The production of medicoethical misconduct: medical ethics and vivisection in Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science

• Published in: Medical humanities Vol. 49; no. 2; p. 289
• Main Author: Cole, 2nd, Thomas G
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 01-06-2023
• Subjects: Animals; Ethics, Medical; Female; Humans; Physician-Patient Relations; Vivisection - history; medical ethics/bioethics; Literature; literature and medicine; History
• ISSN: 1473-4265
• DOI: 10.1136/medhum-2022-012413

Even as Wilkie Collins's
continues in the tradition of cautionary tales of medicine and science, it also integrates nineteenth-century discussions of medical ethics, vivisection and women, further building on earlier criticisms of scientific hubris. By indicting a fictional medical doctor and his methodology,
depicts the extremes of good and bad, ethical and unethical medicine-whether the doctor can care, and not simply solve the medical enigma-in light of a changing medical field that prized objectivity and distance from the subject over the old holistic way of listening to a patient in order to understand her malady. In reading Collins within his historical context and against a changing environment within the medical sciences, literary critics discern a gendered doctor-patient relationship and observe a Victorian author's attempts to combat the fears of scientific advancement by using or aligning himself with a proto-feminist perspective.