerd.
Evenals wij dit voor Suriname hebben trachten aan te toonen, is het wel
zeker dat verreweg het grootste deel der negerslaven van Jamaica van
de Goudkust afkomstig is, waar de Engelschen tusschen 1680 en 1807
slavendepôts hadden, en dat ook uit de meer oostwaarts gelegen
deelen van de kust van Guinea negers naar het eiland kwamen.
Deze afkomst vinden wij nu ook hier weder bevestigd door het feit, dat
het grootste deel van de Neger-folk-lore van Jamaica tot de Goudkust
met het achterland moet worden teruggevoerd en ook door de
overblijfselen van de Afrikaansche taal, die nog in het Neger-Engelsch
van Jamaica worden aangetroffen en die afgeleid moeten worden van
de Tshitaal der Ashantijnen en Fantijnen (Joh. blz. 276). 231 Het
Afrikaansche element is in de taal der Jamaica-negers veel meer door
het Europeesche, hier het Engelsche element, verdrongen, dan in
Suriname, zoodat hun taal een verafrikaansd Engelsch mag genoemd
worden.
Kan het nu verwonderen, dat ook in het leven der Jamaicaansche

Negers de Spinvertellingen (hier „Nancy-Stories” genoemd) een
belangrijke rol spelen?
Hetgeen Uncle Remus voor Georgia gedaan heeft (Ha.), deed Jekyll
voor Jamaica (Je.), en uit hun arbeid is ten duidelijkste gebleken, dat op
Jamaica het Afrikaansche element veel meer door het Europeesche
verdrongen is, dan in Georgia. Want van de 50 vertellingen, door
Jekyll medegedeeld, zijn zeker 11 uit Europa ingevoerd, en, hetgeen
eigenaardig is, eenigen schijnen hun weg naar het eiland gevonden te
hebben uit Portugal over Afrika.
Een groot deel der Jamaicaansche vertellingen zijn, hetzij zij tot de
echte Anansi-vertellingen behooren of niet, [369]dezelfde dierenfabels of
sprookjes, den lezer reeds uit Suriname bekend, en behooren tot
dezelfde type als de Uncle Remus-serie (Ha.) en de talrijke vertellingen
van de West-kust van Afrika (Ba en Cr.). Alle dieren, die er in
voorkomen, stellen menschelijk denkende wezens voor, en zijn ook hier
gepersonifieerd door vóór den naam van het dier een voorvoegsel te
plaatsen, uit de Europeesche talen afkomstig, hetzij dit Mr., Brer (van
Brother) enz. luidt.
De naam „Annancy”, zooals op Jamaica de spin heet, zegt voor de

afkomst der vertellingen genoeg. Ook hier vinden wij de zelfde anansi
der Neger-vertellingen uit Suriname en de Goudkust terug, met zijn
formidabelen eetlust en zijn vele streken om aan voedsel te komen, met
zijn vrees voor den dood, waaraan hij op allerlei manieren tracht te
ontkomen, met zijn voortdurend streven, om oneenigheid onder de
dieren te stichten enz., om van vele andere overeenkomstige
eigenschappen niet te spreken, die een zelfden oorsprong der
vertellingen verraden.
Opvallend is het, dat de schildpad, die elders zoo dikwijls in de Neger-

vertellingen optreedt, op Jamaica gemist wordt, doch hier vervangen
wordt door de pad—hetgeen begrijpelijk is, want de schildpad (steeds
wordt aan de Goudkust en de Slavenkust, wanneer dit dier in de
vertellingen optreedt, een landschildpad bedoeld) komt op Jamaica niet
voor. Enkele malen treedt ook hier „Brer Rabbit” op, die echter weinig
meer herinnert aan het traditioneele karakter, uit de vertellingen van de
Goudkust en Sierra Leone bekend.
Het luipaard, dat zoo dikwijls in de West-Afrikaansche negervertellingen

optreedt, is evenals in Suriname op Jamaica vervangen door den tijger,
hoewel de jagoear er, evenals vele andere voor de Zuid-
Amerikaansche fauna karakteristieke zoogdieren, ontbreekt.
Jekyll herinnert er aan, dat de spin in de vertellingen [370]steeds in zulk

