This chapter argues that large-scale biological and energy systems were an important environmental concept in Victorian literature. It traces two intertwined cultural narratives. On the one hand, the transition to a fossil energy economy raised fears of coal exhaustion that were echoed by narratives of entropy: In both geology and the thermodynamic physical sciences it was proposed that the eventual exhaustion of energy sources would lead to the end of civilization or even human life. On the other hand, narratives of biological degeneration and atavism arose from a certain interpretation of evolutionary theory; some writers claimed to see unhealthy symptoms of species decline in “degenerate” artists and criminals. We can see how these cultural narratives functioned as environmental concepts in Victorian literary genres of science fiction and decadence, through texts such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The fin de siècle’s newly emerging scientific discourse of homosexuality was part and parcel of a broader tension between ‘materialists’ and ‘spiritualists.’ Whereas the former believed that human agency was fatally compromised by the determining influence of hardwired compulsions, the latter insisted on the existence of free will and man’s higher calling to resist basic impulses. For this reason, the notion of congenital homosexuality was an unacceptably radical one to the spiritualist faction of liberals and Catholics, which dominated among Belgian intellectuals and policymakers. Like those abroad, Belgian spiritualists associated the notion of inborn homosexuality with socialism in general and with the left-leaning French Third Republic in particular. This chapter zooms in on a series of international conferences to demonstrate how deeply interwoven the issue of homosexuality was with wider ideological tensions. It also shows why in Belgium the issue was sidelined so that its controversial nature would not stand in the way of penal reform.

In this chapter I describe the introduction of a new concept, “personality,” into the language of psychology and psychopathology of the late nineteenth century. Personality was introduced in a clinical–pathological context but was transferred to a psychometric context by American psychologists. In medicine, in the middle part of the twentieth century, although several types of “psychopathic personalities” were described, most of psychopathology was considered personality related. “Personality disorders” came to be seen as treatment-resistant and conceptualized as lying in a borderline region between neurosis and psychosis. In the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders version III (DSM-III), personality disorders were more thoroughly segregated from the rest of psychopathology. After the publication of the DSM-IV (and the International classification of diseases version 10, ICD-10), psychological scientists began to assert themselves, reinvigorating the old the contrast between a clinical–pathological method and a psychometric, factor-analytic approach as a “categorical” versus “dimensional” debate. More recently, the aspiration to apply factor-analytic psychometrics to psychopathology in general has the potential to reverse the separation introduced in the DSM-III and re-nest psychopathology under personality.

Chapter 6 completes the theme of the European Mythology of the Indies (III) and analyzes the impact of Enlightenment thought (French and British) on interpretations of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders. The chapter explores myths of primitivism and progress, showing how appeals to scientific authority grew at the expense of reference to biblical texts. It then examines the impact of the scientific voyages of Bougainville and Cook. On the one hand, the manner and customs of some of the South Seas peoples evoked the same kind of comparisons with classical antiquity as had been made in the Americas, especially the Golden Age of Antiquity, and appeared to offer confirmation of the myth of humankind in its infancy. So it was not just the Polynesians who interpreted the first Europeans in terms of their own myths; the same was true vice versa. On the other hand, the “enlightened” scientific expedition produced new data on non-European peoples which laid the foundations for rethinking theories of development of humankind, whether through progress or degeneration. Increasingly towards the end of the eighteenth century, notions of race became more salient in how non-European peoples were understood.

The third chapter traces the linkages between evolutionary science and aestheticism through the work of popular science writer Grant Allen and the arch aesthete Oscar Wilde, who shared a penchant for socialist politics as well as a firm belief in the truth of both Charles Darwin’s and Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theories. More importantly, Allen and Wilde were similarly repulsed by the cultural implications of social Darwinism, and for that reason looked to sexual selection – and, by extension, aesthetics – for a life-affirming alternative to the pressures of Darwinian competition. In their fiction and critical prose from the 1880s and 1890s, this chapter argues, both Allen and Wilde eventually arrived at a markedly utopian aesthetics that posited individual self-culture, through the emancipated pursuit of pleasure, as the key to radical social change. This chapter thus sheds light on aestheticism’s late-century polemical turn, which made it a lightning rod in the sexual controversies of the fin de siècle.

