Samuel Johnson in the Medical World
The Doctor and the Patient

This 1991 book looks at Johnson's life and work, including his writings on medical themes, set in their medical context.

John Wiltshire (Author)

9780521022286, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 December 2005

304 pages, 1 b/w illus.
21.6 x 14 x 1.8 cm, 0.395 kg

"...the balance of Wiltshire's bok is sound and sensible, a distinguished contribution not only to Johnsoniana but to the wider field of eighteenth-century studies." Willam B. Ober, M.D.; The Eighteenth Century

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 1991 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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]