Her magnum
opus
The year 1792 brought
Mary to prominence among the self-consciously progressive philosophers and
philosophesses of the time. She had already boldly weighed in against Edmund
Burke’s denunciation of the French Revolution with her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), but it was with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(VRW) that she developed her particular unique contribution to the current
debates, and expounded her matured social critique. (1) The topics of medicine
and health care are clearly not the main issue in VRW, but loom rather larger
than might be expected, from childcare, to life-style advice such as the
benefits of exercise, to the reassertion that medicine was a suitable job for
women. She rejected the notion of female delicacy debarring them from such a
career choice: “Women might certainly
study the art of healing, and be physicians as well as nurses. And midwifery,
decency seems to allot to them, though I am afraid the word midwife, in our
dictionaries, will soon give way to accoucheur
[masculine gender]...” (p.337)
As indicated
previously, it did not follow that she was hostile to male doctors, indeed she
rather prided herself on having been able to communicate with them on equal
terms:
“I have conversed, as man with man, with medical men, on anatomical
subjects, and discussed the proportions of the human body with artists – yet
such modesty did I meet with, that I was never reminded by word or look of my
sex, or of the absurd rules which make modesty a whimsical cloak of weakness.
And I am persuaded that in the pursuit of knowledge women would never be insulted
by sensible men, and rarely by men of any description, if they did not by mock
modesty remind them that they were women.”
(p.278, note)
At the same time she
set a high value on a sense of privacy (‘personal reserve’), along with
cleanliness and neatness in coping with everyday physical functions. Nor did
she go to the opposite extreme of idealising traditionally female-dominated
folk-healing: “Women should be taught the elements of anatomy and medicine...
for the bills of mortality are swelled by the blunders of self-willed old women,
who give nostrums of their own without knowing any thing of the human frame.”
(p.411) Not that women were the only culprits, and they were often the victims
of the assorted ‘quacks’ and charlatans she held to be guilty of preying on the
gullibility and folly of many of them, as in the “fashionable deceptions...
practised by the whole tribe of magnetisers...” (p.419)
Her own prescription was typically straightforward: “If the functions of
life have not been materially injured, regimen, another word for temperance,
air, exercise and a few medicines, prescribed by persons who have studied the
human body, are the only human means, yet discovered, of recovering that
inestimable blessing health, that will bear investigation.” (p.419)
Realising nevertheless that it could not always be so simple, and that
even basic common-sense measures were not within everyone’s reach, she showed
an awareness of the social causes of ill-health: repression and confinements of
female children; the fads and fancies of their mothers; ‘libertines’ and
drunkards whose excesses ruined their own and their families’ health; and the
grinding poverty and ill-paid labour that was the lot of the lower classes. (Of
the prostitutes to whom libertines had recourse she spoke as evoking mingled pity
and ‘disgust ‘– not shutting her eyes to their existence as would have been
thought proper, but fiercely denying the validity of double standards which
always blamed and persecuted the female in any case.
From the cradle...
In the matter of ‘infant
management’ – or the care of babies and small children, another recurring theme
– she found herself more in tune with advanced medical opinion than with
prevailing reliance on traditional practices: “I have often heard women
ridiculed... only because they adopted the advice of some medical men, and
deviated from the beaten track in their mode of treating their infants... [by
adopting] the new-fangled notions of ease and cleanliness... What a number of
human sacrifices are made to that moloch prejudice!” (p.418) Even with the best
management, she envisaged infancy as a dangerous time, and the risk of one or
two neonates or toddlers per family dying as normal, a scenario that sadly
fitted her future grand-children. According to Godwin, she was working on a monograph,
Letters on the Management of Infants while
pregnant with her second child, before she died, and Dr Carlisle, “whom to name
is sufficiently to honour”, had promised to look it over. (2) She was strongly
in favour of breast-feeding by the mother (rather than a wet-nurse), which had
something of a vogue in radical ’circles but was not generally favoured among
the upper and middle classes. A beneficial side-effect, supposedly, was the
postponement of renewed fertility: “Nature has so wisely ordered things, that
did women suckle their children, they would preserve their own health, and
there would be such an interval between the birth of each child [and the next],
that we should seldom see a houseful of babes.” (p.442)
Soon enough she had the opportunity to put her ideas on motherhood to
the test, with a baby daughter of her own. (3) In spite of difficult, stressful
circumstances, and being already in her mid-thirties, she seems to have managed
well. Realistic but upbeat, she described her experience of childbirth in a
letter to Ruth Barlow six days later: “Nothing could be more natural or easy
than my labour – still it is not smooth work.” (4) “This struggle of nature,”
she added, “is rendered more cruel by the ignorance and affectation of women.”