Several versions of ‘social Darwinism’ flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, along with ideologies derived from non-Darwinian evolution theories. They exploited discoveries of fossil hominids including Neanderthals and the Piltdown fraud to construct rival explanations of the emergence of human characteristics that might shape social development. The linear hierarchy of races erected in the nineteenth century remained the basis of many popular accounts, even though professional anthropologists began to turn their backs on it. Ideologies based on national or racial competition were advocated even by writers who did not accept the Darwinian theory of competition within populations. Fear of racial degeneration fuelled the eugenics movement’s calls for the elimination of ‘harmful’ characters, although the input from genetics encouraged an analogy with artificial rather than natural selection.

Richard Wagner’s musical and prose works are shot through with ideas, imagery, and speculation relating to race. Given the influence of racial theorising on almost every area of nineteenth-century European thought and culture, this is hardly surprising. Yet Wagner did not just absorb theories of race: he actively disseminated them, a fact that remains a troubling, if unavoidable part of his legacy. This chapter provides a selective overview of the history of scientific racism in Europe (especially Germany) from the Enlightenment era to the early twentieth century, focusing on the intersections of racial theory with aesthetics, comparative philology, and religious ideologies, including antisemitism. Special attention is devoted to Arthur de Gobineau’s influence on Wagner’s late essays, and the impact of those writings on the Bayreuth Circle, including Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

Osteoarthritis is a common etiology of chronic knee pain and disability associated with aging, weight, and physical inactivity. Global radiographic evidence of knee OA is present in 28.7% of people over 40 years old.Global symptomatic evidence of knee OA is present in 12.4% of people over 40 years old. “Wear and tear” damage to hip joint leading to dysfunctional ECM reorganization leads to chronic onset of pain that is worse with use and associated with decreased knee mobility. Years of conservative treatment with exercise, weight loss, and oral anti-inflammatories can mitigate the disease progression, but severe cases may require intraarticular injections or knee arthroplasty. Some promising injections hope to better manage chronic symptoms by reversing the course of the disease; however, knee arthroplasty remains a gold standard treatment of severe knee OA.

This chapter is the first of three that centre upon Nietzsche’s critique of pessimism in his mature philosophy of the 1880s. It presents Nietzsche’s psychological critique of pessimism as symptomatic of a particular calibration of one’s ‘drives’ that produces fatigue and a world-directed ressentiment. The chapter gives special attention to the crucial similarities and differences between Nietzsche’s psychological reduction of pessimism and those of the degeneration theorists, and the English psychologist James Sully, arguing that Nietzsche’s own position is subtly unique and, in some ways, more plausible. The final sections of the chapter address (1) Nietzsche’s diagnosis of Christianity as the pinnacle manifestation of pessimistic sentiment and (2) the problem of the ‘scope’ of Nietzsche’s psychological reduction.

Before the specter of the Nazi Final Solution, many British intellectuals at the fin de siècle perceived eugenics as forward-thinking and liberating. In their respective novels, A Superfluous Woman (1894) and The Girl from the Farm (1895), the socialist-feminists Emma Frances Brooke and Gertrude Dix paired ideologies of degeneration and eugenics with an endorsement of Edward Carpenter’s ethos of simple living, celebrating good health and wholesomeness. They adopted Francis Galton’s policy of selective breeding yet rejected his promotion of the peerage as “eminent” specimens for propagating future generations. In their fictions, the conservative aristocrat and entitled upper-middle-class man are instead enervated, parasitical decadents and obstacles to social, evolutionary advancement. Ultimately, Brooke’s and Dix’s visions are not altogether unified: whereas Dix simply dismisses her flimsy, immature dandy, Brooke advocates a more radical “negative eugenics” with an eye to her decadent’s diseased offspring. Rejecting privileged, dissipated men in favor of health and liberation, both authors anticipate twenty-first century social critiques of decadence.

