Bodies Politic

Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900

Roy Porter

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781861898227
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Bodies Politic takes a critical look at representations of the body in death, disease, and health, as well as at images of the healing arts in Britain from the mid-seventeenth to the twentieth century. Arguing that great symbolic weight was attached to contrasting conceptions of the healthy and diseased body, Roy Porter shows that such ideas were mapped onto antithetical notions of the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. With these images in mind, he explores aspects of being ill alongside the practice of medicine, paying special attention to self-presentations by physicians, surgeons, and quacks and the changes in practitioners' public identities over time. Packed with amusing anecdotes and unusual illustrations, this book is a magisterial account of the meanings of disease, doctoring, and the "body politic.""A wonderful book.... There are 137 illustrations... and every one is an exultation in the fleshly horrors of the era."— Guardian (UK)"Roy Porter is one of the world's best historical writers: his prose is pithy, witty, vivid, engaging, and perfectly paced. He has a keen eye for evidence and can wrest conclusions with analytical rigour and imaginative subtlety. He masters fact and theory with equal ease and wields both lightly and powerfully."— Independent

1 Introductory: Framing the Picture

Art historians have drawn attention to the fondness of eighteenth-century artists for mining their compositions with textual codes and hints.¹ Take the fifth plate of William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress series, which features two arrogant physicians, resplendent in their wigs, buckled shoes, lace cuffs and canes, locking horns in altercation, whilst the blanket-wrapped syphilitic heroine Moll Hackabout is expiring even as they squabble (illus. 2). Who are those asses? Debate has been spirited, especially regarding the puffed-up fellow tapping a vial of his medicine with the end of his cane. Is he Joshua (‘Spot’) Ward, the age’s most courtly quack?² Or Dr Richard Rock, as most suppose, partly on the grounds that, to the right, atop the coal scuttle by the spittoon, lies a paper lettered ‘Dr Rock’ containing some of Moll’s teeth, which have fallen out presumably as a side effect of Rock’s much-touted mercurial syphilis cure. By the table, which has been knocked over, another handout pronounces ‘PRACTICAL SCHEME ANODYNE NECKLACE’, a medicine popular for teething toddlers, but also for that ‘secret disease’;³ while round and about the mantelpiece lie bowls, medicine bottles and a clyster bag.

Notorious for his ‘Incomparable Electuary’ (the ‘only venereal antidote’), which was also trumpeted as his ‘anti-venereal, grand, specifick pill’, Rock, born in 1690, was quite a celebrity, his image appearing frequently in prints (illus. 3). ‘This great man, short of stature, is fat, and waddles as he walks’, so Goldsmith described him:

He is usually drawn at the top of his own bills sitting in his armchair, holding a little bottle between his finger and thumb, and surrounded with rotten teeth, nippers, pills, packets and gallipots. No man can promise fairer than he; for, as he observes, ‘Be your disorder never so far gone, be under no uneasiness, make yourself quite easy; I can cure you’.

Engravers and essayists certainly expected to wring a laugh out of allusions to Rock and a handful of other high-profile quacks, who in turn knew how to get their names about.⁴

The irascible fellow springing up from his chair to vindicate his pills is generally identified as the notorious Dr Jean Misaubin. He also crops up, it is believed, in the third plate of Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode in the guise of ‘Monr De la Pillule’, old, squat, bow-legged and toothless (illus. 4). The house visited by Viscount Squanderfield, the poxy peer who is the anti-hero of that sequence, is taken to be Misaubin’s residence at 96 St Martin’s Lane, Covent Garden, here rendered by Hogarth festooned with medical paraphernalia: anatomical specimens, Egyptian mummies, a narwhal tusk, a barber’s shaving basin, a pair of bizarre machines, a urine flask, a hydrocephalic child’s head, broken combs, a spear, shield and lance, and various other telltale signs of tawdry medical and social showiness.⁵

If the identification is right, Hogarth was having one of his sly digs at the pretensions of physicians. His premises certainly carry the whiff of a quack, but the grotesquely conceited Misaubin – in Tom Jones Henry Fielding tells us that ‘he used to say that the proper direction to him was, “To Dr Misaubin, in the World”’ – was in fact a ‘regular’ physician, a French university graduate who in 1719 had been admitted a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians.⁶ As ever shuffling appearance and reality, Hogarth invites us to infer that it is ostentatious regulars who are the true charlatans. His verbal/visual puns thus provoke many reflections: there is far more to the prints than meets the eye.

