Myth and (mis)information: Constructing the medical professions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature and culture

Introduction

Clark Lawlor and Helen Williams

In response to the coronavirus pandemic, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published the report Failure to Act (2020), responding to widespread concern regarding the rise in false information about vaccination published across global media since 2019.¹ The World Health Organisation had already declared an ‘infodemic’.² The blurring of fact and fiction had become a major concern. This was not, of course, the first ‘infodemic’ of medical (mis)information. Nor will it be the last. Infodemics, of macro as well as micro proportions, have always been around. When Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74) died after taking Dr James’s Fever Powder, an array of products from the printing press both supporting and decrying Dr Robert James (1703–76) and his medicine proliferated in the marketplace. Printed advertisements authenticating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medicines appeared alongside printed warnings against them, and booksellers participating in a growing medical marketplace made careers from selling and packaging the same medicines that the pamphlets they published criticised.³ Very quickly, a media event – as we well know now – could spark debate at all levels of society about the use and (mis)use of (il)legitimate medical products.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are particularly rich for a study of medical myth and (mis)information, considering the wealth of medical publications that emerged in that period. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, Britain had witnessed a turn from Latin to English vernacular as the standard language of medical expression.⁴ No longer did a medical author need to have received an education for which the hallmark was a solid command of the Latin tongue, a fact which enabled women to participate in public discourse in growing numbers, as sales rather than sex began to determine a work’s success.

The lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 accelerated literacy rates over the next two hundred years and the rapid expansion of print culture ensured the relatively quick and widespread transmission of medical and quasi-medical information, not all of which could be verified. Through promotion and self-fashioning, medical practitioners were able to exploit the capacity of print to establish themselves as household figures, building up their practices and reputations.⁵ Booksellers seized upon increased public literacy and greater purchasing power as opportunities for expanding their productions, thereby stimulating an appetite for science of all kinds and for works of medical utility. Readers were able to take increasing responsibility for their own and their families’ health, bringing medicine into the home in an unprecedented way.⁶ The public perception of medicine was shaped, among other factors, by poetry, the stage, fiction and the rise of the periodical press, where issues of personality, celebrity and the creative expression of the self were foregrounded. Celebrity doctors and new and emerging medical practices – among them vaccination – were by turns praised and lampooned, even condemned as sacrilegious, and the social, political and religious implications of the democratisation of medical knowledge were explored through literary forms such as poetic satire and science fiction and through innovations in the development of the book.⁷

The transmission and representation of medical (mis)information in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has much to contribute to any study of the cultural representation of disease and medicine. Too often there is an assumption that lay readers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were simply a passive public being misled by an excess of unsubstantiated information. But as Wayne Wild has demonstrated, many readers were generally sceptical of medical authority and often non-compliant as patients. Our volume follows recent forays into lay audiences for medical publications, such as Wild’s work, Medicine-By-Post (2006). Wild has traced the rhetoric of physicians in the eighteenth century as evidenced in their consultation correspondence. Rhetoric, as Wild defines it, signifies the language skills that ‘produce belief’, which is a key concern in medical matters, requiring the social and moral requisites of trust within the roots an early system of medical ethics.⁸ Consultation letters were one of many means by which medical rhetoric was popularised, and then spilled over into the novel and other literary genres, mythologising illness and trauma for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers.⁹ These reader-patients could be more or less receptive to the moment’s medical rhetoric. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as today, patients challenged their physicians and, as Wild describes, ‘they probed the knowledge and competence of their doctors by engaging in current medical jargon’. As Wild argues, ‘Any study of rhetoric in doctor–patient letters must be sensitive to the tensions and the vying for authority that describe this complex relationship’.¹⁰

