Degeneration under the Microscope at the fin se siècle

Summary

Theories of familial, racial, and national degeneration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been explored by historians in the context of social and moral pathology. At the same time nerve degeneration was studied in the post mortem room and in the laboratory but links to the broader ideology of degeneration have not been investigated by scholars. This paper joins these domains by examining the concept of Wallerian degeneration. It argues that various discourses—including those of the laboratory scientist, the clinician, and the social theorist—employed the term degeneration, and these discourses frequently overlapped demonstrating that degeneration was a ubiquitous fact of Victorian and Edwardian nature.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Richard Barnett, Rhodri Hayward, and Steve Sturdy, for their comments on an earlier version of this paper, and to two anonymous referees, who took much trouble to produce very helpful reports.

Notes

¹The best study of degeneration theory, especially in Britain, is Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge, 1989).

²Eric T. Carlson, ‘Medicine and Degeneration: Theory and Praxis’, in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, edited by J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman (New York, 1985), 121–44. This is a most useful survey but in spite of its promising title confines itself to the usual flagrant examples of degeneration theory without enquiring into everyday clinical medicine.

³Pick repeatedly emphasises how his study is concerned with the constitution and stabilization of a language of degeneration. Pick, Faces of Degeneration, e.g. 7, 179, 214–15.

⁴Augustus Volney Waller, ‘Experiments on the Section of the Glossopharyngeal and Hypoglossal Nerves of the Frog, and Observations on the Alterations Produced thereby in the Structure of their Primitive Fibres’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 140 (1850), 423–29, 425, 426.

⁵Sidney Ochs, ‘Waller's Concept of the Trophic Dependence of the Nerve Fiber on the Cell Body in the Light of Early Neuron Theory’, Clio Medica, 10 (1975), 253–66, 253. My italics.

⁶Edwin Clarke and C.D. O'Malley, The Human Brain and Spinal Cord, 2nd edition (San Francisco, 1996), 70–74.

⁷John M.S. Pearce, Fragments of Neurological History (London, 2003), 57.

⁸Alan H. Sykes, Servants of Medicine: Augustus Waller—Father and Son Physiologists (York, 2004), Chapter 4.

⁹The ‘Abstract’ of Waller's Croonian Lecture of 1870 makes no mention of degeneration only of the nerve being ‘disintegrated’ and ‘disorganized’. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 18 (1870), 339–43, 339.

¹⁰E.A. Schäffer, ‘The Nerve Cell’ edited by E.A. Schäffer, Text-Book of Physiology, edited by E.A. Schäffer, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1900), vol. II, 601. Italics in original.

¹¹The term is much older but the OED dates its use in biology to only three years earlier, 1848.

¹²James Paget, ‘On Fatty Degeneration of the Small Blood-Vessels of the Brain and its Relation to Apoplexy’, London Medical Gazette, 1850, 1–9. (Seen only as offprint, 1850.)

¹³Hanfield Jones and Edward Sieveking, A Manual of Pathological Anatomy (London, 1854), 154, 280, 244.

¹⁴William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles of Physiology, 5th edition (London, 1855), 316, 318, 331–32.

¹⁵Roger Smith, Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (London, 1992), 38.

¹⁶John C. Egan, Syphilitic Diseases: Their Pathology, Diagnosis, and Treatment (London, 1853).

¹⁷See Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis (Cambridge, 1990), Chapter 6.

¹⁸Charles Wilson, The Pathology of Drunkenness (Edinburgh, 1855).

¹⁹Edward Henry Sieveking, On Epilepsy and Epileptiform Seizures: Their Causes, Pathology and Treatment, 2nd edition (London, 1858), Chapter VII.

²⁰Thomas Reade, Syphilitic Affections of the Nervous System (London, 1867).

²¹B.A. Morel, Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l'espèce humaine et des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives (Paris and Londres, 1857).

²²Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971).

²³Eugene S. Talbot, Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and Results (London, 1898), 20. See also Eugene S. Talbot, Developmental Pathology: A Study in Degenerative Evolution (Boston, [c. 1911]).

²⁴Julius Althaus, On Scrivener's Palsy and its Treatment by Galvanisation of the Cervical Sympathetic Nerve (London, 1870), 1, 5, 7.

²⁵Edward Long Fox, The Pathological Anatomy of the Nervous Centres (London, 1874), 90–92, 112, 121, 179, 186, 308.

²⁶John Syer Bristowe, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Medicine (London, 1876), 78, 941–42, 927, 994–95.

²⁷Quétel, History of Syphilis, 134.

²⁸Pick frequently points out the reluctance of British authors to adopt a full-blown view of national or racial degeneration, Faces of Degeneration, e.g. 184.

