1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910975064803321

Autore

Ingram Allan

Titolo

Swift, Pope and the Doctors : Medicine and Writing in the Early Eighteenth Century / Allan Ingram

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Paderborn, : Brill | Fink, 2022

ISBN

3-8467-6689-5

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (238 pages)

Disciplina

809.933561

Soggetti

Krankheit

Gesundheit

Hypochonder

Pottsche Krankheit

Gullivers Reisen

The Dunciad

Gulliver's Travels

Literatur

Literature and illness

Health perspective

Medical mockery

Diagnosing mediocrity

Literary medication

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Sommario/riassunto

This book explores the impacts, particularly on their writing, of the serious illnesses of Swift and Pope, alongside their respective understandings of health issues and within their period context. Both Swift and Pope spent most of their lives suffering from serious illness, Ménière’s Disease (Swift) and Pott’s Disease (Pope). This was at a time when medical understanding of these conditions was minimal. This book examines the effects of illness on each writer’s relations with doctors, treatment, and medicine more widely, and how far and in what ways their own experiences affected their writing. The book explains



the contemporary medical context and subsequent specialist knowledge of the illnesses, and places each alongside both writers’ attempts to come to terms with their suffering, not least with respect to the different forms and styles of their works. Each writer’s extensive correspondence is drawn on, as well as a range of texts.