This was perhaps inevitable in a period which experienced a series of epidemics, including the influenza pandemic of 1782, the North American smallpox epidemic 1775–82, 1831–32 cholera, in 1836 and 1842 influenza, typhus, smallpox, measles, whooping cough and scarlet fever, and between 1846 and 1849 further epidemics of typhus, typhoid and cholera. Meanwhile, tuberculosis and venereal disease continued to cause deaths on a mass scale.¹¹ There was the debate about the workings of contagion between germ theorists and infectionists or ‘miasmists’, which, as Allan Conrad Christensen notes, ‘was not conducted, however, on serenely rational, or scientific grounds’.¹² For Christensen, it marks the ‘vulnerability of science, in its study of literal contagion, to a metaphorical contagion emanating from other discourses’.¹³ It is precisely this metaphorical contagion or vulnerability that this volume proposes to address.¹⁴

English vernacular medical texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries invite cross-comparisons with literary representations of health and medical practitioners in the period, to enrich the picture of medicine in the popular imagination and to provide important perspectives on those questions surrounding authenticity, agency, representation and accessibility that we might similarly ask about literature. The cross-fertilisation, or feedback looping, between these different forms of writing was significant in the construction of health and disease experience in these periods.¹⁵ The popular imagination brings its own assumptions about illness that might contradict, confirm, or even help construct, professional ones. Literature’s particular contribution to what we might call the construction and perception of the illness (or health) experience is in its ability to construct a narrative through time that provides a template for the reader: generic expectations of how to behave and what to expect. Literature, in the wider eighteenth-century sense, can act as a filter, or even crucible, for philosophies, theories and ideologies of medicine and related discourses that combine to produce the patient experience. However, scholarship on the construction of medicine and its practitioners in this period does not typically address questions of lies and falsehood, seeking rather to access a ‘true’ version of the past or to identify what the individuals of the past held to be true.¹⁶

There is a considerable body of scholarship on the issue of fakery and authenticity in fashionable disease and its representation, but this is generally focused on the way fashionable diseases were constructed via literature and art and the manner in which they might be appropriated by those who were not actually afflicted with them but exploited them for their cultural capital.¹⁷ Our remit here is the transmission of medical information from a perspective broader than disease entities, although this research has aided our understanding of how apparent paradoxes can be produced and maintained through narrative and other cultural media. Quite often, as we shall see, our subjects embrace partial truths, outright untruths, and, as today, the media did not necessarily disseminate ‘knowledge’. A fuller understanding of medical writing by and about different types of health practitioners can lay the foundations for better appreciating the literary and cultural effects of medical writing and creativity and their constructions of myth and (mis)information. This volume aims to fill some of these gaps in literary, cultural and medical scholarship and to show new ways in which the fields, and the interchanges between them, can progress and achieve a greater insight into a crucial aspect of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life in the West. In particular, it is interested in the ways in which popular understanding of medical work and medical figures was not only informed but also misinformed, whether by dishonesty, false marketing, preconceived prejudice or through being made subordinate to non-medical literary ends such as comic or satiric productions or political or religious priorities.

From the very beginning of the period that this volume covers, fake news pervaded public cultures: Sir Richard Blackmore (1654–1729), noted medic, poet and essayist on matters medical and moral, provides a route into understanding the importance of the role of literature, and writing more generally, in the transmission of medical mythology and misinformation. Blackmore was a Modern in matters medical: he argued that knowledge needed to be based on the evidence of experiment, not on the received wisdom of the Ancients. A Whig in politics, devout Anglican in religion, and from a mercantile background, he rose to fame and was knighted as physician to royalty as well as – from the perspective of his detractors, who included Alexander Pope (1688–1744) – a bombastic epic poet who toadied to the monarchs of the day in both literature and medicine. Prolific in many genres, Blackmore published collections of essays ranging across a wide range of topics, including specific medical conditions such as consumption and gout, and literary ones, such as ‘An Essay on the Nature and Constitution of Epick Poetry’ (1717). His essays were aimed at the literati and were read by the notable writers and critics of the day, including Joseph Addison (1672–1719). Blackmore was keen to write in the vernacular to engage a wide audience and to transmit medical knowledge beyond a Latin- and Greek-based medical elite. In this he was in the vanguard of a movement that was gaining traction in the early eighteenth century, and supplies a context for our volume, both in the eighteenth century, but also leaning forward into the nineteenth, where the issues of truth and lies, information and misinformation, remain at least as crucial.

