Membranes: metaphors of invasion in nineteenth-century literature, science, and politics

An examination of how the image of the biological cell became one of the reigning metaphors of the 19th century. Exploring a range of scientific, political and literary writing, Otis uncovers surprising connections among subjects as varied as germ theory, colonialism, and Sherlock Holmes' adventures. At the heart of her story is the rise of a fundamental assumption about human identity: the idea that selfhood requires boundaries showing where the individual ends and the rest of the world begins. Otis focuses on the scientific and creative writing of four physician-authors: American neurologist S. Weir Mitchell; Spanish neurobiologist Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who won the Nobel prize in 1906 for proving that neurons were intact, independent cells; British author Arthur Conan Doyle; and Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzel, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud in fin-de-siecle Vienna. The book also compares the scientific and political thinking of German scientists Rudolf Virchow, the founder of cellular pathology and an active liberal politician, and Robert Koch, who discovered the bacteria that causes cholera and tuberculosis and whose studies of foreign bacteria provided a scientific veneer The work seeks to demonstrate how psychological fears of penetration have both shaped and been shaped by scientific theories and political trends, and offers a perspective on a continuing social problem. In an age of AIDS, ethnic wars and the Internet, Otis explains that belief in impermeable personal and national borders is increasingly dangerous, though we have yet to replace our need for boundaries with a more appropriate concept of identity. Otis concludes by offering ways to circumvent these fears, arguing for a notion based on relations and connections.