een slecht daglicht wordt gesteld, hetgeen wellicht hieraan moet
worden toegeschreven dat de verhalen meestal een moraliseerend
karakter hebben, en het laten uitkomen der slechte eigenschappen de
bedoeling zal hebben, het luisterende volk beter te maken.
Evenals voor mij tijdens ons verblijf in de Surinaamsche oerwouden

een plotseling uit het achter onze kampplaats gelegen
negerkampement tot mij komende schaterlach het teeken was, dat een
onzer arbeiders een anansi-tori aan het vertellen was en een
geestigheid debiteerde, zoo is ook voor de negers op Jamaica het
luisteren naar „Nancy-stories” de geliefkoosde tijdpasseering na
volbrachten dagtaak; en wanneer plotseling uit een groepje negers op
het veld een schaterlach opstijgt, kan men er zeker van zijn, dat een
„Story-teller” bezig is „Bro’er” of „Mr. Annancy” een of andere
geestigheid te laten zeggen of doen.
Opmerking verdient het nog, dat meerdere vertellingen uit Jekyll’s

bundel leeren, waarom de spin te midden van een bananentros leeft
(en niet zooals in Suriname in „beslagruimten”), hetgeen niet vreemd is,
omdat zijne „Nancy-stories” op de cultuurondernemingen van het
groote eiland werden bijeengebracht, waar sedert jaren een uitgebreide
bananencultuur wordt uitgeoefend,
Het drietal „Nancy-stories”, die ik voor dezen bundel uit Jekyll’s boek
heb uitgekozen, zullen den lezer daarom zeker welkom zijn, omdat de
schrijver ook de melodieën heeft tusschengevoegd, waarmede de
verteller zijne verhalen steeds laat afwisselen.
Op Jamaica schijnt de moraliseerende bedoeling der negervertellingen

geheel op den achtergrond te zijn geraakt. Zij worden hier bijna
uitsluitend tot ontspanning verteld, en de beleefdheid schijnt daar mede
te brengen, dat de verteller zijn verhaal eindigt met: „Jack Mantora
[371]me no choose any”, waarmeê hij wil zeggen: „Deze vertelling is
noch gericht tot jou, Jack (d.i. een willekeurige toehoorder) noch tot een
der anderen”.
1. Annancy in Krabbenland.
Op een goeden dag stelde Anansi zichzelf tot predikant aan en begon
al preekende het land door te trekken. Op deze wijze bereikte hij
eindelijk Krabbenland. 232 Doch zijn woord vond daar geen gehoor: de
Krabben wilden niet naar hem luisteren.
„Wie niet sterk is, moet slim zijn”, dacht Anansi, „vriend Krab zal zich
door mij wel laten bekeeren. Daar kan hij donder op zeggen”. Hij
keerde nu naar huis terug, tooide er zich met toga en baret, schilderde
zijn neus rood—alles om een meer betrouwbaren indruk te maken—en
haalde eenige zijner vrienden over, om gezamenlijk zendingswerk te
gaan verrichten. De vrienden waren de Heeren Pad, Rat en Kraai*.
Al spoedig gingen zij met hun vieren op stap, en toen zij Krabbenland
bereikt hadden, begon Anansi ijverig en vurig te preeken, echter met
geen beter gevolg dan voorheen: bij vriend Krab vond zijn woord geen
ingang.
Anansi huurde toen van vriend Krab een huis, en trok daar in. Inziende,
dat Krab zich niet met preeken zou laten vangen, besloot Anansi, die
altijd veel snaren op zijn boog heeft, een anderen weg in te slaan. Hij
vervaardigde een trom en een viool, liet Kraai viool spelen, en vriend
Rat den trom roeren. Maar de muziek bevredigde hem nog niet; zij
maakte te weinig lawaai; er moest meer bij. Hij voegde daarom nog een
fluit aan zijn orkest toe en liet deze door vriend Pad bespelen.
Toen hij dit nu alles voor elkaar had, begon hij uitvoeringen [372]te geven
en volgde nauwkeurig de levenswijze van de Krabben. En ziet! Deze
kwamen nu telkens bij hem en geraakten geheel onder zijn invloed. Wat
Anansi echter in zijn schild voerde, dat vermocht vriend Krab niet te
doorzien.
Toen Anansi nu in Krabbenland niet langer gewantrouwd werd, besloot