Most pertinently for our theme, Blackmore analysed the problematic relationship between writing, the author, and truth in the ‘Of Controversial Writings’ section of his ‘Essay upon Writing’ (1717).¹⁸ Part of the difficulty with transmitting reliable information, for Blackmore, was the capacity of the writer to distinguish truth from falsehood, or the possession of ‘Judgement’, a quality that implied an innate intellectual prowess, hard study, and moral discrimination gained over time:

IT is evident that Nature has bestow’d, on very few that Acuteness, Penetration and discursive Faculty, which are requir’d to qualify Men for Polemical Discourses; and those Persons whom Nature has furnish’d with Judgment and Capacity, must be accustom’d to read the most eminent Authors on Subjects of Controversy, and be well exercis’d and train’d to solid Reasoning, close Debates and Disputations, before their Pens will be accomplish’d for this difficult and important Province. (249)

By ‘Polemical Discourses’ Blackmore means writing that engages with (as the essay suggests) controversial topics, ‘important’ points of medicine, religion or politics (or even literary works that engage these topics) and that therefore require the highest powers of discrimination. Writing is key: ‘Pens’ must ‘be accomplish’d for this difficult and important Province’.

Another part of Blackmore’s problem is the difficulty of recognising Truth when lies look so convincing – and even beautiful:

As Truth often lies entangled with such specious Mixtures of Falshood, that a sharp and distinguishing Taste is demanded to abstract and free it from opposite and repugnant Complications, and shew it in its pure and genuine Splendor; so Error has frequently such a plausible and shining Appearance, in which we meet with so many Lines and features, which imitate and resemble Truth, that it easily imposes on vulgar and credulous Understandings, tho it cannot escape the Observation and Discovery of Men of Sagacity and clear Judgment, long vers’d in detecting such Counterfeits and unmasking the Imposture; such able Writers with wonderful Readiness and Perspicuity, unravel difficult and knotty Subjects, and grapple with the Adversary with superior Strength, triumph in every Page, bear down all before them, and Spread the Field of Disputation with the Spoils of defeated Opponents. (249–250)

Blackmore was in the process of defending himself against Joseph Addison’s accusation that he had written on for too long in his career and was, to use the modern term, past his sell-by date.¹⁹ Part of Blackmore’s agenda is to figure himself as just such an experienced author with ‘sharp and distinguishing Taste’ who is capable of differentiating between ‘plausible and shining’ Error and the Truth that it counterfeits. Blackmore fashions himself as one of the ‘able Writers with wonderful Readiness and Perspicuity, [who] unravel difficult and knotty Subjects’, and follows the logic of his heroic defence of Truth by taking on the masculine metaphor of the knight and warrior. Of course, he was a knight for reasons of medical prowess. It is he who can ‘grapple with the Adversary with superior Strength, triumph in every Page, bear down all before them, and Spread the Field of Disputation with the Spoils of defeated Opponents’. This fantasy of himself as the noble defender of Truth is of a piece with Blackmore’s devout Anglican faith, and conviction in the rightness of his own views. That it is a gendered fantasy is unsurprising, given his concept of writing in general, which requires a certain kind of education and confidence in one’s place in the public sphere not often available to women, and certainly not in the same way as a man of the period.

