satire as medicine in restoration and early enlightment century

Satire as Medicine in the Restoration and Early EighteenthCentury: The History of a Metaphor

Noelle Gallagher

Literature and Medicine, Volume 31, Number 1, Spring 2013, pp. 17-39(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/lm.2013.0005

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17Noelle Gallagher

Literature and Medicine 31, no. 1 (Spring 2013) 17–39© 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Satire as Medicine in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century: The History of a Metaphor Noelle Gallagher

The true end of Satyre, is the amendment of Vices by correction. And he who writes Honestly, is no more an Enemy to the Offen-dour, than the Physician to the Patient, when he prescribes harsh Remedies to an inveterate Disease.

—John Dryden, Preface to Absalom and Achitophel

When Dryden chose to defend his political poem as the “harsh Remedy” prescribed by a well-meaning physician, he was drawing on a figurative conception of satire that would already have been familiar to readers in 1681.1 The “medical model of satire,” as Mary Claire Randolph has termed it, was central to Renaissance satiric theory, and comparisons between satirists and physicians, satire and medi-cine, appeared in a wide range of early modern texts.2 According to Randolph, the “medical model” reached its apex in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and was then replaced by “an intellectual nomen-clature” that became “current and fashionable as the earlier medical vocabulary had been current and fashionable.”3 As my epigraph from Dryden suggests, however, comparisons between satire and medicine would continue to hold an important position within critical accounts of the genre throughout the Restoration and on into the early eighteenth century. Indeed, medical rhetoric not only remained important in the theorization and classification of satire, it also played a prominent role within satiric literature, as satirists began to complicate, and in some cases challenge, the conventional critical associations between satire and medicine.

18 THE HISTORy Of A METAPHOR

Some of the poets and prose writers working between 1660 and 1760—Tobias Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith, John Arbuthnot, Samuel Garth, Richard Blackmore, Mark Akenside—might have had a personal incen-tive to correlate medical and satiric practices, because they themselves had been trained as physicians or surgeons. yet many writers not actively involved in the practice of medicine also sought to explore the changing relations between medicine and literature—and especially between medicine and satire. Some such explorations were acts of tribute (Pope’s 1735 Epistle to Arbuthnot is one notable example); but the eighteenth century also saw the production of an extraordinary array of satiric attacks on mercenary, ignorant, or pretentious medical practitioners. from the pompous Latinity of fielding’s surgeon in Joseph Andrews (1742) to the farcical forceps work of Sterne’s Doctor Slop in Tristram Shandy (1759), the practices of “professional” medicine remained a favored target among eighteenth-century satirists. for writers like Sterne and fielding, the satire-as-medicine commonplace was not just a means of prescribing “harsh Remedies to an inveterate Disease”: it was also a means of exploring wider cultural concerns that affected the practices of both medicine and satire.

This essay will survey some of the uses and implications of the satire-as-medicine commonplace in British literature between 1660 and 1760. In examining several of the similarities—and differences—between satiric and medical theory, I want to suggest that Restoration and early-eighteenth-century satirists defined their genre strategically, identifying satire as a therapeutic practice sometimes in alignment with, and sometimes in opposition to, the work of contemporary medical prac-titioners. Ultimately, I suggest that Restoration and eighteenth-century satirists used the satire-as-medicine commonplace not only to defend potentially offensive or libellous statements, but also—and perhaps more importantly—to engage with a number of debates relevant to both literary and medical practice, including the clash between the ancients and the moderns, the divisions between the arts and the sciences, and the shift from a patronage-based system of production to a commercialized marketplace.

Healthy Body, Healthy Mind: Disease and Morality 1660–1760

The comparison between satire and medicine was only one of several commonplaces by which Restoration and eighteenth-century critics defined satiric literature.4 The medical model had maintained

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a particular prevalence and resilience over the centuries, however, in part because it tied in with a broader understanding of human experi-ence—an understanding that made strong connections between physical and mental states of being, and particularly between moral virtue and physical health. As Roy and Dorothy Porter have demonstrated, the early modern approach to health was what we might now term “holistic.”5 Illness was understood as a problem that affected the whole person, and specific ailments were often traced back to personal problems in the character or habits of the individual patient.6 Popular and profes-sional wisdom continued to emphasize the role of the “constitution” in determining and reflecting health, and visible symptoms of illness could be identified as markers of inherent problems or flaws in the patient’s own character. Equally important were the “non-naturals,” six extrinsic factors that, while essential to human life, could also prove harmful or disease-causing if improperly regulated. Physical ailments might be attributed not only to inherent constitutional tendencies, then, but also to excesses, insufficiencies, or impurities in diet, excretions, air, exercise, sleep, and the passions—factors in what we might now describe as a patient’s “lifestyle.”7

While the range of medical theories circulating in this period was very broad, the links between patient health, behavior, and dis-position encouraged many medical practitioners to identify physical ailments with moral failings, and vice versa.8 Even if a man’s consti-tution predisposed him to a certain illness, he could still attempt to follow a “regimen” that balanced out these intrinsic tendencies—and certainly he could refrain from indulging in behaviors that exacerbated or brought on physiological problems.9 While environmental factors like boggy air weren’t always within a patient’s control, many of the other non-naturals were associated with behaviors that carried clear moral resonances: eating too much (gluttony) was a sin, for example, as was too little exercise or too much sleep (sloth). Similarly, the cat-egory of “the passions” would have invited the association of sinful emotions like wrath, envy, or lust with physical illness. In prescribing a medication or recommending changes to a patient’s lifestyle, then, a physician might well have been identified as treating the mind or the morals as well as the body.

