Drawing on the familiar ideas of Michel Foucault, he argues that war imagery “worked as a tool of biopolitical governance: a mechanism to regulate populations and foster the self-fashioning of individuals, which together mitigated the biological obstacles to expanded urbanization, industrialization, colonization, and the consequential risk of disease” (15). [...]in another familiar turn, Servitje suggests that literature’s reproduction of the martial ideology is necessarily uneven and, while medicine as war was too seductive an image for writers of fiction to pass up, fictional plots highlight the fictive nature of the metaphor, thus “disavowing any material connection to the military as an institution or its violence” (18). While the Crew of Light and their campaign against vampires and less-overt, sexual assault on womanhood reproduce prejudices written into xenophobic and misogynistic enterprises like the Contagious Diseases Act (1864, 1866, 1869), “Stoker’s articulation of the use of force in a medical and juridical capacity” reveals how “the violence of the ancien régime was never really gone but remained an underlying logic of public health’s relation to the state, latently supported by thinking of medicine as war” (112).
Medicine is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture by Lorenzo Servitje (review)