In case we were in any doubt about the elite status of the true author, Blackmore continues the eulogy on such individuals (as himself), although he varies the metaphor:

There are but few Disputants of this superior Rank in any Science; and happy are the Students in Theology and Philosophy, who have Wisdom enough to chuse and stick to these admirable Authors, or into whose Hands they fall by good Fortune or the prudent Advice of others. For these accomplished Masters, that by the resistless Light of their Reason, with great facility: penetrate and dispel the Mists and Error that hang upon and eclipse the Face of Truth, will in the Compass of a few Pages, convince and instruct them infinitely more than the shallow Productions of a light and volatile Genius, or the heavy and prolix Volumes of muddy Heads, who bewilder’d in their own undigested Notions darken the Disputation, confound the Reader by their insignificant Labour, and explain their Subject till it becomes unintelligible. (250–251)

This is an Enlightenment discourse, and here ‘Science’ means knowledge generally: ‘the resistless Light of their [these admirable Authors’] Reason’ dispels the ‘Mists and Error that hang upon and eclipse the Face of Truth’.²⁰ Blackmore was a Modern, and championed experiment over received wisdom of the Ancients in medicine, and was identified as such in Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books (1704) (‘Bl – ckm – re, a famous Modern’).²¹ For Blackmore, the mission of the author, medical or otherwise, is to bring the light of reason where formerly there was scholastic darkness. To illustrate his point further, Blackmore switches to a medical logic: indigestion, the bane of physical health because it causes blockages in the circulation of the body’s various systems (blood, spirits, formerly humours), afflicts those ‘muddy Heads’ who ‘darken the Disputation’ because they are unable to process the necessary ideas to enlighten the reader, and instead render ‘their Subject … unintelligible’.²² At the opposite end of the bad author spectrum are ‘the shallow Productions of a light and volatile Genius’, not so much indigested as inadequately fed with any substantial ideas at all. Either way readers suffer from just such an overproduction of incomprehensible argument, unlike those of the ‘accomplished Masters’, who ‘in the Compass of a few Pages, convince and instruct them’.

Truth, then, is a matter of literary style as well as content. The author who writes on ‘Controversial Points’ must ‘to the strength, closeness and perspicuity of their Reasoning, add fine Temper and genteel Humanity. These Qualities gain immediately upon the Reader, and leave him prejudic’d in favour of the Disputant’ (251). ‘Deep and lasting Impressions’ come from the good author’s ‘unobstructed good Sense’ finding ‘easy Admission to the Mind’. Again, the metaphor is military and manly:

The Energy and convincing Force of a Polemical Writer, does not consist in the immoderate Heat and Fierceness of his Passion, but in the Strength and resistless Violence of his Arguments; not in big Words, arrogant Assurance and Airs of Authority, but in the commanding Force of his Demonstration. (251)

Controlled, ‘resistless Violence’ of logic and the ‘commanding Force of his Demonstration’ is Blackmore’s preferred mode of argument, and one that assumes truth as the core than enables it to be ‘resistless’ (one of Blackmore’s repeated and favourite terms here). Later in this volume we engage with alternative forms of medical and literary authority that work from a wider, feminine model of creativity, but here Blackmore is very much speaking from a traditional, patriarchal standpoint. Calm authority must be reinforced by a polite (in the powerful period sense of the term) and gentlemanly style:

And as this gentle and well-manner’d Conduct is delightful and beneficial to the indifferent Reader, so it is most likely to gain upon the Opponent, who by such Candour, good Usage and respectful Expression, is more dispos’d to entertain and weigh the Evidence, and yield up the Cause to superior Reason. (251)

It is all very well to be in possession of the truth, but a masculine, militaristic command of rhetoric and register (‘yield up the Cause’!) is needed to deliver that truth in a combative, ‘controversial’ mode.