²⁹C. Pitfield Mitchell, Dissolution and Evolution and the Science of Medicine: An Attempt to Co-ordinate the Necessary Facts of Pathology and to Establish the First Principles of Treatment (London, 1888), v, 5, 53–54.

³⁰C. Pitfield Mitchell, Dissolution and Evolution and the Science of Medicine: An Attempt to Co-ordinate the Necessary Facts of Pathology and to Establish the First Principles of Treatment (London, 1888), v, 162–67.

³¹Pick, Faces of Degeneration, e.g. 203–16. I say versions since Pick shows how Maudsley formulated degeneration theory optimistically and pessimistically at different times.

³²Henry Maudsley, The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind (London, 1867), 201, 214, 368, 394–95, 400, 402.

³³Henry Maudsley, The Pathology of Mind: Being the Third Edition of the Second Part of the ‘Physiology & Pathology of Mind’, Recast, Enlarged and Rewritten (London, 1879), 490, 515.

³⁴Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton, NJ, 1998).

³⁵Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, CA, 1992).

³⁶Francis Gotch, ‘Nerve’ in Schäffer, Text-Book, 451, 459. It is noteworthy though, in spite of the supremacy of the nervous system, how the activities of other systems of the body were being transformed into electrical signals, for instance, those of the heart into the electrocardiogram.

³⁷Robert M. Young , Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (New York, 1990).

³⁸See Sykes, Servants of Medicine. In jest perhaps, but in one quip the younger Waller summed up the thesis of this paper. He reportedly said, ‘I am the Wallerian degeneration’.

³⁹Augustus Désiré Waller, An Introduction to Human Physiology (London, 1891), 352, 365. All italics in original.

⁴⁰C.W. Suckling, On the Diagnosis of Diseases of the Brain, Spinal Cord and Nerves (London, 1887), 17, 142.

⁴¹William Osler, The Principles and Practice of Medicine (Edinburgh, 1892), 892–93, 780, 949–50. On the reaction of degeneration, Osler cites Allen Starr, ‘Lectures on Neuritis’, Medical Record (New York, 1887).

⁴²For a survey and a case study from a slightly later period see Christopher Lawrence, Rockefeller Money, the Laboratory and Medicine in Edinburgh: New Science in an Old Country (Rochester, NY, 2005).

⁴³ On Mott's scientific credentials and his relation to Henry Maudsley see Rhodri Hayward, ‘Germany and the Making of “English” Psychiatry: The Maudsley Hospital, 1908–1939’, in Inspiration, Co-operation, Migration: British–American–German Relations in Psychiatry, 1870–1945 , edited by Volker Roelcke and Paul Weindling (Rochester, NY, forthcoming).

⁴⁴Frederick W. Mott, The Croonian Lectures on the Degenera tion of the Neurone (London, 1900), 18, 25, 21, 38, 84, 57, 64, 11, 86, 33, 15, 25–6, 86, 67–9, 86–90. Italics in original throughout. I did not always find Mott clear on the difference between primary and secondary degeneration. They are not the same as inherited and acquired. A primary degeneration may have an hereditary component which requires a poison to activate it.

⁴⁵There is now a considerable literature on scientific objects. See Lorraine Daston (ed.), Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago, 2000).

⁴⁶F.W. Mott, ‘Introduction to Neuropathology’ in A System of Medicine. By Many Writers, edited by Clifford Allbutt and Humphry Davy Rolleston, 2nd edition, 8 vols (London, 1905–1911), vol. VII, ‘Diseases of the Muscles, the Trophoneuroses, Diseases of the Nerves, Vertebral Column, and Spinal Cord’, 173–289, 173–4, 199.

⁴⁷F.W. Mott, ‘Heredity and Eugenics in Relation to Insanity’, in ‘Problems in Eugenics’, Being Papers Communicated to the First International Eugenics Congress, London, 1912 (London, 1912), 10, 12, 13–14.

⁴⁸Pick, Faces of Degeneration, e.g. 184.

⁴⁹Robert A. Fleming, A Short Practice of Medicine (London, 1919), 265–68.

⁵⁰Smith, Inhibition, 38, 40.

⁵¹Indeed, at one point, even Mott talks of the degenerated neurone being ‘disorganized’. Mott ‘Introduction to Neuropathology’, 174.

⁵²For an account of how nuanced and interpenetrating pessimistic and optimistic views of degeneration could be, see Richard Barnett, ‘Education or Degeneration: E. Ray Lankester, H.G. Wells and The Outline of History’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 37 (2006), 203–99.