Samuel Johnson in the Medical World: The Doctor and the Patient

by John Wiltshire

• ISBN13: 9780521383264
• ISBN10: 0521383269
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1991-01-25
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Samuel Johnson has become known to posterity in two capacities: through his own works as the great literary essayist of the eighteenth century, and, through Boswell's Life, as a man - notoriously a medical patient with a string of physical and psychological ailments. John Wiltshire brings the two together in this original study of Johnson the writer as 'Doctor' and patient. The subject of modern medical historians' case studies, Johnson also cultivated the acquaintance of doctors in his own day, and was himself a 'dabbler in physics'. John Wiltshire illuminates Johnson's life and work by setting them in their medical context, and also examines the importance of medical themes in Johnson's own writings. He discusses the many parts of Johnson's work touching on doctors, medicines, hospitals and medical experimentation, and analyses the central theme of human suffering - in body and mind - and its alleviation.

Table of Contents

Preface

A note on references

Introduction

1. Johnson's medical history: facts and mysteries

2. The practice of physic

3. Transactions of the medical world

4. Medicine as metaphor

5. The history of a man of learning

6. Dr Robert Levet

7. Therapeutic friendship

Notes

Bibliography

Index.