Blackmore’s conviction of a mainstream, Anglican and Whiggish medical truth based on empirical findings, as opposed to the wisdom of the ages, carries us forward into the Age of Enlightenment and the following centuries into scientific modernity. Writing, and writing in the vernacular, was key to going beyond the medical elite and into the hinterland of medical actors – midwives, apothecaries, cunning women, ‘Lady Bountifuls’, those in the country with the ability to learn medical techniques without botching them, those who could not afford elite medical care, and so on. To be sure, Blackmore held to a certain (masculine) model of truth and falsity, but he demonstrates the centrality of writing, creative and otherwise, to the construction of that knowledge. He sets in motion themes around the contestation of knowledge via the power of competing narratives that will remain crucial to the ensuing centuries, including our own, and foregrounds the need to analyse the process of writing as we seek for truth, however defined.

This collection, a product of the Leverhulme Trust-funded major research project ‘Writing Doctors: Medical Representation and Personality, ca. 1660–1832’ at Northumbria University, combines a diverse spectrum of scholarly approaches, from medical history to book history, exploring literary and scientific texts, such as recipes, satiric poetry, essays, anatomies, advertisements, and the novel, to shed light on the mythologisation and transmission of medical (mis)information through literature and popular culture throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the intersection of medical history and culture, the various chapters analyse the persuasive, promotional, and sometimes deceptive means by which myths about the medical professions proliferated in English literary culture of this period, from early eighteenth-century household remedies to the late nineteenth-century concerns with vaccination which continue to feel strikingly relevant since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, and which make strong connections between our current climate of misinformation and that which flourished during the heyday of medical print culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This volume seeks to make direct links between social change and the mass availability and circulation of medical information beginning in the eighteenth century and expanding exponentially during the nineteenth, while positioning literary and print cultural forms as playing a pivotal role in how this information was received, interpreted and (often) distorted for an engaged public. At the same time, we situate emergent medical professions in relation to the contemporary marketplace and print culture.²³ While the volume addresses well-known figures like John Arbuthnot (1667–1735) and George Cheyne (1671–1743), it also includes lesser-known individuals, as in the medical publisher Elizabeth Cox (1765–1841). This approach enables us to deal with the mainstream, and the popular medical culture of the period, while also illuminating overlooked texts and writers, or, as in the case of Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925), overlooked texts by figures who remain well known in the literary world but perhaps infrequently so closely considered, particularly in relation to medicine. Individual chapters also place prominent figures like Tobias Smollett (1721–71) and Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65) in direct conversation with more obscure practitioners of domestic medicine, such as the women healers of the period.

Katherine Aske’s chapter on early eighteenth-century skincare makes the important point that the relationship between elite professional medical advice and popular and domestic medical cures for minor skin ailments could be a blurry one and, for Daniel Turner (1667–1740), required a delicate balancing act in his attempt to negotiate the two. The professional medic needed to communicate the ‘true’ professional cure clearly and in the vernacular to a popular audience, who did not necessarily know Latin, while acknowledging/highlighting ineffective cures without losing the veneer of respectability. Turner’s De Morbis Cutaneis: A Treatise of Diseases Incident to the Skin (1714) is the first treatise on this subject in English, which Aske uses to demonstrate the techniques by which Turner sought to dispel popular mythologies, or sometimes professional misdiagnoses and treatment, around skin health. Aske’s chapter, like others in this volume, shows that medical truth is a contested entity in this period, as in our own, and that narrative and rhetorical ability was required to guide the intended audiences, popular or professional, towards the desired destination of the particular author. Skin is a crucial area of the body that invited a commerce between ‘deeper’ and more serious disease to be treated by professional medics and ‘surface’ blemishes and spots that beckoned quackery and popular mythological cures.

Turner, it transpires, was not above lifting and manipulating the work of others, sometimes popularising authors whom he had elsewhere criticised, unacknowledged: in this case William Salmon, who had translated George Bate’s Pharmacopoeia Bateana (1688). In order to reinforce correct information (as provided by himself), Turner had to demonstrate, perhaps paradoxically, ‘the interconnectedness of medical knowledge, and the necessity to engage with domestic and popular works in order to form a professional approach’. Elite medicine, if it wanted to speak to a wider audience than fellow medics, needed to reach out, and in so doing threatened its own validity. Patently this remains a problem in our own time, as we have seen with the coronavirus pandemic and the debates about following a supposedly unified scientific view, albeit Latin has been replaced by the specialised language of biomedicine.

