Liberating Medicine, 1720–1835

Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly, Steve Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138665118
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317316114
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

During the 18th century medicine became an autonomous discipline and practice. Surgeons justified themselves as skilled practitioners and set themselves apart from the unspecialized, hack barber-surgeons of early modernity. This title presents 17 essays on the relationship between medicine and literature during the Enlightenment.

Notes

Introduction

1. This and the following references to Johnson are taken from ‘Akenside’ in Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on their Works, ed. R. Lonsdale, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), vol. 4, pp. 171–5.

2. Sir James Stonhouse, his competitor, was in his early years ‘a confirmed infidel’, ‘extremely licentious in both principles and practice’, but in Northampton met with religious conversion alongside professional predominance (ODNB).

3. J. Bell, The Anatomy of the Human Body (London: Cadell and Davies; G. Mudie and Son: 1797), vol. 2, pp. iv–v.

4. W. St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 202–4.

5. T. Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, ed. J. L. Clifford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); L. Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, to which are added The Journal to Eliza and A Political Romance, ed. I. Jack (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 28–9.

6. G. Cheyne, The English Malady; or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds (London: G. Strahan and J. Leake 1733), p. 1; M. Mears, The Pupil of Nature; or, Candid Advice to the Fair Sex (London, 1797), p. 39. Here Mears refers to Armstrong’s The Art of Preserving Health (1744).

7. T. Gray, ‘Epitaph on Mrs Mason’ in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. R. Lonsdale (London: Longmans, 1969), pp. 255–6; J. S. Mill, Autobiography, in Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. J. M. Robson and J. Stillinger (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1981), ch. 5, pp. 149–53.

8. S. Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia in Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. G. J. Kolb, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 23 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), vol. 16, p. 50.

9. R. Bentley, Eight Boyle Lectures on Atheism (New York: Garland, 1976); M. H. Nicholson, Newton Demands the Muse (London: Archon, 1963).

10. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, p. 117.

11. Dissertatio Medica Inauguralis: de Ortu et Incremento Foetus Humani (Leiden, 1744); The Pleasures of Imagination in The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, ed. R. Dix (London: Associated University Presses, 1996), I:56–78, III:373–410.

12. J. Keats, Letter to John Taylor, 30 January 1818; Letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818, in The Letters of John Keats: 1814–1821, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), vol. 1, pp. 218, 279.

13. J. Dryden, ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ in The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. J. Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), I:163–4, p. 194.

14. R. Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2000).

15. G. S. Rousseau and R. Porter (eds), Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); M. Mulvey Roberts and R. Porter (eds), Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 1993); R. Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: Norton, 2004).

16. M. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ Trans. C. Porter. The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 32–50, on pp. 42, 50.

17. A. Scull, ‘Scholarship of fools’ TLS (23 March 2007). The TLS Subscriber Archive. <http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25369-2631381,00.html>

18. B. Luckin, ‘In Defence of Foucault’ TLS (6 April 2007). The TLS Subscriber Archive. <http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25360-2634350,00.html>

19. R. Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: Norton, 1997); Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine (New York: Norton, 2004).

20. Porter, Greatest Benefit, p. 685.

21. J. Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); A. Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); F. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); T. Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

22. G. S. Rousseau, Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); T. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

23. J. Hogg, Anecdotes of Scott, ed. J. Rubenstein (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 61.

1 Liberation and Consumption: Disease, Imperialism and The Conversion Off the Heathen In Hemans, Sigourney and Stowe

1. C. Lawlor, Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). My thanks to the participants at the BARS/NASSR conference 2007, especially Nanora Sweet (also for her ever-thorough comments on an early form of this essay), Richard Sha, Michelle Faubert, Tristanne Connolly and Steve Clark. I am deeply grateful to Jeffrey Hancks of the Archives and Special Collections, Western Illinois University Libraries, for his aid in exploring the Western Adventurer newspaper as context for Lydia Sigourney’s poem ‘Indian Girl’s Burial’. Thanks also to Tim Fulford for his extremely helpful suggestions on my first draft of this essay. For the idea of consumption as a disease of the Western self, see C. Lawlor and A. Suzuki, ‘The Disease of the Self: Representations of Consumption 1700–1830’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 74 (2000), pp. 258–94.

2. Lawlor, Consumption and Literature, pp. 163–4.

3. J. Pace, ‘Tow...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 Liberation and Consumption: Disease, Imperialism, and the Conversion of the Heathen in Hemans, Sigourney and Stowe
• 2 Freedom, Health, and Hypochondria in Ignatius Sancho's Letters
• 3 'Uncle-Tommery': Slavery and Romantic Medicine in Thomas Carlyle and Harriet Beecher Stowe
• 4 'Due Preparations': Defoe, Dr Mead and the Threat of Plague
• 5 An Organic Body Politic: Wollstonecraft's Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and John Brown's Idea of Health
• 6 Blake, Liberation and Medicine
• 7 Untying the Web of Urizen: William Blake, Nervous Medicine, and the Culture of Feeling
• 8 'In Sickness, Despair, And in Agony': Imagining the King's Illness, 1788-1789
• 9 Disembodied Souls and Exemplary Narratives: James Hogg and Popular Medical Literature
• 10 Idiotic Associations: Wordsworth and Nineteenth-Century Discourses on Idiocy
• 11 Authority and Imposture: William Godwin and the Animal Magnetists
• 12 George Stubbs's Dissection of the Horse and the Expressiveness of 'Facsimiles'
• 13 In Submission: Frances Burney's Patient Narrative
• 14 The Surprising Success of Dr Armstrong: Love and Economy in the Eighteenth Century
• 15 Anna Barbauld's 'To a Little Invisible Being...': Maternity in Poetry and Medicine
• 16 'Some Heart Once Pregnant with Celestial Fire': Maternal Elegy in Gray and Barbauld
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index