4 William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode, pl. III, 1745, coloured aquatint.

In the ‘museum’ of the quack doctor Jean Misaubin (see illus. 2), Viscount Squanderfield holds out a pill box, probably containing a patent venereal-disease treatment, to a young girl. The machinery includes a dislocated-limb-straightener. The traditional apothecaries’ crocodile lurks in the eaves.

Book titles, mottos, captions and other bits and pieces of writing are frequently planted in prints, at first sight to clue the viewer in on the artist’s message, if actually to sow doubt through visual punning, jarring juxtapositions and double meanings.⁷ Take George Cruikshank’s ‘The Blue Devils—!!’ (illus. 35). Sitting by a grate empty save for a long bill, a depressed gentleman clad in nightgown, cap and slippers is beleaguered by various devils: a bailiff serves him a writ; a hangman drapes a noose around his neck; a demon obligingly offers him a cut-throat razor. At his feet a minuscule beadle escorts three women, heavy with child, and, ushered by a skeletal physician, an undertaker scurries towards him, ominously bearing a coffin. On the wall, pictures of shipwrecks, fires and the hero being hounded by a harridan round off the tale of torment. By the chair lies a book, Ennui, while two others rest upon the shelf, The Miseries of Human Life and Domestic Medicine.

This is a picture packed with symptoms inviting the diagnostic gaze. Why has the gentleman been saddled with such harbingers of disaster as a hangman and a bailiff? And what are we to make of the books? Two have titles that seem self-explanatory. Ennui is a novel by Maria Edgeworth; while James Beresford’s The Miseries of Human Life facetiously chronicles mankind’s follies through conversations between Mr Samuel Sensitive and Mr Timothy Testy, whingeing on about the trials and tribulations of life.

But what of the third? The physician William Buchan had published his Domestic Medicine in 1769 by way of a manifesto for rational healthiness. Though himself an Edinburgh-trained regular, Buchan denounced the restrictive practices and mystifications of his own profession and aspired to ‘lay open’ medicine to all, espousing a bold medical populism as his contribution to democratic knowledge and the rights of man. For far too long had healing been monopolized and perverted by a medical cabal; health lay within everyone’s grasp if only the sick would abandon the exorbitant rigmaroles of faculty-bound polypharmacy and opt for self-help, simple treatments, plain diet, hygiene and temperance.

Domestic Medicine proved hugely popular, remaining in print for 90 years; the two books every Scottish croft housed, they said, were Buchan and the Bible.⁸ In principle, then, the wretch bedevilled by the blues should have viewed it as reassuring, a talisman of good health. Cruikshank, however, insinuates the very reverse: reading medical books may, in truth, be one of the blunders that have turned this fellow into a gloomy hypochondriac about to slit his throat. Indeed, medical writings themselves warned how readily reading such works could prove pathological.⁹ If that be so, well might the anxious viewer ponder: is it also dangerous to pore over prints like ‘The Blue Devils—!!’? Are admonitions bad for you? Should we be warned about health warnings? (You have been warned!)

If books are often planted in prints, so as to produce comically subversive palimpsests of meanings, hingeing on infinite regressions, the converse happens too. In 1768, the popular actor-manager Samuel Foote staged a farce entitled The Devil Upon Two Sticks.¹⁰ Its Molièrian targets, no strangers to the Georgian boards, were the asinine pomposities of medicine and the law. Its action culminates in an incident which (however hard to imagine nowadays!) evidently tickled London’s theatregoers: a street demo staged in 1767 by the Licentiates (rank and file) of the Royal College of Physicians, in protest against the power monopoly enjoyed within that august institution by its Fellows, the inner elite (illus. 36).¹¹ One scene in Foote’s play features a knot of lawyers and practitioners poring over a sheet of paper:

SQUIB ... such a print, poys! just fresh from the plate; Feel it; so wet you may wring it.