John Baker discusses a world ‘shot through with its spin, fake news, ‘alternative facts’, storytelling, scams, disinformation, conspiracy theories, propaganda, political lies’ – as it happens, he is describing our own time, but points out that the early eighteenth century was very similar, and needed the treatment of a ‘writing doctor’ to cure, or attempt to cure, its ills. His chapter, ‘Dr John Arbuthnot’s literary treatment for false learning, pedantry and excess: from physic to metaphysics’, takes the volume themes in their broadest sense, and includes the diseases of the nation as well as the individual, maladies that encompass medical myths and misinformation on a grand scale. Arbuthnot was both physician to the Queen and a member of the Scriblerus Club, a literary-satirical powerhouse of the Augustan age that included Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) as its primary members. Medicine and literature combined in the works of Arbuthnot, satirical or otherwise, to debunk quackery and charlatanism wherever he and his Scriblerian fellows found them.

Baker demonstrates that Arbuthnot interrogated the notion of lying via a pseudological mode, The Art of Political Lying (1712), parodying the logical method that the scientific part of his writings enacted so well. This chapter argues that Arbuthnot ranged through three ‘domains and discourses, fact, fiction, and belief’, which correspond to scientific, literary and religious writings, in order to expose truth and condemn falsehood across these areas. The Art of Political Lying and the Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (written around 1713–14) fall under the fictional and satirical category, whereas the later works, such as the poem Gnothi Seauton, Know your self (1734) were more concerned with philosophical reflections that led to a Christian explanation of matters of body, soul and wider society.

From one writing male doctor to another, Clark Lawlor’s chapter ‘The very women read it: medical self-fashioning, mythologies and (mis)information in George Cheyne MD’s medical writing’ discusses the ways in which the famous, and sometimes due to his colourful personal journey, infamous, Bath and London society physician Cheyne wrote popular medical essays (such as An Essay of Health and Long Life (1725)) and treatises that ‘sold’ the author himself as much as his methods. Cheyne did not have the generic range of Arbuthnot, but what Cheyne did, he did very well. Lawlor argues that Cheyne’s mastery of writing in English, rather than Latin, allowed him to reach a much wider audience than fellow medics, although there were other factors in his successful self-fashioning. Improvements in print technology and distribution meant cheaper and easier production of his self-help works, as well as an expanding medical market. His ability to label his writing in an effective way in terms of genre, the simplicity of his treatments (regimens) and the way they fed into a religious aesthetic of slimness were crucial factors.

Cheyne uniquely debunked alternative, quack mythologies of health by promoting his own case and its cure, by himself. This bodily self-fashioning was described in his famous English Malady (1733), in which ‘the Author’s Case’ eloquently detailed Cheyne’s dissolute lifestyle, massive weight gain and what we might now approximately call depression, and then his dietary and general regimen treatment that normalised his lifestyle, weight and mental health. This sensational tale of physical and mental self-mythology played nicely into the new discourse of sensibility, which marked the suffering of the sensitive, possibly creative, individual as the price to pay for a superior intellect and morality underpinned by finer nerves. Lawlor also points out that self-fashioning is never as monologic as it sounds: often that fashioning is created as much by the ‘other’ (be it a publisher, audience, fellow medic or patient) as by the individual supposedly doing the intentional fashioning: a dialogical mythology of the self.

