Nietzschean Variations: Politics, Interest, and Education in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People
Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882) has had an unusual reception. Following A Doll’s House (1879) andGhosts (1881), plays that were scandalized upon performance only to be counted, relatively soon, among Ibsen’s most important works, An Enemy of the Peoplewas caught up by history in a different way. While the play has, no doubt, enjoyed bouts of popularity – including the many stagings that followed in thewake of its publication – late twentieth-centurycritics have worried about the political implications of Dr. Stockmann’s elitism and sometimes even compared it to the rhetoric of the later Nationalist Socialistmovement inGermany (Sage 2006, 3–5, 310–311; Ferguson 1996, 280ff ). The kind of elitist sentiments Dr. Stockmann airs inAn Enemy of the People are often associated with the teaching of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s work was much debated and discussed in Scandinavia when Ibsen was working on the play. Thus, critics have emphasized how Ibsen’s play resonates with a kind of aristocratic pathos that is not unlike the onewe find inwork of theGerman philosopher.While such a reading was prefigured in an essay by Anathon Aall at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, we findmore recent versions of the argument in works by Noreng (1969), de Figueiredo (2007) and Kittang (2005). In his reading ofAn Enemy of the People, Kittang speaks Ibsen Studies, 2014 Vol. 14, No. 2, 109–135, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2014.1000659
Generic Complexity in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People
An Enemy of the People has always been one of Ibsen's most popular plays with producers and audiences and would probably be produced even more frequently were it not for its large cast and multiple settings. Arthur Miller was moved to create an adaptation of it in 1950, and Steve McQueen, in one of his last ventures, chose it as an appropriate vehicle when he decided to try his hand at a serious drama without a chase scene. In remarkable contrast, the play has been far less popular with Ibsen critics and commentators. Few individual studies
Times, places, and persons. Aspects of the history of epidemiology
smallpox thanks to an exemplary vaccination campaign, Dr. Derrick Baxby, himself no mean student of poxviruses, had added yet another volume to the literature on Jenner's vaccine. If one approaches this latest account with some apprehension one soon settles down to read it with unmitigated pleasure. Dr. Baxby's attempt to trace the origin of vaccinia virus is thorough; it is also readable, objective, and eminently fair to Jenner and to all the other participants in the early struggles to establish vaccination as a universally acceptable method. In thirteen chapters, Dr. Baxby takes his readers through the subject of vaccination and the necessary background material of clinical details of smallpox, early attempts to combat the ravages of the disease, and Edward Jenner's personal and educational background, in particular his relationship to his friend and mentor, John Hunter, who died five years before Jenner published his initial Inquiry into the causes and effects ofthe variolae vaccinae. But Dr. Baxby is not content just to fill in the background and give us a reasonable up-to-date version of the old story. His sober account of variolation and vaccination, of the achievements and controversies and personalities of nearly two centuries on the road to the eradication of smallpox, is a vehicle for an intriguing and wholly original theory of the origin of the protagonist of the eradication saga. Dr. Baxby believes, on the basis of a mixture of research and conjecture, that none of the possible origins so far suggested for vaccinia virus makes real sense. He has good reasons for opposing even the most attractive of the hypotheses previously put forward, that vaccinia virus might have been the result of hybridization of smallpox and cowpox viruses in the early years of vaccinations carried out within Woodville's Smallpox Hospital. He also has an equally attractive and inspired alternative to offer. He believes that the surviving closely related strains of vaccinia virus may be descendants of the now extinct virus of horsepox, bearing in mind that Jenner himself thought that his cowpox originated in the horse, although he also introduced the unfortunate and confusing concept of "grease". It is a theory which is unlikely ever to be tested, in spite of the rapid advance of structural analyses of proteins and of DNA at the molecular level, since horsepox disappeared at the beginning of the present century. Dr. Baxby concludes that the origin of the vaccine virus which provided the means for the first planned eradication of a virus disease worldwide may remain forever a mystery. We may add that his contribution, although supplying yet another facet to the mystery, and supported only by the most tenuous of circumstantial evidence, nevertheless offers a beguiling fresh possibility for those who enjoy conjecture in this area, with the added bonus of a refreshingly complete and fair summing-up of the tangled history of Jenner, his friends and foes, and the orthopoxviruses which united and divided them. Lise Wilkinson Department of Virology Royal Postgraduate Medical School