Recommended remedies (for which recipes are provided) call for mercury, mother’s milk, and the bones of humans or various animals. A remedy for use against “red dysentery, particularly for soldiers in wartimes,” reads as follows: “Take a small rib from a hanged criminal, pulverize it, and give it to the sick man in a glass of wine or vinegar.”49
We might be tempted to read the text as a mediated record of experience, though it is just as likely that readers read it because it was sensational. If the remedies speak to the material conditions of readers, the lives of these readers were harrowing, involving illness, the loss of valuable horses, wounds, cold, hunger, and missing friends. Ailments included worms, lice, dysentery, cancer, and melancholy. Based on this content, it seems likely that the body of the text either dates from or was expanded and revised during the Napoleonic Wars. Perhaps its readers occupied a world where tables were filled with strangers whose intentions were difficult to discern; maybe the only way to get along was to know how to make gold heavier and to be able to change the color of a stolen horse. Such concerns as crushed limbs and waterproof gunpowder were in any case very different from the problems that would begin to fill popular medical works at midcentury, when the preoccupations of a respectable middle class would eschew reading about worms, red dysentery, and lost manhood.
To read the text with the expectation of continuity between introduction and body fails to account for the historical conventions of the genre of popular medical works—works that today appear cobbled together from texts and introductions produced, borrowed, and recycled over decades. In some cases this cobbled-together quality may have been a strategy for attracting readers, throwing the police off the trail of an obscene book, or both. A second example of this kind of discontinuity is the 1821 book Magnetism and Immorality: A Remarkable Contribution to the Secret History of the Medical Practice, attributed to the notorious author Christian August Fischer (who often wrote under the pseudonym “Althing”).50 In the book the author promises to reveal the “dark secrets” of the relationship between the practitioner of magnetism and the patient, that is, the secret history of magnetism and its relationship to the sexual drive. The story that follows describes the development of a sexual relationship between a woman patient and her Mesmerist doctor, told from several points of view. The first section of the book takes the form of a dialogue between two women. One woman narrates the story of her initial visit to a Mesmerist gathering (complete with the performance of a somnambulist), where she meets a doctor of “Magnetic Medicine.” After a couple of “indecent” sessions with the doctor in a state of somnambulism, the woman discovers that she is pregnant. The story continues with an account of several attempts made by the doctor to induce an abortion, followed by detailed recipes (reproduced in the text) of the abortifacients. The text then turns to a series of three expert witnesses, each asked to comment upon the efficacy of the abortifacients and the likelihood that the recipes in the book would have successfully induced an abortion. In the end the case against the doctor is undecided, and he receives no punishment for his alleged crimes. The story of the abortion attempts and the recipes for abortifacients are hidden in the body of the text. As with The Book of Secrets, the preface to Magnetism and Immorality appears to promise a medical and scientific treatise about Mesmerism; what it offers instead are seemingly unrelated recipes and a titillating and mysterious story, cast almost as a legal narrative.
In the eyes of the police, the three texts discussed here were obscene and immoral because they played upon the mental susceptibility of the reader to superstition, emotionalism, and irrationality. Implicit in their judgment was also a notion of what constituted legitimate knowledge—something that these stories, at least from their perspective, did not offer. In A Terrifying Horrifying Story irrationality is embodied in Eva Riedelin’s mental break, followed by murder, cannibalism, and suicide. Her story works on the reader by producing strong emotions of horror and terror (indeed the title explicitly promises these emotions). Even in six pages, the text manages to structure the reader as an empathetic witness by aligning him or her with the sympathetic (and horrified) gaze of the baker’s wife. In their files the police and provincial governments expressed their conviction that emotionalism is dangerous because it depletes mental energy (Geisteskraft), rendering subjects useless for “real work.” It seems possible that their concerns were in fact deeper. Emotions are powerful, pleasurable, and potentially disruptive; all three suggest ways subjects might fall into dangerous (and dark) mental states. Such states rendered subjects receptive to destructive, self-destructive, and potentially rebellious actions.
The Book of Secrets and Magnetism and Immorality were troublesome not because of the emotions they evoked through narrative structure but because of the way they invented and authorized what was passed off as scientific and medical knowledge. The existence of this kind of popular medical text spoke to readers’ desire for knowledge about the body and, as in the case of Mesmerism, about the mind. But what readers may have perceived as legitimate knowledge looked like superstition and irrationalism to the police. Seen in this light, the link between obscenity and unproven medical remedies begins to crystallize. In both cases subjects were attracted to remedies and knowledge that masqueraded as legitimate, but they lacked the requisite skepticism to navigate the sea of (titillating) information. Thus in battles over obscenity in the early nineteenth century questions of knowledge—how it was produced, authorized, and policed—were at stake. So too were questions about mental disarrangement produced by strong emotions.
In the remainder of this chapter I frame these early nineteenth-century controversies over printed texts and their allegedly vulnerable readers in a broader context of thinking about the intersection between reading, inner life, and the nature of authority. This involves a return to figures we have already encountered. First, in an attempt to understand the conceptual genesis of secular obscenity law in more detail, I look at the principles of eighteenth-century cameralist thought. I then return to Wessenberg’s 1826 treatise, On the Moral Influence of the Novel, as it represents a serious effort to think about the relationship between popular reading habits, moral development, and actions in the world. In stressing the importance of these contexts, I do not wish to reduce the complexity of each individual development; contemporary debates within civil society about the novel, for instance, existed adjacent to (rather than in direct contact with) legal discussions of obscene and immoral texts. Wessenberg’s book did not directly inform the Prussian authorities’ judgment of books like The Book of Secrets or A True Terrifying Horrifying Story of a Mother. Wessenberg was also not explicitly concerned about the formulation of law (though he did advocate some kind of police control of secular reading practices). Nonetheless it is worth mentioning that official fantasies about the mental fragility of uninitiated readers developed in a world in which the properties of inner life were under close scrutiny and reconstruction, and had been for some time.
“WHERE THE EYES OF LAWMAKERS AND EVEN THE PENALTIES OF JUDGES CANNOT REACH”
Writing in 1769, the influential legal and political theorist Joseph von Sonnenfels advised absolute monarchs that they should keep a close watch on religious leaders and movements, as religion (unlike law) provided access to the deep recesses of the subject’s soul. “Religion,” he explained, “makes up for the deficiencies of legislation: where the eyes of lawmakers and even the penalties of judges cannot reach, religion is present in these transactions, capable of checking evil enterprises through intimidation.”51 Referring to the spaces that elude “the eyes of lawmakers,” Sonnenfels pointed to the importance of consent to the maintenance of power. Something besides external coercion was necessary to the maintenance of civil order and productivity, two of the primary goals of the regent’s governance. What was needed was access to the soul, for only through direct access could evil be checked at the source rather than prohibited once it had already emerged.
One place to look, then, for early links between public order and inner life is the cameralists, who contributed to the creation of secular obscenity law by linking the productivity and security of the state to the morality and virtue of the individual subject.52 Cameralists provided one coherent set of thought about law, statecraft, and modern policing in the German-speaking states during the second half of the eighteenth