Laurence Sullivan’s chapter ‘Studying in solitude: demythologising the masculine medical monopoly with Jane Barker’s Galesia and Tobias Smollett’s Sagely’ broadens the scope of who could participate in healthcare and its representation by examining the role of women in fiction. Sullivan argues that women could not only contribute to healthcare, but also do it better than male practitioners in some instances. Women may not have been permitted to enjoy a professional standing equal to that of Blackmore, but Jane Barker (1652–1732), whose brother was a licensed medic, had acquired knowledge via her relative’s studies, but also through her own determination (and of course a good education that was not accessible to all women or men, depending on rank and individual family circumstances). Barker’s novel, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723), is unusual in that it features a semi-autobiographical character, Galesia, who treats the local community for diseases such as gout (Barker herself had devised a gout remedy that was actually marketed) and is respected for her expertise. Also unusual is Barker’s interpolation of poetry into the novel, poetry that deals with the female perspective on healthcare as a giver rather than as a sufferer (the more common representation).

If Barker demythologises the masculine healthcare monopoly in her novel and practice as a female author and character, so does Tobias Smollett as a male physician and novelist. In his case, it is by means of his character Betty Sagely in The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748). Sagely, as the name suggests, is a wise woman who is isolated from her community by the apparently inevitable association of unmarried women practising healthcare with witchcraft. Smollett demonstrates, through Sagely’s healing of the eponymous Roderick Random, that female healers are valuable contributors to the ecology of healthcare in the eighteenth century, despite the opprobrium heaped upon them by the male professional establishment. Both fictional and actual women (i.e. Barker herself) remain unmarried, an aspect of their identities that allows them to practise medicine to a specialised degree, as domestic duties might otherwise engage all their time and energy. Being a spinster is a mixed blessing, however: freedom from male control to some extent meant suspicion and social ostracism. Barker has to contend, as does Galesia, with mythologies of female incompetence created by the male profession, and Sagely too is shunned by her society even as she provides treatment for people’s ills.

When we think of medical misinformation, we tend to think of medicine applying to humans, but Stephanie Howard-Smith’s essay, ‘Take physic, Pomp: imagining dog doctors in eighteenth-century Britain’, demonstrates the importance of veterinary information and (often sexist) mythology about the owners as well as the medics. ‘Dog doctors’ was an insult, a term that arose through a cultural anxiety about the rise of dog and pet ownership as a leisure industry during the eighteenth century, and with it a veterinary market. As so often, women bore the brunt of this fear of a burgeoning consumerism representationally, specifically and inextricably in creative literature, although also to an extent in the visual arts in Britain and Europe. The lapdog was a symbol of useless canine luxury, an ornament to the equally useless elite woman, or worse, an instrument of sexual pleasure (‘lap’ dog!) gleefully depicted across literary genres and artfully hinted at in visual works. This exclusion of men from female pleasure no doubt exacerbated the worry that consumerism and its primary symbol, the consuming woman, were running amok and not susceptible to moral and male control. Dog doctors themselves were labelled as effeminate creatures, as effete as the dogs and their owners.

Creative literature is crucial here, for the powerful image created in novels, poems and plays (such as Francis Coventry’s influential History of Pompey the Little (1751)) of women tending to their favoured pets rather than their children or husbands and paying extortionate amounts of money to quack dog doctors was difficult to shift for the profession. The absence of archival evidence only increases the importance of literary and visual materials for our understanding of the role of the dog doctors. Howard-Smith debunks the older myth that only elite women owned pet dogs, and positions dogs as a vital source of labour in the city and country, with important sporting functions as well. The rise of the culture of the sentimental also meant dogs were a form of companion beyond the economic, not unlike companionate marriage, although one might facetiously speculate that the dogs were more popular than the husbands. This image persisted throughout the nineteenth century, only to be replaced by ‘a fresh myth – dogs received no specialist healthcare until the Victorian, Edwardian or even post-War periods’, a myth that this chapter firmly contradicts.