Pleased with her quick recovery, she went for a walk no more than eight days
afterwards, contrary to the custom of the time. She was pleased too with the
flourishing “little animal” she had produced. She practised what she had
preached with regard to breast-feeding and close maternal care generally,
albeit with the indispensable help of a maid. Fanny Imlay, the child in
question, was at age three and a half, in her step-father’s view, “a singular
example of vigorous constitution and florid health.” (2)
In the midst of Revolution
This first experience
of becoming a parent took place in revolutionary France where Mary continued to
associate by preference with a fairly close-knit group of mostly
politically-motivated people. Some like her had come from abroad to observe at
first-hand and report on what was happening, others adhered to similar groups
and networks of French writers and thinkers. Most of her affinity group were in
sympathy with the ‘Girondin’ faction, rather than the more authoritarian and
anti-feminist hard left. One new
acquaintance was François Lanthenas, a Paris physician and member of the
National Convention. He was a foremost exponent of what has been called the
‘Rousseauist fantasy’ that “the regeneration of society would restore mankind’s
primitive good health and make medicine itself unnecessary.” (5) Although
involved with the Rolands’ entourage, unlike them he survived the Terror,
reputedly by disassociating himself in time from his dangerous connections.
Evidently he did not totally renounce old friendships, since he sponsored the
application for French citizenship of Mary’s brother James, in 1796. (6)
Not surprisingly perhaps, all things considered, in spite of her
initially positive reaction Mary went through a phase of uncertainty and low
spirits, exacerbated by her dismay at the course of public events, after her
daughter Fanny was born. Worries about her health resurfaced, and the baby fell
ill too, with what was diagnosed as smallpox (happily she got over it, a result
for which her mother felt she, as nurse, could take some credit). Her letters
to Gilbert Imlay, Fanny’s father, who was more or less in the process of leaving
her to fend for herself as a single parent and expatriate, convey something of
her negative feelings and worries. In February 1795: “Physicians talk much of
the danger attending any complaint in the lungs, after a woman has suckled for
some months. They lay a stress also on the necessity of keeping the mind
tranquil. – ” She tried to overcome her symptoms by will-power, asserting at
one point that her mind could make her body do anything it wished, a theory
popular with rationalists.
Norway, Sweden, Denmark
Tranquility, though,
was not to be the prevailing mode of the relationship. Within a few months its
breakdown had led to Mary’s first suicide attempt, back in London, by means of
a laudanum overdose; perhaps ‘para-suicide’ would be more accurate, since she
notified Imlay of her intention in time to be rescued. Godwin thought it was
“perhaps owing to [Imlay’s] activity and representations that her life was
saved” on this occasion. By way of therapeutic distraction she found a new type
of purpose-directed activity in the form of a journey to Scandinavia,
accompanied by her child and maid, on Imlay’s business. While waiting to sail
from Hull, she called on a physician to whom she had been given, or as she put
it had had forced on her, a letter of introduction, and was pleased to find him
“an intelligent and rather interesting man” who with his wife and “young brood”
showed her great hospitality.
Travel eased her mind, if only temporarily, to the extent of supplying
the material and impulse for the production of a successful book, her Letters Written during a short Residence in
Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796).