hij verder te gaan. Openlijk liet zijn Eerwaarde nu aankondigen, 233 dat
er in zijn woning een plechtig doopfeest zou plaats hebben, en dat de
plechtigheid door de uitvoering van hemelsche muziek zou worden
opgeluisterd. De gasten zouden met muziek ontvangen worden en met
muziek voorop naar huis teruggebracht worden. Onder de tonen der
muziek zou het loopen voor Krab een genot zijn.
Nu begon de groote repetitie. Vriend Rat sloeg op den trom, dat het
donderde; Kraai speelde op de viool, zoodat de vonken er afvlogen, en
Pad speelde op de fluit, zoodat de aderen op zijn hoofd opzwollen.
Anansi zou hen voorzingen, wat er gespeeld moest worden, en het
eerste nummer luidde:
The bands a roll, 234 The bands a roll, the bands a roll, a go to Mount Si-ney 235
Sa - lem is Zak - kilow, 236 Some a we da go to Mount Si - ney. 237
[373]
Verder sprak Anansi met zijn vrienden af, dat zij zich voor den schijn
door hem moesten laten doopen, en wel met zooveel vertoon, dat
vriend Krab verlangen zou, die plechtigheid ook te ondergaan.
Het doopfeest vond nu plaats en toen het was afgeloopen, waren de

Krabben daarover zóó in de wolken, dat zij niet konden nalaten te
verzoeken, hen op dezelfde wijze te begenadigen als Anansi’s
vrienden.
Anansi antwoordde hen, dat hij vriend Krab de genade en den doop
niet wilde onthouden, maar dat hij er nog meê wilde wachten tot den
volgenden morgen, omdat hij zich door vasten er op moest
voorbereiden. Vriend Krab was met dit antwoord zeer in zijn schik.
Anansi legde nu zijn vrienden uit, wat hij van plan was te doen. Hij zou
vriend Krab doopen, maar niet met koud, maar met kokend water. Hij
liet een diep vat aanrukken, stelde dit als doopvont op, en verzocht zijn
vriend Krab, in het vat te kruipen en op den bodem daarvan plaats te
nemen. Toen het zoover was, vroeg Anansi zijn vrienden, den gereed
gemaakten ketel over te reiken, en hij goot dien over vriend Krab uit,
wiens lichaam daardoor geheel rood werd.
Toen Anansi dit zag, riep hij uit: „De Hemel zij dank, nu kan de slimme
rakkert mij niet langer weêrstreven, en zal Anansi hem rustig bij zijn
ontbijt kunnen verorberen”.
Sedert dien tijd bedriegt Anansi al zijn vrienden.
Ik bedoel er jou niet meê, Jack.
2. Reiger.
Er was eens een Indiaansche vrouw, die een dochter had, geboren met
een gouden ring om den vinger. Iedereen had van het geval gehoord,
maar niemand had het merkwaardige meisje gezien.
Toen Anansi deze geschiedenis vernam, wekte ze zijn eerzucht op, en

hij besloot het meisje tot zijn vrouw te [374]nemen. Hij overlegde nu, hoe
hij het aan zou leggen, bij haar te worden toegelaten.
Aan het hoofd zijner muziekanten trok hij naar de woning van het
meisje en op zijn beleefd verzoek werd hij op het omheinde erf
toegelaten. Hij liet de muziekanten hun mooiste stukken spelen, maar
deze konden het meisje niet bekooren; haar gelaat bleef strak. Zij bleef
droevig voor zich uitstaren; zij glimlachte niet eens. Anansi, die zag, dat
hij niet vorderde, zei haar nu goeden dag en ging weêr naar huis terug.
Onderweg ontmoette hij zijn boezemvriend, heer Konijn. „Zeg, broêr

