Abstract
Studies of Lawrence’s physiological thinking2 have generally refrained from linking his ideas to developments in theoretical neurology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An exception occurs in Professor James C. Cowan’s Journey with Genius: D. H. Lawrence’s American Journey, where Lawrence’s ideas are placed discerningly in the context of available anatomical knowledge.3 Anatomical clarifications were; however, inseparable from major debates about function, and these are strongly reflected in all Lawrence’s writing in this field. Lawrence saw his ‘blood-consciousness’ theory as a remedy to the inadequacies of psychoanalytic theory and practice, and various other cults of his period, but complicated the debate by nowhere revealing his sources. ‘I am no scholar of any sort’, he argued, but remained silent about scientific writers whom he may have had in mind when he added, ‘But I am very grateful to scholars for their sound work’ (F, p.11). The suggestion of this essay is that Lawrence made use of two major and originally rival theories on the function and structure of the involuntary nervous system, the one stemming from the work of Marie-François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802) and the other from the work of the Nottingham-born physiologist Marshall Hall (1790–1857). Hall’s work on the reflex arc largely supplanted Bichat’s ‘ganglionic’ theory by mid century, but Lawrence does not seem to have been aware of the synthesis of the two systems which stemmed from the work of Claude Bernard (1813–78).
In its original form this essay appeared as ‘D. H. Lawrence’s “Blood-consciousness” and the work of Xavier Bichat and Marshall Hall’, Etudes Anglaises, 32, no. 4 (1979) 397–413. I thank the Research Fund of Sheffield University for grants enabling me to consult material cited here. In addition I thank the staff of the Bibliothèque d’Histoire de la Médecine, Paris, the Wellcome Institute, London, and the Wolfson Institute at the Maudsley Clinic, London, for assistance in tracing references and material.
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Notes
Donal Shehan, ‘Discovery of the Autonomic Nervous System’, Archives for Neurology and Psychiatry, 35 (1936) 1081–113.
E. Clarke and C. D. O’Malley, The Human Brain and Spinal Cord(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1942) pp. 347–51;
Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, ‘Marshall Hall, the Grasp Reflex and the Diastaltic Spinal Cord’, in Science, Medicine and History. Essays in Honour of Charles Singer ed. E. Ashworth Underwood (London, 1953)pp. 303–20;
Sir William Hale-White, Great Physicians of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1935) pp. 85–104;
Max Neuburger, Die historische Entwicklung der experimentellen Gehirn- und Rückenmarksphysiologie vor Flourens (Stuttgart, 1897);
Sir Humphrey Rolleston, Centenary of the Nottingham Medico-Chirurgical Society (Nottingham, 1928) pp. 15–19. I thank Dr Adrian Bower, of the Department of Human Anatomy at Sheffield University, for assistance in this reading.
Charlotte Hall, Memoirs of Marshall Hall, MD, FRS. (London, 1861); referred to here as Memoirs with page references given in the text. This work appears as item 39 in the Catalogue of the Library of the Eastwood and Greasley Mechanics’ and Artizans’ Institute (Eastwood, 1895) p. 4 (Nottinghamshire County Library).
Xavier Bichat, Physiologische Untersuchungen über den Tod ed. with an introduction by Rudolf Boehm (Leipzig, 1912); referred to here as Untersuchungen with page references given in the text. This volume belongs to the Klassiker der Medizin series.
Martin Green, The Von Richthofen Sisters ( London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974 ).
Rose Marie Burwell, ‘A Catalogue of D. H. Lawrence’s Reading from Early Childhood’, D. H. Lawrence Review, (1970) 193–324.
Emile Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter: A Study in Edwardian Transition ( London: Heinemann 1971 ) pp. 118–63.
Marshall Hall, ‘On the Reflex Functions of the Medulla Oblongata and the Medulla Spinalis’, Philosophical Transactions XXVI (1833) 635–65.
Edward Carpenter, The Art of Creation (London, 1904) p. 146.
