Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies最新文献

This introduction to the special issue ‘Writing Doctors and Writing Health in the Long Eighteenth Century’ explores the various types of literary and visual creativity enacted by medical practitioners as they sought new ways of communicating and engaging with the public. Focusing on the shift from Latin to vernacular publishing in elite medical circles, we examine the proliferation of new opportunities open to physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, medical artists, midwives, and other women practitioners to express themselves. Novels, drama, poetry, artworks, almanacs, and letters, to name but a few creative products of the period, allowed new ideas and underrepresented voices to be heard for the first time, changing forever the way creative and empirical cultures would intertwine. Stemming from the Leverhulme Trust Research Project Writing Doctors: Medical Representation and Personality, ca. 1660–1832 (2018–22), this research has undoubtedly been impacted by the rapidly changing nature of public healthcare in the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic that was still ongoing when this issue went to print. We value and celebrate connections made between the past and present that continue to assist us in understanding and caring for our bodies.

This paper explores the construction of the identities of Philippe Curtius and his protégé Marie Grosholtz, known as Madame Tussaud, as providers of medical and health services, body workers, and entrepreneurs in key works that charted their experiences during the volatile period of the French Revolution. As purveyors of entertainment that derived its attraction from perceived close rendering of the likenesses of noteworthy individuals, modellers in wax required attentive discernment of bodies, or at least the capacity for imaginative descriptive skills, establishing a professional language for body work. Moreover, Tussaud's account explicitly foregrounds complex gender dynamics as a young woman interacting with the bodies of male and female clients. This essay explores how important eighteenth-century gendered conceptualizations of body work are revealed in the body texts produced in this period.

In the annals of writing by physicians from the long eighteenth century, there exists a neglected subset that demands greater attention: the writing of slave-ship surgeons. Such physicians existed on many slave ships, and they were required to attend the crew and kidnapped Africans during the Middle Passage to the colonies. They were also required to keep meticulous records, which became the basis for some of the most powerful evidence brought to bear by parliamentary committees tasked with investigating the slave trade in Britain. I argue that the literary productions of slave-ship surgeons, such as Thomas Trotter's Sea-Weeds (1829) and Thomas Boulton's The Sailor's Farewell (1768), can also shed light on their experiences. The writings of slave-ship surgeons offer an intriguing glimpse into the cognitive dissonance these doctors felt in answering their calling in circumstances designed to undermine its basic principle: to treat and foster human life.

Eighteenth-century medical literature recommended that women record their menstrual cycles to identify dates of conception, measure gestation, and predict delivery. Women's pocketbooks were natural repositories of such pregnancy-related data. This article charts the history of women's pocketbooks providing printed affordances for menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth. Throughout the eighteenth century, women's printed pocketbooks were self-conscious of, and began to make more obvious, their potential to assist the safe delivery of children. The first mass-produced tool for predicting childbirth, Anton F.A. Desberger's Schwangerschaftskalender (1827), translated into English as the Marriage Almanack in 1835, presupposed a female readership familiar with women's pocketbooks' self-conscious capacity to assist family planning.

This essay studies the variation between the ways in which physicians wrote about their patients in private and their presentation of these case histories to the wider world in print. Focusing particularly on the case of Andrew Duncan, who founded the Edinburgh Public Dispensary in 1776, this paper will investigate the differences detailed in Duncan's handwritten case notes with the ways in which he chose to portray these patient cases in his published works. This paper will argue that not only does Duncan demonstrate a tendency to exaggerate the positive outcomes from his treatments but also his published works simplify the diagnoses performed on dispensary patients. The self-editing which is apparent in his medical publishing includes the omission of details of the range of complaints individual patients suffer from and exclusion of certain disease categories, including hysteria, from the printed record. This paper will argue that a historiographical focus on printed material such as disease studies and annual reports can result in the distortion of information regarding diagnosis, medical outcomes, and the relationship between patient and practitioner during the eighteenth century.

This essay offers a corpus-based linguistic analysis of the paratexts of the works of John Pechey (1654–1718), a licentiate physician and prolific medical author and popularizer, whose ideas and practice brought him into conflict with the Royal College of Physicians. Following the methodology of corpus-assisted discourse analysis, historical discourse analysis, and historical sociopragmatics, the essay analyses the paratextual material of Pechey's medical publications, with the aims of (a) collecting a corpus of texts published under his name, (b) assessing his role in the popularization of learned medicine, and (c) tracing how he constructed and performed his identity both as a knowledgeable medical practitioner and as a critic of the beliefs and practices of the Royal College of Physicians.

This essay looks at two medical families in Georgia between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Kollocks from Savannah and the Fort family from Milledgeville. Lemuel Kollock (1766–1823) moved there in 1792 from Connecticut to set up a medical practice. He married and had two sons and a daughter (Phineas, 1804–1872; Mary, 1806–1885; and George, 1810–1894). Phineas became a doctor and returned south after qualifying to practise in Savannah. The correspondence covers the social and professional contexts of practice, as well as the challenges of life and work in a climate like Georgia. A striking picture emerges of the place and importance of medicine in people's lives. Tomlinson Fort (1787–1859) was a native Georgian who set up in medicine in Milledgeville in 1810. He developed a wider public profile than Kollock, both as a doctor and in banking and politics. Most significantly, he published in 1849 his Dissertation on the Practice of Medicine, written in clear jargon-free English, which gives a detailed and practical perspective on health in the deep South. These surviving writings allow us to examine the place of medicine within the distinctive conditions of the society of the time.

The act of writing has long been acknowledged as integral to eighteenth-century medical practice, with medical practitioners relying on their ability to communicate via the written word for professional success. Partly as a result of their literary activities, the achievements of male physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries are frequently well-documented, yet the same cannot be said of women engaging in medical work. This essay argues that eighteenth-century women's medical practice extended into their creative writing, with numerous women writers utilising poetry as a central form of authoritative expression on matters of health. Verse offered opportunities to scrutinise, advise on, and influence medical knowledge and practice. Print and manuscript works by authors Jane Barker (1652-1732), Martha Hodges (fl.1675-1725), and Susanna Blamire (1747-94), serve a variety of functions, including arguing for women's medical education, reimagining the workings of the body, and advocating holistic forms of practice that unite physical and emotional forms of care.