Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900 (review)

In earlier books, the late Roy Porter has reviewed the British medical world of the long eighteenth century: the relations of patients with their physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, specialists, quacks, and other members of the medical fringe; the social position of these practitioners; concepts of illness, disease, and death; and the varieties of therapeutic procedures. Now he has returned once more to this period, enlarging it to the years between 1650 and 1900, emphasizing the visual record along with the written and the interplay between the two, and stressing the reinforcement of verbal with visual forms. The 137 images (39 in color), interspersed with Porter's zestful text, provide a well-balanced study of the years when William Hogarth, James Gillray (see figure), Thomas Rowlandson, and the three Cruikshanks joined with poets, novelists, and literary critics in creating a noteworthy cultural age.

The political body is one of several themes around which the argument of Bodies Politic is arranged. Three others concern the grotesque, monstrous body; the healthy, beautiful body; and the diseased body. To these are added discussions on patients; practitioners, both regular and irregular; and "professional problems," a diffuse category covering conflicts between physicians and patients and the less heroic aspects of medical practice. Certain of these groupings— politics, criticisms of practitioners, disease, and death—have routinely been of interest to artists, and consequently are rich in imagery; others, such as the healthy body and profiles of physicians, provide fewer gripping examples. The illustrations in the chapter on physicians are primarily portraits, considerably less lively an assemblage than images of patients, where stock figures such as the hypochondriac, the railer against the profession, and the woebegone valetudinarian predominate.

Porter dwells on the variety of ways in which artists have depicted disease, from direct representation (e.g., Hogarth's 1772 engraving of the Pool of Bethesda) to caricature personification (such as Rowlandson's 1778 etching Ague and Fever). Imps and other tiny creatures provide the torment in four early-nineteenth-century engravings of colic, headache, indigestion, and depression by George Cruikshank; and a formidable monster does the same in James Gillray's iconic The Gout of 1799. One of the more lively prints on disease is James West's engraving An Address of Thanks from the Faculty to the Right Hon_ble, Mr. Influenzy, for his Kind Visit to this Country (1803), in which a grotesque, emaciated, partially nude influenza receives the homage of nine identified physicians, including William Pitt's doctor Sir Walter Farquhar and the well-known Thomas Beddoes.

Political caricature, an area in which eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British artists excelled, used medical metaphors consistently, and Bodies Politic covers this provocative ground in detail. Ideas came easily: the "constitution" refers to both the nation and the healthy body; "solutions" are prescribed by the politician and resolve political problems; difficulties are overcome by "purges" as these are taken by mouth; clysters and enemas proliferate. Certain conventions are quickly grasped—bleeding for taxation, dissection for political ruthlessness, insanity and madness for political foes. In all these prints no one under the physician's care ever improves. Perhaps the medical theme reached its apogee during the long political career of Henry Addington, prime minister between two Pitt administrations early in the nineteenth century and later, as Lord Sidmouth, home secretary during the divorce proceedings of George IV: Addington appeared in more than 130 prints as physician, surgeon, apothecary, or, not surprisingly, quack.

A final chapter on Victorian developments brings matters to more recent times, and shows the more genteel manner in which medical matters were treated by the artists of Punch, who in 1841 veered away from the biting satire of their predecessors. These years saw the growing use of graphic imagery to market proprietary medicines, and Porter includes one...