Henry R. Binns, Letter of 4 Apr 1904, Carpenter MS 271.84, Sheffield City Libraries. I thank Professor Delavenay for this reference. The work of Claude Bernard (1813–78), the other physiologist referred to by Binns, appears to have been unknown to Lawrence. For Bernard’s literary importance, see Reino Virtanen, Claude Bernard and his Place in the History of Ideas ( Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1960 ) pp. 117–28.
H. Maudsley, Die Physiologie und Pathologie der Seele trans. Rudolf Boehm (Wu. rzburg, 1870) in the Library of the Wolfson Institute, Maudsley Clinic, London.
For an obituary of Boehm by O. Gros (not Otto Gross), see ‘Rudolf Boehm’, Deutsche medizinische Wochenschrift 52 (1926) 2000. See also Green, The Von Richthofen Sisters pp. 62–73.
Frederick Carter, D. H. Lawrence and the Body Mystical (London, 1932) p. 26.
Brian Bracegirdle, ‘J. J. Lister and the Establishment of Histology’, Medical History, 21 (1977) 187–91.
The Notebooks of S. T. Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London, 1973 ) III, 4409–10.
Raphael Blanchard, Centenaire de la mort de Bichat (Paris, 1903) p. 13.
T. Rennell, Remarks on Scepticism… being an Answer to the Views of M. Bichat (London, 1819);
J. Bardinat, Les Recherches physiologiques de Xay. Bichat sur la vie et la mort, réfutées dans leurs doctrines (Paris, 1824).
W. H. Gaskell, The Involuntary Nervous System (London, 1916 ) p. 12.
Lawrence made numerous references to ‘blood’ in his ‘College Notebook’ poems. See Warren Roberts, A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963) pp. 344–5, item E317. The suggestion cannot be ruled out that the Bichat system was known to him in some form before the appearance of the Untersuchungen. The crystallising of his ideas after 1912 suggests that a first-hand reading of Bichat would have fallen on fertile ground. I thank Dr Holly Laird for her reference to this material.
Cited in Thomas H. Miles, ‘Birkin’s Electro-Mystical Body of Reality: D. H. Lawrence’s use of Kundalini’, D. H. Lawrence Review; IX (1976) 194–212.
George A. Panichas, Adventure in Consciousness (The Hague: Mouton, 1964) p. 4. Criticism of Lawrence’s work generally gains in clarity when it is placed against the background of his physiological thought. Thus, the view of David Cavitch — ‘Birkin more ardently and openly seeks Gerald’s love as his romance with Ursula proves successful and vivifying to him. Lawrence hoped to show through Birkin that the free, unified man will express his sensual affections, his unconscious feelings, in every relationship with things and persons. Gerald perversely dies’ — approximates to a recognition that ganglionic functioning, considered by Carpenter and others to be predominant among women, acts as a vital principle to the two men, but is ineffectual in the case of the predominantly cerebral Gerald Crich.
David Cavitch, ‘On Women in Love’, in D. H. Lawrence. A Collection of Criticism, ed. Leo Hamalian ( New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973 ) pp. 63–4.
See Harry T. Moore, The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence ( London: Allen and Unwin, 1963 ) p. 83.
Richard Hunter and Ida MacAlpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry ( London: Oxford University Press, 1963 ) pp. 1079–84.
D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926; first published 1916 ) p. 49.
J. R. Ebbatson, ‘Thomas Hardy and Lady Chatterley’, Ariel, 8 (1977) 85–95.
George Henry Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life (London, 1859–60) II, 280. See also pp. 151–272 (ch. 9: ‘The Spinal Chord and its Functions’).
William James, Principles of Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1890) 234–401 (chs 9–10).
L. Paulin, ‘Old Libraries of Nottinghamshire’ (1950, typescript in Nottingham County Library) p. 28.
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© 1987 Christopher Heywood
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Heywood, C. (1987). ‘Blood-Consciousness’ and the Pioneers of the Reflex and Ganglionic Systems. In: Heywood, C. (eds) D. H. Lawrence: New Studies. Macmillan Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18695-2_8
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