Too late to die early

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

• Life in the Sick-Room by Harriet Martineau, edited by Maria Frawley
  Broadview, 260 pp, £8.99, March 2003, ISBN 1 55111 265 5
• On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf, edited by Hermione Lee
  Paris Press, 28 pp, £15.00, October 2002, ISBN 1 930464 06 1

In the spring of 1877 T.M. Greenhow, a retired surgeon, published an article in the British Medical Journal on the case of Harriet Martineau, who had died in her house in Ambleside the previous summer. Greenhow hoped to settle a heated debate about Martineau’s medical history that had been ignited – or rather, reignited – by some disparaging remarks about doctors which Martineau had managed to circulate posthumously. Greenhow’s principal evidence was a detailed autopsy report, written by another physician, that described the removal of ‘a vast tumour’, measuring 12 inches by ten, from her left ovary two days after her death. Greenhow also happened to be Martineau’s brother-in-law, though she had permanently broken with him 32 years earlier, after he published an article on her condition whose clinical specificity as to her symptoms, from ‘irregular uterine discharges’ to constipation, had offended her almost as much as its attempt to discredit her conviction that after five years as a hopeless invalid she had been cured of a fatal tumour by mesmerism.