It was this sense of medicine’s ethical purposes—or, more broadly, of the link between moral and physical health—that provided perhaps the strongest rhetorical underpinning for a parallel with satire. from the classical period onward, satire had been characterized by poets and critics as a genre that pursued an elevated moral purpose. As


the physician-turned-poet Richard Blackmore put it in 1695, “Satyr is intended for . . . the Promotion of Virtue, and exposing of Vice; which it pursues by sharp Reproaches, vehement and bitter Invectives, or by a Courtly, but not less cutting Raillery.”10 Similarly, Nahum Tate explained that “The Representing of Vertue and Vice in their respec-tive Beauties and Deformities, is the genuine Task of Poetry: the true and proper themes of Panegyrick and Satyr.”11 And in 1697, Dryden’s influential Discourse of Satire identified a moral mandate as the genre’s defining feature: “that which is most Essential to this Poem, and is as it were the very Soul which animates it, is the scourging of Vice, and Exhortation to Virtue.”12

As Dryden’s reference to “scourging” perhaps suggests, many writers of Restoration and early-eighteenth-century satires described their moral aims in physical terms. More to the point, for many satirists, the link between spiritual and bodily health meant that satire’s remit was not just moral, but medical. Accordingly, throughout the early modern period, satire was presented as a kind of medicine for the mind or soul, designed to treat moral corruption in much the same way that a course of physic could treat bodily illness. The poet Thomas D’Urfey, for example, contended that “Satyres, just like Medicines, are design’d, / As those the body cure, so these the mind.”13 Thomas Emes, evok-ing the same comparison, suggested that satire could be “prescrib’d against some Maladies endangering the Life and Health of Men, that have their root in the Mind; such as Pride, Ignorance, Confidence, Covetousness, &c.”14 And throughout the period, satiric works appeared with titles or subtitles that indicated their role in “treating” various social or individual ills: “A Pill to Purge State-Melancholy,” “A Cure for a Scold,” “A Remedy for the Gout.”15

As a function of this association between physiological and moral health, satirists were often compared with medical practitioners, or identified as “diagnosing” or “curing” society’s vices. Dryden’s famous distinction in the Discourse between Horatian and Juvenalian satire was articulated, among other ways, as a contrast between physic and sur-gery, with Horace characterized as a general practitioner treating minor ailments, and Juvenal cast as a barber-surgeon enjoined to perform an amputation.16 The treatment performed by Juvenal, Dryden explained, was “an Ense rescindendum; but that of Horace was a Pleasant Cure, with all the Limbs preserv’d entire: And as our Mountebanks tell us in their Bills, without keeping the Patient within Doors for a Day. What they promise only, Horace has effectually Perform’d: yet . . . Juvenal’s Times requir’d a more painful kind of Operation.”17 Each satirist could

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possess his own area of expertise, Dryden suggested, making satirists—much like the increasing number of medical practitioners known for treating a specific problem—“specialists” whose skills were of use or importance according to the health and character of their “Times.”18

In addition to the tropes of satirist-as-physician and satire as “medicine for the mind,” the association between medical and satiric practices could also be figured in a number of other ways. In some texts, satires offered less a cure than a prescription; they specified a treatment that it was ultimately up to the patient-reader himself to implement. Dryden echoed his french source, André Dacier, for example, when, later in the Discourse, he compared satiric literature to a book of home remedies: “They who endeavour not to correct themselves, according to so exact a Model; are just like the Patients, who have open before them a Book of Admirable Receipts, for their Diseases, and please themselves with reading it, without Comprehending the Nature of the Remedies; or how to apply them to their Cure.”19 Where the comparison between Horace-as-physician and Juvenal-as-surgeon accorded primary agency to the satirist, here Dryden’s account sug-gested that satires merely provided curative recipes; it remained up to the reader to pursue treatment.

Equally, the poet and courtier Sir Carr Scroope remarked that satire offered “wholesome Remedies” for those oppressed by “Sick-ness of Mind”—but its prescriptions could also be helpful cautions, he argued, for those in danger of succumbing to moral ills:

for, as the Passing-Bell frights from his meatThe greedy sick Man, that too much would eat;So, when a Vice ridiculous is made,Our Neighbour’s Shame keeps us from growing bad.20

By applying to himself the satiric “Remedies” issued to another “sick Man,” a self-aware reader, Scroope’s lines suggested, could even use satire as a kind of preventive medicine.

Cure and Punishment

While different writers figured the satire-as-medicine trope in different ways, most were united in conceiving of satire not just as curative, but as punitive. In this preference for unpleasant medicine, too, the work of the satirist mirrored that of the medical practitioner.


Treatments for illness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were almost exclusively based on practices of removal or extrac-tion—and, perhaps needless to say, such practices tended to be very unpleasant. Nicholas Jewson has suggested that physicians favored more intensive treatments because these satisfied aristocratic patients with the sense that they were “getting their money’s worth”21—but the particular emphasis on bleeding and other forms of purgation did have a logical basis within the Galenic model of medicine: if ill-nesses were the result of imbalances in the humors, then it stood to reason that removing some amount of bodily matter or fluid would remove a proportionately larger amount of the excessive humor than of the other humors.22 Even when humoral theory began to fall out of favor, medical theorists still identified “corrupted matter” as the primary cause of illness, and recommended removal of the offending substance as the best course of treatment.23

Accordingly, in addition to the popular methods of drawing blood—by slitting open a vein, cupping, or, less frequently, by the use of leeches—seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medical practitioners administered “vomits,” “purges,” and “clysters.” If bleeding, vomiting, urinating, or defecating couldn’t effect a cure, patients might endure the removal of other bodily fluids: the mercury treatments commonly prescribed for syphilitics, for example, resulted in a massive overproduc-tion of saliva, as well as a sweat-soaked fever. It’s not difficult to see how these sorts of treatments might be conceived of as penitential: just as a disease could be understood as the result of some intemperance on the part of the patient, so the treatment might be viewed as the corrective—or the proportionate punishment—to the original failing.