JULEP And pray, good doctor, what is the subject?

SQUIB Subject? Gad take me, a trimmer! this will make some folks that we know look about them; Hey, Julep, don’t you think this will sting?

JULEP I profess I don’t understand it.

SQUIB No? Why, zounds, it is as plain as a pikestaff; in your own way too, you blockhead! Can’t you see? Read the title, you rogue! But, perhaps you can’t without spectacles. Let me see; ay, ‘The State-Quacks; or, Britannia dying.’ You take it?

JULEP Very well.

SQUIB There you see her stretched along on a pallet; you may know she is Britannia, by the shield and spear at the head of her bed.

APOZEM Very plain; for all the world like the wrong side of a halfpenny.

SQUIB Well said, little Apozem! You have discernment I see. Her disease is a lethargy; you see how sick she is, by holding her hand to her head; don’t you see that?

JULEP I do, I do.

SQUIB Well then, look at that figure there upon her left hand.

JULEP Which!

SQUIB Why he that holds a draught to her mouth.

JULEP What, the man with the phial?

SQUIB Ay, he, with the phial: That is supposed to be ... [whispers] offering her laudanum, to lull her faster asleep.

JULEP Laudanum! a noble medicine when administered properly; I remember once, in a locked jaw ...

SQUIB Damn your lock’d jaw! hold your prating you puppy! I wish your jaws were lock’d! Pox take him, I have forgot what I was going to ... Apozem, where did I leave off?

APOZEM You left off at faster asleep.

SQUIB True; I was at faster asleep. Well then, you see that thin figure there with the meagre chaps; he with the straw in his hand?

APOZEM Very plain.

SQUIB He is supposed to be ... [whispers] You take me.

JULEP Ay, ay.

SQUIB Who rouses Britannia, by tickling her nose with that straw; she starts, and with a jerk ... [starting, strikes Julep.] I beg pardon! ... and with a jerk knocks the bottle of laudanum out of his hand; and so, by that there mans, you see, Britannia is delivered from death.

JULEP Ay, ay.

SQUIB Hey! you swallow the satire : Pretty bitter I think?

JULEP I can’t say that I quite understand ... that is ... a ... a ...

SQUIB Not understand? then what a fool am I to throw away my time on a dunce! I shall miss too the reading a new pamphlet in Red-Lyon-Square; and at six I must be at Serjeant’s-Inn, to justify bail for a couple of journeymen printers.

APOZEM But, Dr Squib, you seem to have forgot the case of the College, your brethren.

SQUIB I have no time to attend their trifling squabbles: The nation! the nation! Mr Apozem, engrosses my care.¹²

I have not been able to find a print titled ‘The State-Quacks; or, Britannia Dying’ which precisely corresponds to Foote’s description.¹³ Many, however, broadly depicted the sort of scene here mentioned, a symbolic Britannia languishing, diseased, neglected or poisoned by false doctors (read: politicians), though perhaps ultimately rescued by a heroic one. Along these lines a Gillray engraving of 1804, ‘BRITANNIA Between DEATH and the DOCTOR’S’ (illus. 38), showed the nation being treated, or rather mistreated, by its doctors, that is, statesmen.¹⁴ Crowing over Henry Addington’s ignominious exit from office, Gillray implied that the former prime minister’s nostrums (‘Composing Draft’) had left the wan Britannia on the brink of the grave – death being personified as the arch-enemy Napoleon, then preparing an invasion. The body politic is rescued only by the return of her one-time chief physician, Pitt the Younger, represented booting Addington (himself a doctor’s son) out of the House, while also trampling over Charles James Fox’s bloated body. Pitt brandishes, like a lantern, a flask of ‘Constitutional Restorative’, while The Art of Restoring Health (another text-within-a-print) pokes out of his pocket. Lying discarded on the ground are ‘Whig Pills’ (actually dice, Fox being a notorious gamester; the Whigs are a gamble), and in ...