Affectionate love: an autoethnographic investigation into a dark inheritance

This paper investigates an enigmatic past through autoethnographic research and writing devoted to nineteenth-century London surgeon Isaac Baker Brown and his family, with reference to the medical condition vulvodynia. The most obvious absence the article seeks to address is the identity of the dedicatee to whom Isaac made out, in 1866, with ‘affectionate love’, a copy of his book, On the curability of certain forms of insanity, epilepsy, catalepsy, and hysteria in females. Forms of disruption the paper explicitly investigates are twofold: ‘unintentional’ erasure as a consequence of information lost over time, with a focus on Isaac’s actions, and the fate of family members in Australia; and medical violation of English women through Victorian-era clitoridectomy. The article demonstrates how research on the peripheries of medical history might implicate the researcher and generate creative conjecture and writing, accounting for historical gaps and erasures, and interrogating the gendered wielding of power. It employs fictional interludes as an example of attempts to make sense of emotional and ethical ambivalence and to find appropriate creative form for research dilemmas. The paper illustrates the capacity of research and writing to draw attention to what remains unsaid about the historical perception and medical treatment of ‘disordered’ female bodies. Finally, the article reinforces the reflexive capacity of research by centralising the positioning of the author in relation to what is discovered and gestures towards writing as responsibility and reparation.