Satirists, in keeping with early modern medical practices, also often viewed themselves as attempting to treat the “distemper’d Mind . . . by bitter and unsavoury but salutary Applications.”24 Within sev-enteenth- and early-eighteenth-century satiric theory, figurations of satire as physically punitive were often combined with, or subordinated to, conceptions of the genre as curative or therapeutic. Equally, praises directed toward the satirist as a physician could be presented along-side fearful warnings of his violence or ruthlessness. Satire was often represented as a “lash” to vices—indeed, by the time Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary appeared in 1755, the verb “to lash” had “to scourge with satire” listed as its fourth meaning25—and the skilled satirist, “scourge in hand,” could not only whip his victims, but also bite, sting, or even kill them.26 According to Dryden’s Discourse, the highest attainment of satiric skill lay in learning to deliver such punitive violence “sweetly”

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and expertly: “there is still a vast difference betwixt the slovenly Butchering of a Man, and the fineness of a stroak that separates the Head from the Body, and leaves it standing in its place. A man may be capable, as [the famed executioner] Jack Ketch’s Wife said of his Servant, of a plain piece of Work, a bare Hanging; but to make a Malefactor die sweetly, was only belonging to her Husband.”27 Like his description of Juvenalian amputation, Dryden’s account of satiric decapitation validated the exercise of violence for the greater health of the social body. Executed on the offending members of society, satiric assassination wasn’t violence; it was surgery.

Although Dryden’s account pushed the logic of punitive satire to a disturbingly homicidal extreme, critics routinely connected the violence of satire with its role in treating moral ills. Satire could “scourge and mend a venal age”;28 it could “purge” the nation of “state disorders”;29 it inflicted “wounds” that could “cure.”30 As these descriptions suggest, the treatments offered by satire—much like those favored in medicine—were strongly focused on the removal of undesir-able elements: the satirist could lance boils or amputate limbs, dispense emetics or laxatives, draw blood, or burn off the affected area with his caustic humor.31 The poet Edward young offered a particularly witty articulation of the satirist’s “urge to purge” (and perhaps made a sly allusion to Pope’s real-life dosing of the bookseller Edmund Curll with an emetic in 1716)32 in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759):

But as good books are the medicine of the mind, if we should dethrone these authors, and consider them, not in their royal, but their medicinal capacity, might it not then be said, that Addison prescribed a wholesome and pleasant regimen, which was univer-sally relished, and did much good; that Pope preferred a purgative of satire, which, tho’ wholesome, was too painful in its operation; and that Swift insisted on a large dose of ipecacuanha, which, tho’ readily swallowed from the fame of the physician, yet, if the patient had any delicacy of taste, he threw up the remedy, instead of the disease?33

Here young’s account expanded the satirist-as-physician trope to consider the “medicinal capacity” of literature across the genres, con-trasting the “purgative” treatment of satire against the “wholesome and pleasant regimen” suggested by forms like the periodical essay. While an individual satirist might vary in the extremity of the treat-ment—with Pope delivering a painful laxative and Swift a toxic dose


of emetic—the nature of the remedy as “evacuative” or “purgative” remained the same.

further, as young’s remarks on Swift suggest, the violence of a satiric cure could be such as to produce an affliction as severe as the disease it ostensibly sought to treat. In early modern popular percep-tion, as we have seen, ailments were often understood as “punishment” for misbehavior of some sort—but medical treatment could also bear a punitive aspect. Similarly, within satiric theory, satire was paradoxically figured as both a punishing remedy for social vice, and an affliction with disease-like “virulency.”34 Thus the term “scourge,” although com-monly applied to satire, was also used to describe epidemic diseases, for example.35 In the same way that the satirist could “bite” or “lash” his victims, so he could “plague” them with his criticisms. Reconfig-ured in this way, satire might be understood not as the work of a physician or a surgeon, but as the “spleen” or “gall” of an infected patient, whose ill feelings could only be soothed by “purging” them onto the page.36

Satirist as Physician and Physician as Satirized

As a defensive strategy, the satire-as-medicine commonplace enabled a writer to declare his ostensibly altruistic motives, draw-ing a flattering comparison between his own purposes or methods and those of a contemporary medical practitioner. But just as the satirist’s noblest aims could be captured in his role as society’s phy-sician, so his failings could be upbraided, in a reformulation of the same metaphor, as the work of a quack or mountebank—and satirists working throughout the long eighteenth century sought to attack their political or literary rivals in exactly these terms.37 In A Supplement to One Thousand Seven Hundred Thirty-Eight (1738), for example, Thomas Newcomb lamented the increasing number of literary “quacks” to good physicians, complaining that “Arts pine, quacks flourish—R-ck and M-rg-n kill.”38 Linking the commercial corruption of the medical and the literary spheres, Newcomb identified writers-for-hire like Nicholas Amhurst with quack doctors like Richard Rock and Thomas Morgan, and opposed all such exemplars of “bad practice” to Alexander Pope, the “scourge and cure of every vice.”39 Newcomb’s subsequent poem, “Danvers and Moore; Or, the Rival Quacks” (1740), similarly ridiculed Amhurst (who wrote under the pseudonym Caleb D’Anvers) by com-paring his anti-Walpole newspaper The Craftsman with the “quackery” of the apothecary John Moore.40

