Free Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century by Laurence Lerner

smallpox. Looking back more than a century later, we can see that she was both right and wrong. Of course foul air and foul water are the causes of disease, because there are airborne and waterborne infections. It is not foulness as such that we must be protected from, but the microorganisms

 

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that carry these diseases. But for her, to maintain that would be to reify disease:
Is it not living in a continual mistake to look upon diseases, as we do now, as separate entities, which must exist, like cats and dogs, instead of looking upon them as conditions, like a dirty and a clean condition, and just as much under our control. I was brought up, both by scientific men and ignorant women, distinctly to believe that smallpox, for instance, was a thing of which there was once a first specimen in the world, which went on propagating itself, in a perpetual chain of descent, just as much as there was a first dog.Since then I have seen with my eyes and smelt with my nose smallpox growing up in first specimens, either in close rooms or in overcrowded wards, where it could not be any possibility have been "caught" but must have begun. 24
Here we hear the commanding voice of experience, authoritative, impressive, and wrong. For a counterstatement from modern times to set against it, I choose not a medical writer but Susan Sontag's vigorous and personal essay, Illness as Metaphor. This stirring defense of scientific medicine attacks multicausal theories of disease, along with theories that diseases are caused by mental states, because they moralize what should be seen as pathology and "make people irrationally fearful of effective measures such as chemotherapy, and foster credence in thoroughly useless remedies such as diets and psychotherapy." All moral or mental explanations, which Sontag sees as examples of metaphor, "are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease, 25 and she has, as one would expect, no respect for the outmoded "miasma" theories that Nightingale still clung to.
The contrast tells us a great deal. It is the contrast between scientific medicine and public health, two institutions that (fortunately) collaborate in practice but between which, as I have tried to show, a deep gulf of principle can open. Perhaps too it is the contrast between the human being seen holistically and morally (what do diagnostic details matter to the spiritual self?) and the human being anatomized by experimental science. And is it going too far to suggest that it is, in part, the contrast between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries?

 

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2
Strategies of Consolation: The Dead Child in Poetry
CHILD DEATHS , then, were common enough in the nineteenth century and were brooded on; so it is hardly surprising that they figure so prominently in nineteenth century literature. (Whether we should nonetheless be surprised will be discussed in chapter 4.) In this chapter I shall look at some of the many poems on the subject.
All deaths bring to the survivors a need for consolation, and child deaths most of all because of the feeling that it is unnatural as well as distressing for the mother to outlive her child. Consolation is at least the apparent theme of poems on the subject; so imagine yourself a bereaved mother reading the following poem by Felicia Hemans:
No bitter tears for thee be shed,
Blossom of being! seen and gone!
With flowers alone we strew thy bed,
O blest departed One!
Whose all of life, a rosy ray,
Blushed into dawn and passed away.
Yes! thou art fled, ere guilt had power
To stain the cherub-soul and form,
Closed is the soft ephemeral flower

 

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That never felt a storm!
The sunbeam's smile, the zephyr's breath,
All that it knew from birth to death.
Thou wert so like a form of light,
That Heaven benignly called thee hence,
Ere yet the world could breathe one blight
O'er thy sweet innocence:
And thou, that brighter home to bless,
Art passed, with all thy loveliness!
Oh!