Smith, Adam James ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3938-4836 (2023) ‘We now prescribe, like doctors in despair’: The Satirist-as-Doctor Metaphor in Early Eighteenth-Century Print. In: Lawlor, Clark and Blackwood, Ashleigh, (eds.) Rewriting Medicine: Healthcare, Literature, Culture, 1660-1831. Cambridge University Press (Submitted)

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Abstract

When Dryden writes that the ‘true’ satirist is ‘no more an Enemy to the offender than the Physician to the Patient, when he prescribes harsh remedies to an inveterate disease’, he is participating in what Mary Claire Randolph has termed the ‘medical model of satire.’ This figurative conception of satire, which compares satirists to physicians and their satire to medicine, appeared across a wide range of early modern texts. Randolph, and subsequently Noelle Gallagher, trace this model back to a point where medical theories saw a correlation between physical ailments and moral failings. In such a context, Gallagher argues, the remit of satire – which according to Dryden was the ‘scourging of vice, and exhortation of virtue’ – proved ‘not just moral, but medical.’ Though this came to be understood less literally, the figure of the satirist retained a metaphorical association with the physician in the eighteenth century and, as public understanding and scepticism regarding both medicine and satire grew and proliferated, so too did the ways this metaphor of satirist-as-doctor was used and critiqued.
Andrew Benjamin Bricker has observed that arguments over the nature and function of satire reached fever pitch during the early decades of the eighteenth century. Both sides of this debate ‘antagonistically argued [that] satirists were [either] high-minded public moralists or they were vindictive lampooners.’ At the same time, comparable debates plagued the medical professions, with E M Papper writing that during the eighteenth century few professions were ‘subjected to so wide a variety and so frequent an occurrence of satirical attacks as medicine.’ In the case of both medicine and satire, public scepticism circled questions relating to the relationship between personal profit, public duty and professional integrity.
This chapter will survey a variety of instances in which the satirist was positioned as a physician, primarily in the work of Dryden, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, to argue that language associated with medical practitioners offered satirists a means of disambiguating between different modes of satire, of asserting their own professionalism and of discrediting that of their rivals.

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	Submitted
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain > DA430-463 Later Stuarts D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain > DA498-503 1714-1760 P Language and Literature > PE English
School/Department:	School of Humanities
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/8311

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