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Predictably, those who practiced at both physic and literature proved to be particularly popular targets for the accusation of quack-ery. Charles Sedley, Samuel Garth, and Tom Brown were among the many satirists who mocked Richard Blackmore, for instance, as both a hack writer and a quack physician. According to Sedley, the author of the Satire Against Wit (1700) was “like a Quack” in pedaling such ineffectual satiric cures:

It is a common Pastime to write ill;And, Doctor, with the rest, e’en take thy fill.Thy Satyr’s harmless; ‘tis thy Prose that kills.When thou prescrib’st thy Potions and thy Pills.41

Sedley’s lines portrayed Blackmore as an inversion of the satirist-as-physician ideal: a literary and medical mountebank whose harmless insults contrasted against his deadly prescriptions. Garth’s mock-epic The Dispensary (1699) attacked Blackmore on similar grounds, caricaturing him as the pretentious apothecary-turned-“Bard” whose invocations—like his medicines, presumably—failed to produce the desired effect.

As these attacks suggest, both satire and medicine depended to some extent on the practitioner’s public persona, with prestige hinging on the satirist’s or physician’s ability to project an air of intellectual authority. Practitioners within both fields accordingly sought not only to display their own abilities, but also to position themselves against an imagined underclass of “hack” or “quack” performers. While the contrast between “good” and “bad” medicine, “high” and “low” art, was sometimes played out quite straightforwardly (as in the epic battle of the Dispensary), the tensions between satirist and hack, physician and quack, could also be figured more obliquely. The persona of the mountebank offered irresistible opportunities for satiric play, and some of the best-known writers of the period ironically impersonated or com-mended quacks in order to enhance their own satiric performances.42 The slippery narrator of Swift’s preface to A Tale of a Tub (1704), for example, aligned himself with a quack by identifying the ladder, the pulpit, and the stage itinerant as the three “wooden machines” used to project the voices of criminals, Covenanters (Scottish Presbyterians), and mountebanks—all of whom, he explained, were “orators who desire to talk much without interruption.”43 Situating his own work and that of other Grub Street hacks within this oratorical tradition, Swift’s narrator explained that such texts were properly classified as belonging specifically to the “stage itinerant,” along with mountebanks’ performances:


Under the Stage-Itinerant are couched those Productions designed for the Pleasure and Delight of Mortal Man; such as, Six-peny-worth of Wit, Westminster Drolleries, Delightful Tales, Compleat Jesters, and the like; by which the Writers of and for Grub-Street, have in these latter Ages so nobly triumph’d over Time. . . . It is under this Classis, I have presumed to list my present Treatise, being just come from having the Honor conferred upon me, to be adopted a member of that Illustrious fraternity.44

By identifying the Grub Street “fraternity” with the stage itinerant, Swift’s narrator suggested that hack writers shared the same mercenary purposes and sensational performing style as the mountebanks whose fly-by-night work required a movable stage.45 At the same time, Swift gave his own satiric performance, impersonating a literary “mounte-bank” in order to parody the moral and aesthetic failings identified with hack writing.46

Similarly, in the Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris (1713), Pope used the persona of the quack doctor as a means of ridiculing the hot-headed literary critic John Dennis.47 Presented as the testimony of a discredited physician, the Narrative defended Dr. Norris’s actions in his encounter with one “Mr. John Denn”—a patient whom he had been summoned to examine, and in the treatment of whose “exceeding hot” temperament he had been obliged to “make use of force.”48 As a result of the ensuing altercation, Norris explained, the furious Dennis had spread rumors “that I enter’d into his Room . . . either out of a Design to deprive him of his Life, or of a new Play called Coriolanus,” “that I was an Accomplice with his Bookseller, who visited him with Intent to take away divers valuable Manuscripts, without paying him Copy-Money,” and “that I am no Graduate Physician, and that he had seen me upon a Mountebank Stage in Moorfields.”49 Much like Swift’s Tale, Pope’s text aligned the voice of the hack writer with that of the mountebank, linking the charges of quackery and plagiarism. By adopting the voice of the shady Dr. Norris, Pope was able to parody both medical and literary malpractice, exposing the mountebank’s au-thority as a pose while also taking aim at a literary opponent. If the principal purpose of literary criticism was, in Pope’s view, diagnostic, then the Narrative offered a fantasy of reversal, empowering the artist to diagnose as mental illness the fury of his severest critic.

Perhaps the most flamboyant mountebank impersonation of all was that of the Earl of Rochester, who played the part of the quack not only on paper, but also in costumed reality. fleeing arrest and

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possible trial for murder in 1676, Rochester disguised himself as a quack doctor named Alexander Bendo and began selling his wares on Tower Hill. He quickly attained a popular following, offering free medical advice and selling remedies concocted from urine, asafoetida, and other noxious substances.50 At the same time as he evaded the law and hoodwinked the public, Rochester also satirized the court, publishing a mock advertisement in which he aligned politics and government with quackery.51 Alexander Bendo’s Brochure observed that both the mountebank and the politician recognize “how the people are taken with specious, miraculous, impossibilities,” and promise things that “can ne’er be brought about”; “So you see the Politician is, and must be a Mountebank in State Affairs; and the Mountebank (no doubt if he thrives) is an errant Politician in Physick.”52 Bendo’s advertisement simultaneously criticized, and acknowledged complicity in, society’s moral ills, hinting suggestively, for example, at the doc-tor’s possession of a “great secret to cure barrenness.” By offering his questionable “services” as a means of treating various ills, Bendo’s Brochure mocked a credulous public while also exposing various figures of authority—literary, political, medical—as confidence men.53