Adopting a queer and disabilities studies perspective, Declan Kavanagh puts the emphasis very much on masculinity in his chapter dealing with the ways in which venereal infection challenged heteronormative and ableist mythologies, experiences and expressions in literary form. ‘A man of common understanding: venereal disease, myth and reading as a protective practice in eighteenth-century Britain’ takes three main instances of venereal infection from three different literary modes: William Buchan’s (1729–1805) popular medical self-help advice in his Observations Concerning the Prevention and Cure of the Venereal Disease (1796), Tobias Smollett’s eponymous character in The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and James Boswell’s (1740–95) account of his own pox in his London Journal (1762–63). Buchan’s philosophy of allowing men to take matters into their own hands (the implied sexual reference is deliberate in the case of Kavanagh and his subjects) and overcoming misinformation to cure themselves via knowledge gained by reading donated a form of male agency where none was forthcoming from rapacious quacks and charlatans, and where one’s reputation might be damaged by wider exposure of a potentially embarrassing and often debilitating condition.

When it comes to novelistic representation, Smollett’s Roderick Random, himself poxed, has the threat to his masculine identity, informed by both his autonomy in reputation and ability in agency, displaced by his sentimental care for Miss Williams, a woman who has also contracted venereal disease. Because Random has experience as an employee with the professional treatment of venereal disease and exposure to the dark arts of his former quack employer, he is able to treat Miss Williams and retain, in the process, his ‘straight’ masculine qualities of gallantry, self-possession and apparent physical integrity – we never see his ‘leaky’ vessel of a body for what it really is as all the representational mythology and information is directed at Miss Williams. The final instance, James Boswell’s autopathography, if one can label it as such, in his London Journal, details Boswell’s reclamation of his masculine physical, mental and reputational integrity by his demeaning rejection of the woman from whom he had allegedly received his infection – the opposite of the fictional Roderick Random’s strategy of care. Boswell’s anxiety about queering himself at all-too-intimate hands (when being treated) by his medical friend is mitigated by his splitting of the identity of Douglas into the professional doctor who might want to overcharge for treatment and the trusty friend minus such a medical identity. Venereal disease is a threat to the mythologies of compulsory able-bodiedness and heteronormativity, one that must be neutralised by various narrative strategies across these different genres.

Further pursuing eighteenth-century narrative strategies, Bethany Brigham, in her essay on the little-known but fascinating Minerva Press novel The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey (1797) by ‘Mrs Carver’, describes its engagement with the anatomy debates. Exploring its potential authorship by the surgeon and anatomist Sir Anthony Carlisle (1764–1840), Brigham demonstrates how the narrative is ‘veined through with detailed medical knowledge’ and plays into the debates of its moment, particularly by dealing with the politics of body snatching. While opening with gothic images of the walking dead, the novel soon assumes the style of the Radcliffean supernatural explained, when the protagonist learns that the abbey of the title has been repurposed as a vault for stolen corpses awaiting dissection. Brigham demonstrates how Carver/Carlisle manipulates the seeming excesses of the gothic genre to reflect the medical realities of late eighteenth-century England.

The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey captures a moment of uncertainty, when the growth in medical education throughout the eighteenth century also meant an increased demand for corpses for dissection. The Murder Act of 1752 permitted corpses of executed murderers to be donated to the London Company of Surgeons, combining criminality, ethics and anatomy in a bid to put a stop to a disturbing rise in body snatching as a lucrative underground business. However, body snatching continued to be a major source of anatomical subjects until the passing of the Anatomy Act by the UK Parliament in 1832. In the meantime, the anatomy debates continued, proposing imaginative alternatives to body snatching, and debating the propriety of both the theft and dissection itself. As a surgeon, Carlisle was unusual in promoting legislation to improve the supply of anatomical subjects. Until that point, the ethics of body snatching, dissecting criminals and of sourcing sufficient anatomical subjects in a largely Christian society continued to be debated at all levels of society. Brigham demonstrates how The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey unveils popular belief systems around death and dissection as a form of myth and misinformation that only further perpetuated body snatching and prevented legal reform. In Brigham’s reading, the Minerva Press novel emerges as a gothic intervention uniquely placed to present the criminal body’s centrality to the advancement of medical knowledge