Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900Reaktion Books, Mar 8, 2021 - 328 pages In this historical tour de force, Roy Porter takes a critical look at representations of the body in health, disease, and death in Britain from the mid-seventeenth to the twentieth century. Porter argues that great symbolic weight was attached to contrasting conceptions of the healthy and diseased body and 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 to changes in practitioners’ public identities over time. Porter also examines the wider symbolic meanings of disease and doctoring and the “body politic.” Porter’s book is packed with outrageous and amusing anecdotes portraying diseased bodies and medical practitioners alike. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 88
Page 10
... (illus. ). Images were not routinely produced, independently of writing, so as to get through to those who could not read. Typical, rather, at every level of graphic sophistication, were the presence and interplay of word and image ...
... (illus. ). Images were not routinely produced, independently of writing, so as to get through to those who could not read. Typical, rather, at every level of graphic sophistication, were the presence and interplay of word and image ...
Page 15
... (illus. ). 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? Or Dr Richard Rock ...
... (illus. ). 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? Or Dr Richard Rock ...
Page 16
... (illus. ). 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 St Martin's Lane, Covent Garden, here rendered by Hogarth festooned with medical ...
... (illus. ). 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 St Martin's Lane, Covent Garden, here rendered by Hogarth festooned with medical ...
Page 17
... (illus. ). 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 ...
... (illus. ). 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 ...
Page 18
... (illus. ). One scene in Foote's play features a knot of lawyers and practitioners poring over a sheet of paper: ... such a print, poys! just fresh from the plate; Feel it; so wet you may wring it. And pray ...
... (illus. ). One scene in Foote's play features a knot of lawyers and practitioners poring over a sheet of paper: ... such a print, poys! just fresh from the plate; Feel it; so wet you may wring it. And pray ...
Contents
8 | |
9 | |
15 | |
35 | |
3 The Body Healthy and Beautiful | 63 |
4 Imagining Disease | 89 |
Plate Section I | 97 |
5 Prototypes of Practitioners | 129 |
Plate Secton II | 177 |
8 Professional Problems | 209 |
9 The Medical Politician and the Body Politic | 229 |
10 VictorianDevelopments | 250 |
Afterword | 272 |
References | 276 |
Select Bibliography | 315 |
Photographic Acknowledgements | 318 |
Other editions - View all
Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900 Roy Porter No preview available - 2001 |
Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900 Roy Porter No preview available - 2014 |
Common terms and phrases
anatomy apothecary Bath blood Britain British Cambridge captioning Caricature cartoon Chapter Christopher Lawrence College of Physicians coloured etching comic Cruikshank culture Death depicted disease dissection doctors Dorothy Porter E. P. Thompson Eighteenth Century English engraving Enlightenment Erasmus Darwin Essays etching with watercolour fashionable female Fiction flesh G. S. Rousseau George Cheyne George Cruikshank Georgian Gout Harmondsworth Haslam Haven healing History Hogarth to Rowlandson Hospital humour idem Ihid illus James Gillray John Bull Lady Letters London Lord Malady Mary Medicine mind moral Nature novel ofthe pain physic physician Pills political popular portrait practice practitioners profession professional Punch quack reads Renaissance representations Richard Robert Roy Porter Royal College Samuel Samuel Garth satire Science sexual Shandy sick Social Society Steven Shapin surgeon teeth theatre Thomas Beddoes Thomas Rowlandson Victorian vols London vols Oxford W. F. Bynum William Hunter women Woodward York