Healing the Republic

In this study Joan Burbick interprets nineteenth-century narratives of health written by physicians, social reformers, lay healers and literary artists in order to expose the conflicts underlying the creation of an American national culture. Including annual reports of mental asylums, the home physician manuals, social reform books, and middle-class novels, these ‘fictions’ of health engage in a counterpoint of voices competing to construct the hegemonic values of the emerging republic. Exploring the notion that political values flow from the daily exigencies of survival and enjoyment, the narratives of health presented here address the demands and desires of everyday life and construct a national discourse of control, authority, and subordination. The text first examines the structures of authority found in health narratives, later going on to analyse how specific knowledges about the brain, heart, nerves, and eye provide indices that reveal conflicts basic to American nationalism. Healing the Republic confronts what Burbick sees as a certain fundamental uneasiness about democracy in America. Fearing the political freedom they hoped to embrace, Americans designed ways to appropriate somatic discourse to create, impose, or embrace social order in a politics of the body whose influences are felt to this day.