The body in Swift and Defoe

Did Johnson possess real medical learning and understanding or merely a standard smattering of information? The issue has been much debated. Wiltshire persuasively argues the former. He shows, especially by examination of Johnson's correspondence, that he possessed a clear grasp of Boerhaavian iatromechanism. Johnson's considerable faith in venesection followed from such physiological principles, as well as from personal experience of benefit (he attested that bleeding relieved his bronchial troubles), and a psychological urge for visible action when in pain. His continued experimentation with squills to remedy his dropsy (often going well beyond the advice of his physicians) was likewise based upon careful consideration of his own medical experience (on one occasion, their use provoked a spectacular evacuation of urine). And Johnson could also be a rational sceptic in respect of the received wisdom, for instance discounting the popular notion of gout as a prophylactic (he found his asthma did not remit during bouts of gout). Wiltshire is surely right to suggest that the medical protocols of the eighteenth century afforded room for a respectful partnership between the professional physician such as Heberden, with his unmatched clinical practice, and the active sufferer such as Johnson, possessed of unique insight into his own particular case. This is a well-written book, free ofjargon, but full of perceptive observations ("as is the case with most people who suffer from chronic illness", Wiltshire observes, "friendship and therapy, of various kinds, became deeply intertwined"). No cranky ideesfixes are pursued, while much light is shed, through exploration of Johnson's attitudes towards sickness and suffering, upon his religion, his moralism, and his fictional world. This volume stands alongside Marjorie Hope Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau's This Long Disease My Life: Alexander Pope and the sciences (1968) as our best medical biography of a Georgian patient and writer.