Enlightening the Blind: Ormond; or, The Secret Witness and the Representation of Cataract Surgery in the Early Republic
Publisher : Ewha Institute for the Humanities: EIH
Research Area : Other Humanities
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This essay is an attempt to uncover the nature of the interface between the literary and the scientific in a fictional discourse. In so doing, it focuses on an anecdote in Charles Brockden Brown’s second novel Ormon; or, The Secret Witness (1799), in which the father of the novel’s heroine Constantia, Stephen Dudley, loses his sight but recovers it soon. The paper points out that this most curious, though unexplored, event is interlinked with various discourses that were bred in the Enlightenment period. Almost all of the critics have long ignored the fact that Dudley’s blindness has a distinct cause: a cataract. First, the paper tries to show, based on pathology, that the opening events in the novel and the progress of a cataract in Dudley’s eyes are paralleled. Second, it discusses the peculiar feature of the anecdote: the operation on the cataract. According to contemporary sources, there were two methods of cataract operation — depression and extraction — available in the Early Republic. Examination of these sources and Brown’s description proves that the method described in the novel is extraction, the advanced medical technology of the age, which can radically cure the blindness caused by cataracts. This is notable because Ormond, who helps remove Dudley’s cataract by calling a doctor, could be the object of removal in view of the US political situation. Ormond, who is a member of Illuminati, a secret society bred in the Enlightenment, has enough reason to be the “evil” that should be expelled immediately from the United States due to the enforcement of Alien Laws in 1799. Therefore, the fact that the person who should be removed helps remove a cataract critiques the Federalist policy. Thus, the two frameworks of reference — medical treatment and political thought — encounter at an anecdote in Ormond, which successfully contrives the interface between the literary and the scientific with a political resonance.
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