The Satire-as-Medicine Commonplace in Context

As the many examples I have touched on should suggest, Resto-ration and early-eighteenth-century references to the satire-as-medicine commonplace were both extensive and diverse, as writers varied their use of the trope not only by figuring the relationship between satire and medicine in different ways (satire as physician, satirist as physi-cian, satirist as patient, satire as prescription or cure), but also by destabilizing or refuting the alignment of medical and satiric practices. The remarkable flexibility of the satire-as-medicine commonplace—its ability to stand in for a wide variety of different concepts or debates—helps explain the trope’s longevity within satiric literature and literary criticism. Throughout the Restoration and eighteenth century, the link between satire and medicine served not only as a means by which satirists were able to validate their own work or clear themselves of charges of bias, but also as a vehicle for exploring broader concerns about the state of contemporary politics, commerce, or learning.

for some writers, the satire-as-medicine trope offered an avenue for expressing fears that the practices of medicine and those of litera-ture (and particularly, panegyric and satiric literature) were changing


for similar reasons, and in similar ways. The growth of commerce, for example, had strongly affected both the medical and literary worlds: an expanding array of medical practices and practitioners emerged to meet the increasing demand for treatment.54 Equally, literature was becoming a profitable line of business, with writers-for-hire catering to the demands of a larger, and more diverse, body of readers.55 As commercial writers and medical professionals exploited the increasingly lucrative markets for their wares, satirists attacked prominent figures in both fields for subjugating their profession’s higher moral purposes to a selfish desire for material gain.

In works like Garth’s Dispensary (1699), for example, the satire-as-medicine commonplace provided a means of critiquing both mercenary writers and for-profit physicians. Written in the context of the Royal College of Physicians’ decision to open a free dispensary for the poor, Garth’s poem dramatized as a mock-epic battle the conflict between two opposed camps of college members: the “Society Physicians,” who supported the creation of the dispensary, and the “Apothecaries Physicians,” who opposed the venture as a threat to their profits. In the preface to the 1718 edition of the poem, Garth explicitly identified his satire as treatment for a profession that had itself grown “sick,” and the poem’s speaker repeatedly attributes the current dis-ease within the College to a shift from altruistic to commercial medicine.56

Writing as both a physician and a satirist, Garth questioned the commercialization of literature as well as of medicine, and the poem frequently aligns physicians engaged in “Mercenary Projects” with hack writers.57 Not only do the Apothecaries Physicians count a hack poet (Blackmore) among their number; they also make their money, at least in part, by scribbling. As the villainous Mirmillo declares when rousing the dispensary’s opponents to battle, “Physicians, if they’re wise, shou’d never think / Of any other Arms than Pen and Ink.”58 By aligning the writing of profitable prescriptions with the writing of hack literature, the Dispensary incorporated the satire-as-medicine trope into a broader attack on the commercialization of learning.

Pope’s Epistle to Arbuthnot similarly invokes the satire-as-medicine commonplace to denounce the desire for personal gain, but its critique focuses more narrowly on the distinction between literature written for altruistic purposes and literature written with the intention of securing wealth or fame.59 While the evolution of a competitive marketplace might legitimately be seen as a threat to all literature, commercialization and party politics seemed particularly to compromise the “therapeutic” purposes of satire and its sister genre, panegyric, as hack writers were

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tempted to exploit a growing market demand for bespoke flattery or slander. As a defense of Pope’s own satiric principles, the Epistle sought to highlight these moral and literary concerns. The poem draws on the familiar satire-as-medicine trope in order to defend disinterested satiric literature as curative; at the same time, it attacks mercenary writing as a kind of infectious disease.

Structured as a kind of epistolary conversation between Pope and his more cautious friend, the Epistle celebrates the connection between satire and medicine that would have been embodied by the poem’s addressee, the physician and poet John Arbuthnot.60 In addition to reaffirming the conventional links between morally elevated satire and social medicine, however, Pope’s account also champions satire as a form of therapy for the writer:

The Muse but served to ease some friend, not wife, To help me through this long disease, my life,To second, Arbuthnot! thy art and care,And teach, the being you preserved, to bear.61

Here purgative satire and professional medicine are presented as complementary forms of therapy, with both treatments contrasted against—and perhaps used as antidotes to—the infectious mania of hack writing: in the famous opening lines of the poem, Pope compares his mercenary contemporaries to escapees from Bedlam, lamenting the vast number of fame-hungry writers who “rave, recite, and madden round the land.”62

At the same time as writers like Garth and Pope used the satire-as-medicine commonplace to explore (or, more commonly, denounce) commercialization, other writers adapted the trope to express related concerns about professional prestige, including the problem of dis-tinguishing between “learned” and “lay” medicine, high” and “low” art.63 The comparison between satire and medicine offered different opportunities for exploring issues of status; some writers linked profes-sional medicine with satire-as-high-art, while others employed satiric wit to question the rising power and prestige of ostensibly “learned” physicians. fielding’s novels, for example, interrogated professional medicine by depicting physicians and surgeons as stock figures of social and intellectual pretension.64 In Joseph Andrews, a work that explicitly identifies “affectation” as the chief butt of its satire, Fielding targets not only the social pretentions of Mrs. Slipslop, but also the intellectual pretentions of the surgeon summoned to treat the injured


Joseph. Keen to establish his own importance, the surgeon not only exaggerates the severity of his patient’s injury; he also delivers his diagnosis in a convoluted mixture of ostentatious Latin phrases and impenetrable medical jargon: “The Contusion on his Head has perfo-rated the Internal membrane of the Occiput, and divellicated that radical small minute invisible Nerve, which coheres to the Pericranium; and this was attended with a Fever at first symptomatick, then pneumatick, and he is at length grown deliruus, or delirious, as the Vulgar express it.”65 Like Mrs. Slipslop’s vocabulary of malapropisms, the surgeon’s convoluted language—the means by which he seeks to demonstrate his intellectual superiority to his audience—ironically becomes the very means by which his real inferiority of mind is exposed.

