ENGLISH

Samuel Johnson in the Medical World: The Doctor and the Patient

By John Wiltshire

Book information

Year
1991
ISBN
0521383269, 9780521383264, 0521022282, 9780521022286, 9780511597640
LCC
PR3537.M4 W54 1990
Open Library ID
OL1850204M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
5 MB (5704062 bytes)
Pages
303\303
Topic
Medicine
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

Samuel Johnson has become known to posterity in two capacities: through his own works as the great literary essayist of the eighteenth century, and through Boswell's Life, as a man--notoriously a medical patient with a string of physical and psychological ailments. John Wiltshire brings the two together in this original study of Johnson the writer as "doctor" and patient. The subject of modern medical historians' case studies, Johnson also cultivated the acquaintance of doctors in his own day, and was himself a "dabbler in physic." Dr. Wiltshire illuminates Johnson's life and work by setting them in their medical context and also examines the importance of medical themes in Johnson's own writings. He discusses the many parts of Johnson's work touching on doctors, medicine, hospitals and medical experimentation, and analyzes the central theme, running throughout, of human suffering--in body and mind--and its alleviation.

Similar books