A Mortal Antipathy

A Mortal Antipathy is Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s 1885 novel, the third and final of his major medical novels following Elsie Venner from 1861 and The Guardian Angel from 1867. The three novels are sometimes called the medicated novels because Holmes used each of them to explore some particular psychological or medical condition through the framework of fiction, with his actual medical practice and his Harvard Medical School position giving him the professional authority to engage with the material seriously.

The Mortal Antipathy of the title is a particular psychological condition affecting the central character Maurice Kirkwood. As a young child, Maurice had been involved in an accident that produced an extreme aversion to all young women, with the mere presence of a young woman producing in him intense physical and psychological reactions that have made his adult life nearly impossible to live in normal society. Holmes uses the case as the framework for the wider novel, with Maurice’s slow recovery from the antipathy across the page count providing the central plot.

The novel reflects Holmes’s interest in the psychological dimensions of medical practice that the period was beginning to develop, with his depiction of Maurice’s condition drawing on the actual medical understanding of phobic and traumatic reactions that nineteenth century medicine was working through. The novel is more directly psychological than the standard Victorian fiction of its period, with Holmes’s professional background giving the medical material weight that more conventional novels lacked.

The novel has been criticized by some readers for the somewhat creaky plot mechanisms that Holmes used to bring about Maurice’s eventual recovery, with the conventions of nineteenth century romance fiction sitting uneasily alongside the more serious psychological material. Even so, the novel remains an interesting example of how Holmes used fiction to explore medical themes that he could not always engage with in his professional medical writing.

For longtime Oliver Wendell Holmes fans, A Mortal Antipathy is the closing novel in his fiction trilogy and worth knowing for that reason. For students of nineteenth century American literature, of the early American psychological novel, or of the wider intersection of medicine and fiction in the period, the novel is worth knowing.