This dealt with and dwelt on her own psychological state as well as the countries
she visited. Her capacity for observation and tendency to introspection were both
in evidence, in a combination that appealed to many readers. The consolations of landscape and interesting
novelty of meeting different people did not always carry the day, but she
tried:
“I need scarcely inform you, after telling you of my walks, that my
constitution has been renovated here; and that l have recovered my activity,
even whilst attaining a little embonpoint.
My imprudence last winter, and some untoward accidents just at the time I was
weaning my child, had reduced me to a state of weakness which I have never
before experienced. A slow fever preyed on me every night, during my residence
in Sweden, and after I arrived at Tonberg.” (7)
In London on her
return she had to confront once more the reality of her moribund relationship
with Imlay. A second attempt at suicide, this time by drowning, in 1796, was
more determined than the first and more nearly succeeded. She was, however,
retrieved from the River Thames and revived; an unnamed physician was sent for
and attended her at the Duke’s Head public house. The Royal Humane Society, with
which her old acquaintance Dr Lettsom was closely involved, had shown the
practicality and propagated the technique of reviving the apparently drowned. (8)
Mary found the experience of near-drowning extremely painful, and resolved to
try another method if she should feel suicidal in the future. There were in
fact no more such attempts, although she went on alluding occasionally to the
possibility, for a while.
Wrongs of Woman
Again she set about
writing it all out of her system, and doing much more besides, in a second
novel, The Wrongs of Woman (a.k.a. Maria).
Although it was to remain unfinished, she wrote enough to provide many
useful insights into various aspects of the society of the time, and especially
on how the laws made by men dominated and damaged the lives of women in
different social strata. (9)
The setting of the opening scenes is a lunatic asylum in which the
(sane) heroine, Maria, is incarcerated by an ill-intentioned husband, with a
cover story to keep her there: “No person, excepting the physician appointed by
the family, was to be permitted to see the lady... The malady was [alleged to
be] hereditary, and the fits not occurring but at very long and irregular
intervals, she must be carefully watched; for the length of these lucid periods
only rendered her more mischievous, when any vexation or caprice brought on the
paroxysm of phrensy.” Thus however sane she appeared, it was to be taken as
only a temporary remission, and the longer it went on the worse it would be
when it ended.
In his journal Godwin recorded a visit he and Mary made to ‘Bedlam’
(Bethlehem Hospital, for those considered mentally ill, or ‘mad’) in February
1797, with Joseph Johnson. It was quite a fashionable pastime to walk round
looking at the lunatics, but in their case morbid curiosity was no doubt less
of a motive than research for their respective writings and analyses of the
contemporary world in all its aspects. Certainly Mary seems to have come away
with deep and lasting impressions that influenced her novel. She was aware of
different categories of inmate: “Melancholy and imbecility marked the features
of the wretches allowed to be at large; for the frantic, those who in a strong
imagination had lost a sense of woe, were confined.” One of the minor
characters is a “fair maniac” similar to those found in other 18th
century fictions, for example, Fanny Burney’s Camilla and Mackenzie’s Man
of Feeling. But perhaps her most significant and original creation in the
book is the asylum attendant, Jemima. The story of this woman’s life, presented
as a narration in her own voice, is an indictment of the established class
structure and economic inequality, including the (lack of) medical care for the
poor. When after a number of adverse events she is forced by an accident at
work to seek medical help, her experience as a moneyless patient in a
money-driven set-up is recounted at some length, in damning detail:
Hospitals, it should seem (for they are comfortless abodes for the sick)
were expressly endowed for the reception of the friendless; yet I... wanted the recommendation of the rich and
respectable, and was several weeks languishing for admittance; fees were
demanded on entering; and, what was still more unreasonable, security for
burying me, that expence [sic] not coming into the letter of the charity. A
guinea was the stipulated sum – I could as soon have raised a million; and I
was afraid to apply to the parish for an order, lest they should have passed me
[under the Poor Law regulations] I knew not whither. The poor widow at whose
house I lodged, compassionating my state, got me into the hospital; and the
family where I received the hurt [injury], sent me five shillings, three and
sixpence I gave at my admittance – I knew not for what.