Similarly, the medical practitioners who appear in fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) seem designed to prompt readers into questioning the prevailing conception of medical knowledge as a marker of elite intellectual status. When two doctors—the generically named “Dr. y.” and “Dr. Z.”—are “fee’d at one and the same instant” to attend on Captain Blifil, their dispute over the cause of the captain’s death sug-gests that the practice of medical diagnosis is as dependent on the individual physician’s whims as on his store of medical knowledge:

To say the truth, every physician, almost, hath his favourite disease, to which he ascribes all the victories obtained over human nature. The gout, the rheumatism, the stone, the gravel, and the consumption have all their several patrons in the faculty; and none more than the nervous fever, or the fever on the spirits. And here we may account for those disagreements in opinion, concerning the cause of a patient’s death, which sometimes occur between the most learned of the college, and which have greatly surprised that part of the world who have been ignorant of the fact we have above asserted.66

Like the surgeon’s unwittingly ironic reference to “the Vulgar” in Jo-seph Andrews, the narrator’s distinction between “learned” physicians and “ignorant” laypeople ultimately serves to undermine, rather than validate, medical practitioners’ claims to intellectual superiority.

More broadly, we might usefully consider the satire-as-medicine commonplace as a forum for examining the major philosophical issues of the period, including the mind-body problem and the relationship between material and spiritual realms. After all, the practice of medicine was becoming increasingly “material” not only in its commercialization, but also in its gradual acceptance of empirical philosophy.67 Although

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most people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continued to draw connections between morality and health, many learned medi-cal practitioners were reconsidering the belief that illnesses were the result of temperamental or behavioral failings.68 Privileging sensory observation and clinical experience over ancient medical theories, these early medical professionals began to focus more narrowly on the body as itself the best means of diagnosing and treating forms of disease.69 Physicians like Herman Boerhaave, for example, effectively narrowed the scope of medicine to physiology alone by contending “that the body of man was a machine,” and thus, that bodily health was “purely mechanical.”70

Much like the tensions between “high” and “low,” or between “learned” and “unlearned,” then, the tensions between spiritual and material approaches to human health might be presented as either reaffirming or destabilizing the satire-as-medicine trope. On the one hand, scientific and satiric diagnoses might be seen as complementary: in Pope’s Epistle to Arbuthnot, as we have seen, satiric catharsis is presented as a therapeutic accompaniment to conventional medicine. On the other hand, shifting views of the relationship between bodily, mental, and moral states could undermine the basis of the satire-as-medicine commonplace, throwing the link between the satirist and the physician, or the definitions of satire or medicine as therapeutic, into doubt. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy—a novel that derives much of its comedy from attempts by physicians and others to find simple mate-rial solutions to larger philosophical problems—might be read as an exploration of exactly these issues.71 Tristram’s traumatized homunculus and crushed nose, his accidental circumcision, his interest in baptism in utero, his attraction to the fantasy of Momus’s glass: all these elements in the narration might be understood as contributing to the work’s broader satire on our common human need to search for some simple, straightforward link between spiritual and material experience. The character of Dr. Slop, championing medical advances like the forceps as quick-fix solutions to the problems of life, becomes, in this reading of the novel, a quixotic figure. His faith in the materiality of modern medicine suggests that perhaps for Sterne, as for fielding, the “type” of the modern doctor was an irresistible target for satire.72

Ultimately, then, we might consider seventeenth- and eighteenth-century references to the satire-as-medicine commonplace in relation to a wide range of social, political, economic, and aesthetic concerns. While there is insufficient space here to survey all of the ways in which early modern satiric and medical practices intersect, it is worth


observing that this trope can be located on the fault lines of a num-ber of important cultural divides: between the arts and the sciences, between the ancients and the moderns, between the learned and the vulgar, and between the spiritual and the material. for satirists who understood the practices of medicine and literature as aligned, medicine and medical practitioners could be used as symbols of, or stand-ins for, the literary world. for satirists who saw, or wished to create, a division between literature and medicine, medical practices and practitioners could be held up as objects of ridicule. Regardless of whether they were cast as complementary therapies or prescribed as alternative models of treatment, the “harsh Remedies” of both satire and medicine played a key role in shaping the English satiric tradition, throughout the long eighteenth century and beyond.

NOTES

I would like to thank Ian Burney for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

1. for Dryden’s remarks in full, see Dryden, Works, 2:5.2. Randolph, “The Medical Concept,” 125–57. John f. Sena has examined

the concept of the satirist-as-physician in relation to Smollett’s Humphry Clinker in “Smollett’s Matthew Bramble,” 380–96.

3. Randolph, 126.4. By emphasizing the medical metaphor here, I do not mean to suggest that

it was the only such critical commonplace used in satiric theory. Another promi-nent trope characterized satire as a looking-glass. See, for example, Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 140; fielding, Joseph Andrews, 189; Kelly, Thespis, 4; The Mirror, 3; Theophilus Swift, The Temple of Folly, xii.