The modern era of epilepsy can be said to date from around 1860. In the ensuing decades epilepsy was at the centre of an enormous range of endeavours which included Hughlings Jackson’s landmark works, the theory of cerebral localisation, the introduction of bromide and then phenobarbitone therapy and the first attempts at the surgical resection of the epileptic focus. It was the period when idiopathic epilepsy (‘genuine epilepsy’) was considered to be an inherited degenerative brain disorder, associated with mental symptoms and deficiency and a specific ‘epileptic personality’. It was the period when neurology first became a recognisable medical specialty, special hospitals for epilepsy opened and epilepsy colonies were formed all over the world. Lombroso considered epilepsy and criminality to have close connections. Inpatient treatment was conducted within the asylum system by psychiatrists. Epilepsy was associated with enormous stigma and was widely hidden or denied. In 1911, eugenics was proposed as a solution to the problems caused by epilepsy. Dostoyevsky, Zola, Dickens, Hardy and others included epilepsy in their books, and leading authors suffered from epilepsy but concealed their condition. International medical and psychiatric congresses were held, and during one of these, the International League Against Epilepsy was formed.

Chapter 2 shows how two Elizabethan and Jacobean engagements with problematic multitudes undermined the body politic as a framework for managing multitudes in a context of rapid population growth, economic change and political challenges beyond England. Turning first to growing anxieties about poverty and vagrancy in England, it examines how rogue literature constructed vagrants as a foreign and inherently idle counter-polity, rather than a displaced and degenerated multitude; it then shows how municipal ordinances, surveys and poor laws came to treat the mobile poor as inherently idle of quantification as well as regulation, for whom systematic intervention and routine management was necessary to instill the virtues of industry. Second, it follows late Tudor and early Stuart efforts to undo the degeneration (through mixture with the Irish) of the Old English in Ireland, and to civilize – through projects of plantation, conquest or legal reform – the putatively barbaric Gaelic Irish themselves. In both cases, problematic groups were no longer seen as displaced organs of a body politic but rather as populations that must be made governable in the first instance through policy.

Chapter 5 considers texts in which music acts upon queer bodies to subject them to temporal flux or dislocation. Reading such texts through the lens of both Victorian evolutionary accounts of music’s origins and contemporary theory’s concern with ‘queer temporalities’ makes it possible to better articulate the tropes of backwardness and retrogression that attach to those queer desires awakened by music. In Browning’s ‘Charles Avison’ music’s association with both the evolutionary primitive and sexually abject presents a challenge to the teleological impetus underpinning Victorian ideals of progressive time. Similar motifs also emerge with particular prominence in stories relating to the figure of Pan by Machen, Forster and Benson. Here, the music of Pan unleashes queer desires that act upon bodies to subject them to the reverse flow of evolutionary time. In Forster’s text, Pan’s queerness is also made evident in the narrator’s paranoid fixation with masturbation, revealed in the text’s obsessive patterning of images invoking tactile contact. For Benson, Pan’s music leads his protagonist towards a queer sexual encounter that is simultaneously alluring and horrific.

Chapter four traces the nebulous narrative of degeneration theory in Zola’s La curée, (The Kill) from its origins in medicine to its influence in fiction, and then back to case studies of hermaphrodism. This trajectory reveals how the degeneration diagnosis fundamentally shifted doctor-patient relationships. The French fin-de-siècle natality crisis elevated the stakes of hermaphrodism and non-reproductive sexuality, illustrating how social anxiety can fundamentally alter scientific findings, and how science can, in turn, influence lived experience in fundamental ways. Zola’s obsession with androgyny is merely a partial reflection of what became widespread cultural terror inflected in the writings of numerous authors and doctors, from the well-known Rachilde and Huysmans to the more obscure Armand Dubarry and Dr. Laupts. In La curée, hermaphrodism becomes a scary confluence of scientific, moral, and social anxiety that prefigures its treatment in later nineteenth and early twentieth-century sexology. At the same time, however, Zola’s use of androgyny in La curée unexpectedly subverts his normalizing use of science. By portraying unstable gender identities, La curée undermines the seemingly inexorable calculus of degenerate heredity inherited from medicine and recasts literary naturalism in a new light—less as a derivative of science than as a critic of it.