My leg grew quickly better ; but I was dismissed before my cure was
completed, because I could not afford to have my linen washed to appear
decently, as the virago of a nurse said, when the gentlemen (the surgeons)
came. I cannot give you an adequate idea
of the wretchedness of an hospital; every thing is left to the care of people
intent on gain. The attendants seem to have lost all feeling of compassion in
the bustling discharge of their offices; death is so familiar to them, that
they are not anxious to ward it off. Every thing appeared to be conducted for
the accommodation of the medical men and their pupils, who came to make
experiments on the poor, for the benefit of the rich. One of the physicians, I
must not forget to mention, gave me half-a-crown, and ordered me some wine,
when I was at the lowest ebb. I thought
of making my case known to the lady-like matron; but her forbidding countenance
prevented me. She condescended to look on the patients, and make general
enquiries, two or three times a week; but the nurses knew the hour when the
visit of ceremony would commence, and every thing was as it should be. – pp.117-8.
Mary had not been a
hospital patient herself, nor had she experienced hardships comparable with
those of Jemima, although she may have heard first-hand from women who had. For
one, there was a young sister of Fanny Blood’s who had fallen into extremely
distressed circumstances and whom Mary tried to rehabilitate. Then there were
her doctor friends with hospital appointments, who may have talked about their
work environment. It is worth noting that a ‘good’ doctor is on hand to give
help when Jemima most needs it.
The story allows Jemima to have found a kind of asylum in the asylum,
but she has no illusions about it as an institution: “The overseer... purchased
this dwelling, as a private receptacle for madness. He had been a keeper at a
house of the same description ... [He] offered to instruct me how to treat the
disturbed minds he meant to intrust to my care. The offer of forty pounds a
year, and to quit a workhouse, was not to be despised, though the condition of
shutting my eyes and hardening my heart was annexed to it... Four years have I
been attendant on many wretches, and the witness of many enormities.” In spite
of everything she retains enough humanity to respond to the heroine’s plight
and help her escape. Maria’s troubles are not over but she too has at least met
with much-needed kindness from a stranger.
Towards the end
In their author’s life the recent melancholy was now mitigated by a new relationship, with fellow writer and political thinker William Godwin. Like her he had produced substantial, original works both of fiction (Caleb Williams, or, Things As They Are, 1794) and non fiction (An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793); he had also spoken for the defendants in the Treason Trials.
In their author’s life the recent melancholy was now mitigated by a new relationship, with fellow writer and political thinker William Godwin. Like her he had produced substantial, original works both of fiction (Caleb Williams, or, Things As They Are, 1794) and non fiction (An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793); he had also spoken for the defendants in the Treason Trials.
Together,
they maintained their contacts with other radicals and literary personages, in
spite of government repression of dissent and the growing climate of reaction.
Mary’s circle of acquaintance was broadened to include women writers Mrs.
Barbauld and Amelia Alderson, both daughters of dissenting medical men, John
Aiken and James Alderson respectively. Fanny Imlay, Mary’s daughter, was of
course still with her, growing satisfactorily but coming in for her share of
childhood ailments. In September Mary wrote to another new friend, Mary Hays, “A
fever, which has tormented my darling for some days past, gave me no little
uneasiness. I am now reassured by the sight of the Chicken-pox, and know that
she will soon be well again.”
Not all their acquaintances stayed close to William and Mary when they
married, since the fact that Mary had not been married to the father of her
first child was now inescapable, and the ensuing scandal was too much for some.
Doctors Fordyce and Carlisle, however, were among those who were not put off;
Mary mentioned a visit to the former in February 1797, and from the latter in
June – in each case social rather than professional, apparently, although she
was by that time pregnant again. It was also primarily as friends rather than
physicians that the same two made their first visits after the birth of a
daughter on 30th August.