5. for summaries of this view, see Porter, Disease, Medicine, and Society, 24–26; Lindemann, Medicine and Society, 9–10.

6. On the link between illnesses and individual identity, see Porter and Porter, In Sickness and in Health.

7. See Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 154–209. 8. On the broad range of medical theories and treatments, see King, The

Medical World, 1–58; Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 78–82; Porter and Porter, Patient’s Progress. On the relationship between mind, morals, and body, see Porter and Porter, In Sickness and in Health, 60–75; Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 178–84 and 281–88.

9. See Porter and Porter, In Sickness and in Health, 21–42; Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 178–84.

10. Blackmore, Prince Arthur, 2v. 11. Tate, Characters of Vertue and Vice, A2r.12. Dryden, Works, 4:55.13. D’Urfey, Scandalum magnatum, 8; see also the prologue to Dryden, Albion

and Albanius: “Satire was once your physic, wit your food: / One nourish’d not, and t’other drew no blood. / We now prescribe, like doctors in despair, / The diet your weak appetites can bear” (c2r).

14. Emes, Letter to a Gentleman, 5. for other descriptions of satire as a “cure” or remedy, see, for example, Newcomb, The Manners of the Age, 586–87; Harwood, “To the Worthy Author,” A6r-v.

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15. See, for example, Whyte, “A Burlesque Upon Musick,” in Poems, 215; Brownsword, Laugh and Lye Down; A Wipe for Iter-Boreale Wilde; A Pill to Purge State-Melancholy.

16. On the distinction between physicians and surgeons, see Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 210–74; Christopher Lawrence, “Democratic, Divine and Heroic,” 1–47.

17. Dryden, 4:71–72; this edition translates Ense rescindendum as “it must be cut off with the sword” (4.573).

18. On the range of medical practitioners in this period, see Porter, Disease, Medicine and Society, 18–20; Porter and Porter, Patient’s Progress, 208–09.

19. Dryden, Works, 4.75. See also Dacier: “those, who do not endeavour to correct themselvs [sic] by so beautiful a Model, are just like sick Men, who having a Book full of Receipts, proper to their Distempers, content themselves to read ’em,/ without comprehending them, or so much as knowing the Advantage of them” (E6r-v).

20. Scroope, “In Defence of Satire,” 1:115.21. See Jewson, “Medical Knowledge and the Patronage System,” 369–85.22. See Sloan, English Medicine, 59. 23. On the importance of purging corrupted or putrified matter, see Wear,

Knowledge and Practice, 136-43; McMaster, “The Body Inside the Skin,” 281. 24. Newbery, Poetry Made Familiar and Easy, 131. Amending these words

somewhat, an early American encyclopedia described satire as curing “by bitter and unsavoury, or by pleasant and salutary, applications” (Encyclopaedia, 15:249).

25. Johnson, Dictionary. See also Allen, Complete English Dictionary. 26. for examples of such language, see Denis, Select Fables, 326; Dryden,

Works, 2:59, 4:62, 4:63, 4:65, 4:68, 4:79; A Letter to a Friend in the Country, 10–11; fortescue, Dissertations, Essays, and Discourses, 209.

27. Dryden, 4.71. Dryden’s reference to Jack Ketch—the executioner famous for taking eight fumbling strokes to complete the decapitation of the Duke of Monmouth—adds an extra layer of complexity to his metaphor here, as it suggests that the satirist’s focus should not be on executing with precision, but rather on executing in such a way as to cause the greatest pain to the victim.

28. falconer, Ode, 6. 29. Spirit and Unanimity, 28.30. Merit, 3. See also A Letter to a Friend in the Country, 10–11; The Modern

Englishman, 6; The Neuter, B1r; Newcomb, A Supplement, 10. 31. for descriptions of satirists performing such tasks, see, for example, “To

Mr. Pope, By a Lady,” xiv; Harwood, “To the worthy Authour,” A6r-v.32. On Pope’s “poisoning” of Curll, see Pope’s own satiric pamphlet, “A full

and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison On the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll,” in Prose Works 1:257–66; for subsequent discussions of this episode in literary history, see Baines and Rogers, Edmund Curll, 80–85; Mack, Al-exander Pope, 295–301. I am grateful to Tom Keymer for the suggestion that young’s remark may refer to this incident.

33. young, Conjectures on Original Composition, 97–98. young’s statement was frequently quoted in subsequent texts, suggesting that it struck a chord with many readers. See, for example, Anecdotes of Polite Literature, 2:74–75 and Biographia Britannica, 1:55.

34. See, for example, Neville, Remarks, 565. 35. The use of the term “scourge” in this context was so commonplace as

to render citations hardly necessary. Among the texts cited elsewhere in this essay, see, for example, A Letter to a Friend in the Country, 10-11; The Modern Englishman, 6; The Neuter, B1r; Newcomb, A Supplement, 10; falconer, Ode, 6; “To Mr. Pope,” xiv; entries for “to lash” in Johnson’s and Allen’s dictionaries; Denis, Select Fables, 326; fortescue, Dissertations, Essays, and Discourses, 209.

36. See, for example, Dryden, 4.35–36; 4.63; Harwood, “To the Worthy Au-thor,” A6r; Cooper, Observations on the Present Taste for Poetry, 5, 38; “Introduction


to the English translation,” A2r-v. Sena characterizes the physician-satirist as a man of acute physical or moral sensitivity, whose exposure to moral ills causes him to fall prey to disease or debility himself. See “Smollett’s Matthew Bramble,” 380–96.

37. On the slippery distinctions between physicians and quacks in the eigh-teenth century, see Loudon, “The Vile Race of Quacks,” 106–28; Porter, Quacks; Porter, Health for Sale.

