Kevis Goodman, Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking of Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023. Pp. 305. £35. ISBN 9780300243963.

Kevis Goodman’s excellent new book opens on a scene of Samuel Taylor Coleridge grumbling. This erstwhile champion of Germanic philosophy was not, it seems, a fan of aesthetics. 'I wish I could find a more familiar word than aesthetics for works of taste and criticism', Coleridge complained (1)—but, as Goodman explains, it would be many decades still before the borrowed term was fully interpellated into English belletrist discourse.

Yet this funny, original scene of Coleridgean anti-Germanic resistance becomes more significant when Goodman reveals that 'aesthetics' had belonged to the English language all along. Since the seventeenth century, aisthetics had been 'the term of the "Anatomists" used to designate the 'common sensory', that mysterious cerebral organ that was believed to unify the impressions of the five senses (2-3). Medical long before it was literary, 'aesthetics' serves as a keystone example of the magisterial book that follows: a deeply learned, historically astute study of unexpected forms of interplay between medical and poetic theories in the eighteenth century.

The 'basic task' of Pathologies of Motion is to explore aesthetic principles from the vantage of eighteenth-century pathology, paying particular attention to theories of disease imbricated in motion, displacement, and the dislocation of humans from their environment (15). It goes without saying that the historical 'pathology' covered in this book differs from the modern medical discipline with the same name (the branch of medicine that since the nineteenth century has been based on the study of morbid anatomy and responsible for the diagnosis of disease). In the mid-eighteenth century, Goodman explains in the first chapter, diagnosis belonged not to 'pathology', but to 'nosology'; what was then called 'pathology' referred instead to the study of interpreting the signs of disease, 'also known as "medical semiotics" and taught under the alternative name of 'semiology' in medical schools (9, 56).

Resisting the pull of a Foucauldian historical arc, Goodman derives her careful nomenclature from the archives of William Cullen (1710-1790), the Scottish Enlightenment physician. Responsible for training a generation of doctors who practised medicine around the world—including Erasmus Darwin and Benjamin Rush—Cullen was also a leading figure in the Edinburgh philosophical scene, practising medicine 'on intimate terms' with Adam Smith, David Hume, and Henry Home, Lord Kames (43). The second and third chapters immerse the reader in Goodman's brilliant close textual analyses of Cullen's influential textbooks on pathology and nosology. Exported worldwide, Cullen's textbooks considered the unexpected or undesired effects of mass migration and displacement—the very phenomena that also ensured the textbooks' international circulation. Attesting both to the global mobility of Cullen's ideas, as well as to the profound expertise of the author herself, Goodman complements her study of Cullen's medical archives (now held at the University of Glasgow) with medical-historical material from Germany, including the dissertation of a young Friedrich Schiller (116).

The book's central example of a pathology of motion is the historical disease of nostalgia, an often-fatal historical illness caused by the insatiable longing for home. Conceived by a Swiss medical student in 1688, by the mid-eighteenth century, nostalgia had become a veritable global epidemic, carried across oceans by the unwilling bodies in motion of sailors, soldiers, merchants, settlers, and enslaved people. Those afflicted with nostalgia could die within a matter of weeks; some drowned by throwing themselves into the green fields they saw in the sea (176).

Yet despite its ubiquity as a condition of modernity, Goodman writes, nostalgia profoundly troubled the nosological classification of disease. William Cullen treated the condition as a problem of location and taste: he situated nostalgia among other 'false appetites', such as bulimia, polydipsia, pica, satyriasis, nymphomania, and anorexia—which he admitted were bizarre bedfellows (75). Dissatisfied, his student, Erasmus Darwin, later reclassified nostalgia among diseases of 'volution and voluntary motion' (175). For this Romantic poet-doctor, nostalgia was produced by the disharmony between humans and their surroundings; consequently, it was both an environmental disease and a disease of rhythm.

Nostalgia was thus of considerable interest to his fellow Romantic poets, Coleridge and William Wordsworth, whose lyrical experiments could be reconceived as rhythmic interventions on the 'common sensory'. The book's final chapter—a tour-de-force analysis of the Lyrical Ballads and their 'Preface' alongside Biographia Literaria—finds the collaborators at a productive crossroads, poised between an ideal of 'reading as a free and voluntary movement' and the 'fettered feet—of a metrical sort' that restricted and acted upon the 'common sensory' of the reader (208). In the end, Wordsworth and Coleridge recognized that poetry could be both a bibliotherapeutic corrective to environmental discordance—and, disturbingly, yet another 'pathology of motion', this time 'realized in readers' bodies' (156).

Arden Hegele, Columbia University