Mary had taken a positive attitude to her second pregnancy, and
initially at least, expressed confidence at the prospect of her imminent
confinement. She had been through it once, in more daunting circumstances, and
survived. This buoyancy, regardless of what was she had seen of death in
‘childbed’, was not in itself rash or irrational; distressing as its incidence
was, research has shown maternal mortality to have been not quite as prevalent
in Mary’s world as may be supposed. (10) Of course it was a home birth; an
experienced midwife, Mrs. Blenkinsop of Westminster Lying-in Hospital, had been
booked to attend.
Unfortunately Mary’s optimism turned out to be misplaced. There were
complications (retention of the placenta) and a doctor had to be called in
after all. Dr Louis Poignand, physician and man-midwife, was also from
Westminster Hospital. Prominent in his field, he had published in 1778 a
translation of a French work on a substitute for the caesarean operation. (11)
At first his intervention seemed to have succeeded. After she had got past the
pain – the worst, she said, that she had ever experienced – Mary’s condition
appeared greatly improved. When Dr Fordyce visited her he “saw no particular
cause of alarm; and quoted Mary’s case as a corroboration of a favourite idea
of his, of the propriety of employing women in the capacity of mid-wives. Mary
‘had had a woman, and was doing extremely well’”. Dr Carlisle’s first visit
likewise passed without any sign of foreboding, but shortly afterwards things
took a turn for the worse; the most likely retrospective diagnosis is that the
attempt to deal with the problem of the afterbirth had introduced an infection
(puerperal sepsis). A few days later, Poignand withdrew from the case, saying
he would make no more visits, ostensibly because the household had “thought
proper to call in Dr. Fordyce”, but possibly, it has been suggested, because
his greater experience convinced him there was no hope.
Mary’s last few days, until her death on 10th September 1797,
were meticulously recorded in Godwin’s journal, from which he compiled the
Memoirs he began only a fortnight later. Nursed by Mrs. Blenkinsop and a
friend, Eliza Fenwick (another writer, commended by Carlisle as “the best nurse
he ever saw“), the patient received every attention that devotion could suggest
and current knowledge provide. (11a) Godwin, who had attended lectures on medicine
the previous year, did his best to ensure that her care was state-of-the-art,
using his many contacts. He recorded that he had called on John Walcot, Gilbert
Thompson and George Tuthill during this time, in addition to the four medical
men who actually attended Mary. The fourth was Dr John Clarke, who had been
brought in by Fordyce because he was not himself a specialist in obstetrics, in
case an operation was considered advisable; no doubt mercifully, it was not.
Clarke was the author of Practical Essays
on the Management of Pregnancy and Labour and of Epidemic Diseases of Lying-in Women. (12) He continued in
attendance despite a possible clash between his outlook and that of the other
doctors and the household. He had a name for opposing female midwives, but on
examining some of his strictures on ignorance and superstition they appear not
so very different from things Mary herself had written. Any difference of
opinion did not lead to a lack of respect on his side: he described her to Godwin,
in a note of thanks for a copy of Memoirs
and Posthumous Works, as a valuable member of society and a worthy woman.
(13)
Modern-minded as they were, those
around her were ready to resort to anything that might help to ease her
situation. When the pain became too severe, she was plied with “as much wine as
the stomach could bear” and any other beneficial “cordials” available. A week
after the birth Carlisle was fetched from dinner on the far side of town, and
stayed on in the house for the remaining four days that Mary lingered. “It was
impossible,” Godwin wrote, “to exceed his kindness and affectionate attention –
ever upon the watch, observing every symptom.” He was frank about the prognosis
and “observed that her continuance was almost miraculous – remarking that
perhaps one in a million in her state might possibly recover.” The most that
could be done was to try to relieve her suffering. She cooperated with their
efforts to the limits of her considerable physical and mentality strength, but
will-power, the mind-over-matter theory she and Carlisle both favoured, could
not prevail against the overwhelming odds or postpone the inevitable end for
long.