38. Newcomb, A Supplement, 7. R-ck and M-rg-n are de-anonymized as Rock and Morgan and cynically described as “Two famous Quacks” in the footnotes to the 1739 Dublin edition; Haines is listed as “Printer of the Craftsman.”

39. Newcomb, A Supplement, 12. 40. Newcomb, “Danvers and Moore,” 29–33. 41. Sedley, “Upon the Author,” 1:103. for Garth’s caricature of Blackmore, see

The Dispensary (1699), canto 4, lines 172–91. Subsequent references to this edition are by canto and line number.

42. I am using the term “mountebank” here in its original sense, as referring specifically to “An itinerant charlatan who sold supposed medicines and remedies.” See meaning 1a. in the Oxford English Dictionary Online.

43. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 34. 44. Ibid., 38.45. A similar comparison appears in Dennis, Iphigenia: “I find it is the daily

practice of our Empiricks in Poetry to turn our two Theatres into downright Mountebanks Stages, to treat Aristotle and Horace with as contemptuous arrogance, as our Medicinal Quacks do Galen and the great Hippocrates” (A4r).

46. four years later, Swift assumed the voice of another dubious man of science, Isaac Bickerstaff, in order to parody the astrologer and quack physician John Partridge. See Bickerstaff Papers, 140–64.

47. Pope, Prose Works, 1:155–68.48. Ibid., 1:164.49. Ibid., 1:167.50. Rochester’s period as Alexander Bendo is well documented by the Earl’s

many biographers, from Gilbert Burnet onwards. See, for example, Goldsworthy, The Satyr, 200–203; Greene, Lord Rochester’s Monkey, 108-113; Lamb, So Idle a Rogue, 178–82; Pinto, An Enthusiast in Wit, 81-90.

51. On Alexander Bendo’s bill as a political satire, see Combe, A Martyr for Sin, 124-31; Bourne, “If I Appear to Any One Like a Counterfeit,” 3–17; Thormälen, Rochester, 154–55.

52. Wilmot, “Alexander Bendo’s Brochure,” 114.53. The notorious satire that led to Rochester’s earlier expulsion from the

court in 1673 was also (erroneously) known as “A Satire on the King, for which he was banished the Court, and turned Mountebank.” See The Works of the Earls of Rochester, Roscommon, and Dorset, 1:81; Lamb, So Idle a Rogue, 114–15; Greene, Lord Rochester’s Monkey, 108.

54. On the medical marketplace of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Porter and Porter, Patient’s Progress; Holmes, Augustan England, 166–205; Cook, 28–69; Jenner and Wallis, “The Medical Marketplace,” 1–23.

55. On the rise of a literary marketplace, see Rogers, Grub Street; Raven, Judging New Wealth, 19-82; Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson, 213–70; feather, The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth Century England. On the links between the literary and medical marketplaces, see Porter and Porter, Patient’s Progress, 110; fissell, “The Marketplace of Print,” 108–32.

56. Garth, Dispensary (1718), a1v; for examples of the poem’s critique of mercenary medicine, see the 1699 edition, 1:3–4 and 1:63–66.

57. Garth, Dispensary (1699), 2:93.58. Ibid., 4:70–71. 59. See Pope, Imitations of Horace. Subsequent references to the epistle are by

line number and use this edition.

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60. Several critics have remarked on the use of medical language or rhetoric in the epistle. See, for example, Knoepflmacher, “The Poet as Physician,” 440–49; Douglass, “More on the Rhetoric and Imagery of Pope’s Arbuthnot,” 488–502.

61. Pope, Imitations of Horace, 131–34. 62. Ibid., 6. 63. On the changing status of learned medical professionals, see Wear, Knowl-

edge and Practice, 21–29; Holmes, Augustan England, 206-35; Cook, Decline of the Old Medical Regime. Cook’s account complicates Holmes’s narrative of advancement, arguing that while learned medical practitioners gained in social prestige, the col-lege of physicians as a body lost much of its power.

64. Trainor speculates on fielding’s opinion of doctors in “Doctors in field-ing’s fiction,” 111–16.

65. fielding, Joseph Andrews, 63. A similar scene appears in Tom Jones, with a jargon-happy surgeon called to attend to the wounded Tom: see fielding, Tom Jones, 1:380–81.

66. fielding, Tom Jones, 1:112.67. See Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 472–73. 68. Lindemann, Medicine and Society, 75–76.69. On the developments in medicine during the late seventeenth and eigh-

teenth centuries, see King, Road to Medical Enlightenment; Sloan, English Medicine in the Seventeenth Century, 70–90, 170–77; Lindemann, Medicine and Society, 101; Law-rence, Charitable Knowledge; foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. Andew Wear usefully notes that the commercial need to attract patients effectually transcended many of the shifts or tensions between competing medical theories. See Wear, “Medical Practice,” 294–320.

70. King, Road to Medical Enlightenment, 68. On the mechanical model more generally, see King, The Philosophy of Medicine, 95–124; Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 472–73. It is worth observing that historians of medicine continue to dispute the degree to which mechanical theories actually affected medical practice.

71. Rodgers, by contrast, convincingly argues that we might align Sterne’s approach to the novel with contemporary physiologists’ approach to human life. See “‘Life’ in the Novel,” 1–20.

72. Many critics have explored the theme of medicine in Tristram Shandy. See, for example, Porter, “‘The whole secret of health,’” 61–84; Rodgers, “Sensibility, Sympathy, Benevolence,” 117–58; Hawley, “The Anatomy of Tristram Shandy,” 84–100.

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