The professionalization of psychology in Nazi Germany

For one thing, what was the Augustan world of polite letters to make of the warrior culture of the Homeric epics? As Williams deftly shows, eighteenth-century values prized "manliness", setting off the "manly" against the effeminate, the childish, and the brutal. Yet the literary mores of the Spectator era also felt equivocal about the parade of martial virtues, seeing macho bellicosity as an outmoded and hopefully obsolescent mark of barbarian savagery. Thus, Williams demonstrates, Pope was concerned to praise more a mental than a physical manliness. Such views obviously ramify with a medical milieu which increasingly emphasized that the ultimate determinant of human nature lay less in gross anatomy or the humours than in the nervous system and the brain. For another thing, the very notion of "manliness" came exceedingly close to the bone for Alexander Pope, a dwarfish man (he probably suffered from Pott's disease, tuberculosis of the spine) who could speak of "this long disease my life". If Pope could never hope to be manly in the martial sense, he could at least aspire to a certain literary manliness. The question as to whether satire (the pen is mightier than the sword) was an appropriately masculine deployment of wit clearly raised issues (skilfully handled by Williams) respecting medical and psychological understanding as to whether literature was a form of healthy discharge, perhaps of spleen, or an introverted species of psychopathology. Pope's fear of being unmanned, Williams shows, led to a parade of muscular mockery, spiteful caricatures of homosexuals, and an enigmatic misogyny. All readers disposed to the view that it is important to study medical ideas as they permeated the general culture will find rich rewards in this intriguing work.