A PROFESSIONAL CONTEST OVER THE BODY: QUACKERY AND RESPECTABLE MEDICINE IN MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT

Extract

IT IS NOT LIKELY THAT MANY readers of Martin Chuzzlewit will remember Mr. Bevan’s profession. The gentleman so kind as to lend Martin and Mark Tapley money to go back to England is not just one of few honest persons in the vulgar, shoddy world of Dickens’s America, but a doctor as well: “[H]e made Martin acquainted with his name, which was Bevan: and with his profession, which was physic, though he seldom or never practised” (280; ch.17). We find many other medical persons in the novel: Jobling the doctor, Lewsome the medical assistant, and Mrs. Gamp, the most famous or notorious nurse in English literature, but they are not highly commendable characters and never offer effective cures to their patients. Jobling is a pretentious swindler, and Lewsome assists, albeit unintentionally, Jonas Chuzzlewit’s attempt to murder his father. One would be reluctant to be nursed by Sairey Gamp, however tremendous she is as a product of a great literary imagination. As if to endorse the reader’s suspicion, Old Martin Chuzzlewit does not trust any doctors and has an amateur, Mary Graham, carry “a small medicine-chest” to care for him (26; ch. 3). The doctor treating Lewsome never seems very efficient in his practice (410, 416; ch. 26), and the only apparently reliable doctor “seldom or never practise[s].” No doctor or nurse can give proper treatment to the numerous sick people in this text full of physical disorders.