Did she die of a surfeit of doctors? In the view of at least one
biographer, medical men did not just fail to save her, they were responsible for
the tragedy, insofar as her chances would, it is argued, have been better if
Godwin had not been so quick to involve them. (14) Even if the fatal infection
was iatrogenic, though, it must be open to doubt whether, given that the
expectation of a straightforward delivery and trouble-free recovery had not
been fulfilled, leaving nature to take its course would have brought a happier
end result. It would be almost another half century before the classic description of
transmission of infection by (hospital) doctors to women in childbirth was
published. (15)
Recording aspects of health provision and medical practice in the
context of her times was hardly a major part of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life
work, but it stands as a not insignificant, if so far largely unregarded,
feature of her legacy.
E. A. Willis
Originally written c.1995; published online
only (so far).
It was the basis of a seminar paper for London Socialist Historians at the Institute of Historical Reaearch c.1996
It was the basis of a seminar paper for London Socialist Historians at the Institute of Historical Reaearch c.1996
Notes to Part 2:
1. Mary Wollstonecraft, A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Facsimile edition. Gregg International
Publishers, 1970. Page references in the text are for this
edition.
2. William Godwin, Memoirs of the
Author of A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1798]. Facsimile edition, bound with VRW, Gregg International Publishers, 1970, as at Note 1.
3. Biographical information here mainly from Claire Tomalin, The
Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976.
4. Ralph, ed., Collected Letters of Mary
Wollstonecraft. Ithaca/London, Cornell U P, 1978. Superseded by Janet Todd, ed. (Allen Lane 2003). Quotations from MW’s letters
in the text are from the Wardle edition.
5. Matthew Ramsay, Professional
and Popular Medicine in France, 1770-1830. Cambridge U P, 1988; p.72.
6. Tomalin,
p.135.
7. Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters
Written during a short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). Fontwell, Sussex, Centaur Press, 1970.
Excerpt in Dale Spender, Janet Todd, eds.,
Anthology
of British Women Writers. London, Pandora, 1989, p.317.
8. Joseph Johnson published at least one of the Royal Humane Society’s
prize essays: Edmund Goodwin, The
connexion of life with respiration... London,
printed by T. Spilsbury for J. Johnson,
1788.
9. Mary
Wollstonecraft, Mary, and The Wrongs of Woman, ed.
and intro. G. Kelly, OUP 1961.
10. pp 16-17 in Irvine Loudon, ‘Deaths in childbed from the eighteenth century to 1935’, Medical History 1986, vol. 30: 1-41.
11. Poignand is in Munk’s Roll: William Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London, vol.2, (1978), pp. 390-1.
11a. An unreliable edition (maddeningly rife with grotesque mistranscriptions), of Eliza Fenwick’s novel ‘Secresy’ [sic, not a mistranscription] was published by Pandora in 1989.
11a. An unreliable edition (maddeningly rife with grotesque mistranscriptions), of Eliza Fenwick’s novel ‘Secresy’ [sic, not a mistranscription] was published by Pandora in 1989.
12. Clarke is in Munk’s
Roll vol.2, pp. 369-71; and Sir George Clark, A History
of the Royal College of Physicians of London, vol.2, OUP, 1966, pp. 588-9.
13. Kenneth N Cameron, ed., Shelley and his Circle, vol. 1. Oxford U P 1961. Notes on pp. 186, 195, 201.
14. William
St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys.
Faber & Faber, 1989, pp. 177-8.
15. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The contagiousness of puerperal fever, 1843 (“classic paper”).
15. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The contagiousness of puerperal fever, 1843 (“classic paper”).
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London street art portrait of MW
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Now available: Both parts combined (with fewer illustrations)
as 16-page article (Word); also as pdf
as 16-page article (Word); also as pdf
