Railway spine

“It is argued here that it is more accurate to see nineteenth-century medicine as broadly united on the somatic nature of these disorders, but divided over the acceptability of an organic theorization which permitted the direct action of what were normally identified as the non-organic factors of ‘mind,’ ‘emotion,’ ‘moral,’ or ‘emotional shock’ upon the functions of the body, and which located that interaction in the brain and nervous system” (217-218). In Britain, the surgical tradition of theorizing a somatic basis of apparently nonsomatic disorders went back to Abercrombie and Brodie in the 1820s & 30s (218-19). “Differences of medical opinion arose not from a nonsomatic challenge to the established somatic interpretation but from a theorization of the disorder that sought its origin in pathological lesions rather than the organic processes proposed by The Lancet. This model of railway spine is associated most influentially with the work of the surgeon, John E. Erichsen” (219). Erichsen’s “opponent,” Herbert Page, surgeon to the London & North Western Railway, was equally an organicist, but he argued for the influence of nonorganic emotional and ideational phenomena as organic phenomena – railway spine demonstrated the action of nonorganic influences through the physical matter of the body (221).