Abstract
In his enormously popular and influential medical treatise The English Malady (1733), George Cheyne declares in a moment of literary self-awareness that he has written his work in “a plain narrative stile, with the fewest terms of art possible” (363). The famous doctor’s “plain” style, we can assume, was generally effective since Cheyne was, as Roy Porter notes, “perhaps the most popular English writer of practical medical works targeted at the ‘general reader’” (ix). Interestingly, however, Cheyne adds that he has adopted this accessible “narrative stile” to appeal to readers who have never before encountered “a physical book” (363). By “physical book” Cheyne is not referring, of course, to The English Malady’s status as a material, printed artefact. Instead, he uses the term in its common eighteenth-century usage to refer to a book of “Physick” or medicine. The famous doctor, then, claims to have adjusted his writing to address a wider untrained public, who would not be familiar with the specialized scientific terms and concepts used by the field of medicine, a field that in eighteenth-century Britain was in the midst of unprecedented institutional and commercial expansion.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In this way, I frame the issue in a manner that builds on yet diverges from Mary Poovey’s Making A Social Body (1995).
In her work, Poovey traces the development in the nineteenth century of the concept of a recognizable, coherent, mass culture or “social body” to its eighteenth-century roots in tensions between traditional notions of the “body politic” – made up of an elite sphere of “political subjects” including “Parliament” and “gentlemen” – and a more modern concept introduced by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations (1776) of “the great body of the people” – referring “not to the well-to-do but to the mass of labouring poor” (Poovey 7). Poovey thus ties the perception of mass culture as an interconnected “social body” in the nineteenth century to eighteenth-century social (and sentimental) theorists like Smith and Hume who began the process of widening definitions of “the public” to include segments of society once excluded. Most notably, however, Poovey also examines in essays such as, “Curing the Social Body in 1832,” and “Anatomical Realism and Social Investigation,” how the metaphor of the nation as a “body” mediates concepts of material human bodies bringing together the discourses of medical science and social theory. For instance, she draws attention to how physician turned social reformer John Phillips Kay’s self-documented “experience – and failure – as a medical man led him to recast physiological disorders into more general social political terms” and also led to his observation that there is an “inseparable connection between the mental and moral condition of the people and their physical well-being” (57). While I follow Poovey in examining the connections between moral, social and physical health, I present evidence to suggest that these domains were not just beginning to come together, but already intersected quite deeply and complexly in the cultural debates of the eighteenth century.
For a helpful analysis of Sterne’s use and abuse of medicine and obstetrics through Dr. Slop see Hawley’s “The Anatomy of Tristram Shandy” in Literature and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century (1993).
As well see, A. H. Cash’s “The Birth of Tristram Shandy” from Studies in the Eighteenth Century (1968) and Erickson’s Mother Midnight: Birth, Sex, and Fate in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne) (1986).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Alex Wetmore
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wetmore, A. (2013). Public/Health. In: Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137346346_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137346346_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46688-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-34634-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)