Anansi”, vroeg Konijn, „waar kom jij zoo vandaan?”, waarop Anansi
vertelde wat er gebeurd was. Toen Konijn alles had gehoord, gaf hij
Anansi te kennen, dat hij eveneens zijn geluk bij het meisje wilde gaan
beproeven. „Doe dat”, zei Anansi, „jij bent een heerlijke blanke meneer;
ik heb zoo’n idee, dat je slagen zult. Maar als het in orde komt, deel het
me in het teruggaan meê, en, wat ik zeggen wil, in dat geval moet je mij
als kamerheer te werk stellen”.
Konijn begreep niet, wat Anansi bedoelde, die stellig van plan was, hem
het meisje afhandig te maken.
Konijn begaf zich nu naar de woning van het meisje. De moeder deed
hem open en vroeg wat hij wilde. „Ik ben op zoek naar een verloofde”,
zei Konijn, „en denk haar hier te zullen vinden”. „Het spijt me, Heer
Konijn”, zei de moeder, „want ge zijt slechts een wouddier en aan een
dier wensch ik mijn dochter niet uit te huwen.”
Na eenig dralen begreep Konijn, dat hij maar moest heengaan 238. [375]
Intusschen was Anansi buiten op Konijn blijven wachten, nieuwsgierig

om te vernemen, hoe het was afgeloopen. Toen hij nu van Konijn
vernam, dat ook deze een blauwtje had geloopen en zij samen het
geval bleven bespreken, voegde Reiger zich bij hen en luisterde gretig
naar wat zij vertelden.
… voegde Reiger zich bij hen en luisterde gretig naar wat zij
vertelden.—Zie blz. 375.
Naar huis gaande, overlegde Reiger of ook hij niet een kans behoorde
te wagen, en hoe hij het zou aanleggen. Hij kleedde zich als een fijne
meneer, huurde een omnibus en reed naar het huis van het meisje,
waar hij hartelijk werd ontvangen en zóó in den smaak viel, dat reeds
dadelijk alles geregeld kon worden voor het aanstaand huwelijk.
Nu was er in het huis van het meisje een jongen, die toovenaar was, en
toen deze Reiger goed had bekeken, zei hij: „dat is geen fijne meneer;
dat is niemand anders dan Reiger, die zich verkleed heeft”.
„Je liegt”, zei het meisje, „het is mijn beminde, en geen verkleede
bedrieger”. „Heb geduld”, antwoordde de jonge man, „ik vind dat wel
uit”.
Hij volgde Reiger, eerst naar diens huis, en daarna naar den oever der
rivier, waar Reiger ging visschen. De toovenaar klom daar ongemerkt in
een boom, en terwijl Reiger zich daar met zijn arbeid bezig hield, begon
de jongen te zingen:
[376]
Moderato.
My id dy, my id dy, Pyang 239, ha - lee, 240 Come go da ri - - ver go, Pyang me.
Yak - ky, Yak - ky, Pyang, me je - - wah - - lee 241, Pyang, me. Yak - ky, Yak -
ky, Pyang, me je - wah - lee, Pyang.
Reiger had geen flauw vermoeden, dat iemand hem van een boom uit
zat te begluren.
Toen nu de toovenaar voor den eersten keer het lied had aangeheven,
richtte Reiger zich op en daardoor viel de hoed van zijn hoofd.
Toen nu de jongen het lied herhaalde, viel als vanzelf eerst de jas en
daarna het hemd van zijn lichaam en nadat de jongen het lied voor de
derde maal had gezongen, viel Reigers broek naar beneden.
De toovenaar had zich nu overtuigd, dat zijn vermoeden gegrond was,

en dat de vrijer van het Indiaansche meisje niemand anders dan Reiger
was, die zich onkenbaar had trachten te maken.
Reiger was nu, bevrijd van zijn kleeren, ijverig begonnen te visschen en
daarvan maakte de jongen gebruik, om zich ongemerkt uit de voeten te
maken.
Toen nu den daaropvolgenden dag de bruiloft zou plaats hebben 242 en

allen zich om den feestdisch geschaard [377]hadden, stond de jonge
toovenaar op en zei: „Dames en heeren, als ge een aardig liedje wilt

Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth Century British Literature History and Culture Sandra Dinter Full Chapter

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Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth Century British Literature History and Culture Sandra Dinter Full Chapter

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Medicine and Mobility in

Nineteenth-Century British Literature,

Medicine and Mobility in

Medicine and Mobility

ISBN 978-3-031-17019-5 ISBN 978-3-031-17020-1 (eBook)

Cover illustration: ParkerDeen/Getty Images

excellent feedback we received from our anonymous reviewer. We are

June 2022 Sandra Dinter

Part I Travel and Health 27

Part II Pathologising Mobilities 119

Part III Mobilities and Medical Regimens 211

Natasha Anderson is Doctoral Research Fellow at Johannes Gutenberg

“Trace: Embodied Approaches to the English Novel” in English

t­heatre broadcasting, and new forms of criticism. Recent publications

Medicine and Mobility

Sandra Dinter and Sarah Schäfer-Althaus

On a bustling Monday morning, Mary Barton, the heroine of Elizabeth

© The Author(s) 2023 1

Historical Coordinates: Medicine, Mobility,

Britain witnessed a pervasive professionalisation, institutionalisation, and

breakdown indicates, being a woman was considered “inherently patho-

journeying were emerging” (Mathieson 2015, 3). Domestic tourism in

hydrotherapy (water cures) and galvanism (electric therapy), combined

women, various medical experts advocated cycling. An article in Chambers’s

This overview has shown that entanglements of medicine and mobility

Theoretical Cornerstones: Mobility Studies

Mobility studies and the medical humanities define themselves primarily

manifestations. Accordingly, mobility studies go beyond mobility as an

the medical humanities originally foregrounded the doctor’s responsibility

Dissecting Medicine and Mobility

(1995), further comprehensive studies of illness and medicine in Romantic

travel to escape, prevent, or cure a variety of ailments associated with

and limited by their relatives’ illnesses, their children’s premature deaths,

norms yet also questions them, particularly by showcasing how Maggie’s

books, health advice pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, and personal cor-

“health guide before the twentieth century enjoyed a greater popularity”

Rothfield, Lawrence. 2014. “Medical.” In A New Companion to Victorian

and Economics of International Shipping, edited by Gelina Harlaftis, Stig

Travel and Health

Doctors’ Ships: Voyages for Health

In 1925, various newspapers lamented the “passing” of the famous clipper

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 29

The Ocean as a Health Resort

Welgemoed ging Nansi huiswaarts, maar al weêr bedroog hem zijn

Op etenstijd geschiedde weêr hetzelfde; maar toen Nansi riep:

Daarop namen nu Nansi en Varken beiden hun snoet af en gingen te

En van toen af is het, dat de varkens in den grond wroeten, om den

Creoolsche folk-lore van St.-Eustatius.

St.-Eustatius, het voornaamste der drie aan Nederland toebehoorende

Wanneer op ruime schaal voor het vasthouden van het regenwater en

De bevolking, gedeeltelijk Nederlanders en hunne afstammelingen,

Dat door de genoemde omstandigheden het karakter der door de

Ook op St.-Eustatius behoeft de folk-lorist niet voor negatief resultaat te

Braha- 227 Nanci en Braha-Toekema.

Er waren twee vrienden; de een heette Braha Nanci, de ander Braha

„Goed, B.T., ik zal oppassen”… en de beide vrienden namen hun

B. T. sneed de mooiste en vetste stukjes uit en was zeer voorzichtig,

Maar weêr verliepen minuten en nog kwam B. N. niet te voorschijn.

Toen de os dood neêrviel, wist B. N. eerst niet, wat gebeurde en van

De koeienjongen, den mooisten os van den Koning dood vindende,

De twee vrienden gingen nu verder en kwamen voorbij een huis, waar

Ja, ze dreven de schijnheiligheid zóó op, dat ze zeurig eentoonig

„Een goede vrouw is zij geweest,

June 2022 Sandra Dinter

Part I Travel and Health 27

Part II Pathologising Mobilities 119

Part III Mobilities and Medical Regimens 211

theatre broadcasting, and new forms of criticism. Recent publications