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Masculinity and the Male Experience in English and Scottish Medicine C.1640-C.1780

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Masculinity and the Male Experience in English and Scottish Medicine C.1640-C.1780 Durham E-Theses (The) man, his body, and his society: masculinity and the male experience in English and Scottish medicine c.1640-c.1780. MONTGOMERY, ALISON How to cite: MONTGOMERY, ALISON (2011) (The) man, his body, and his society: masculinity and the male experience in English and Scottish medicine c.1640-c.1780. , Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3452/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 Alison Montgomery (The) man, his body, and his society: masculinity and the male experience in English and Scottish medicine c.1640-c.1780. Abstract This thesis examines the relationship(s) between medicine, the body and societal codes of masculinity in England and Scotland between c.1640 and c.1780. It responds to the way in which the men in histories of post-1660 masculinity are often disembodied, and to the comparative absence of men’s gendered experiences from the history of medicine. Its findings show that in both centuries the experience of being a man with a body that was the site of health and sickness was an open, candid, and often communal, one, inside and outside of the formal medical encounter. Thus, and on both sides of 1700, ill men had full freedom in the pursuit and acceptance of medical, familial and social assistance, while their physical suffering, and associated emotional distress, was met with sympathy. With their sick bodies the sites of honest self-examination and open discussion, it was in part this very public nature of their sicknesses that allowed men, as a gender and as individuals, independence and agency in their non-commercial health care. Indeed, later-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century men suffered no constraints in their ability to respond to the vulnerabilities of their bodies, even where this involved behaviours or attributes allegedly associated with women and femininity, or inconsistent with ideals of active, independent, masculinity. These findings indicate, therefore, great continuity across the period 1640-1780, and not only in masculine ideals of and involving the male corporeality. There seems to have been significant consistency across time in men’s social and medical experiences of both sickness and their pre-emptive preparation for it, and in an apparent collective self- confidence concerning their corporeal masculinity, their sex, and, possibly, even their sexual potential. Indeed, these sources suggest that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century men had a resilient sense of self-identity (and personal masculinity), conceptually separable from the corporeal body and its known fragilities. i (The) man, his body, and his society: masculinity and the male experience in English and Scottish medicine c.1640-c.1780. Alison Montgomery PhD History Department Durham University 2011 ii Contents List of Tables iv List of Abbreviations v Acknowledgements vii Chapter one: Introduction: ‘Made not born’? Bodies, being male, 1 and the masculine experience in English and Scottish medicine c.1640-c.1780 Chapter two: The male and the man in published medical writing 31 Chapter three: Problematic male organs 77 Chapter four: Masculinity in imaginings of male sickness 124 Chapter five: The bodily costs of living as men 171 Chapter six: Masculinity and taking care of the body 217 Chapter seven: The sick man 265 Chapter eight: Conclusion 307 Appendix A note on medical records and statistics 330 Bibliography 348 iii List of tables Table 4.1 Diagnoses given to apparently adult males in London 127 by Joseph Binns, c.1633-c.1663 Table 4.2 Diagnoses given to apparently adult males in London 129 by Sir Edmund King, c.1668-c.1684 Table 4.3 Diagnoses given to males at London’s Westminster 131 Infirmary, 1723-1724 Table 4.4 Diagnoses given to apparently adult males in the West 132 Riding of Yorkshire by Joshua Firth, November 1727-July 1728 Table 4.5 Signs and symptoms named in letters about sick men 139 sent to Sir Hans Sloane, 1681-1741 Table 4.6 Ascribed or proposed causes of male sickness in letters 151 sent to Sir Hans Sloane, 1681-1741 Table 4.7 Ascribed or proposed behavioural causes of male 153 sickness in letters sent to Sir Hans Sloane, 1681-1741 Table 5.1 Male causes of death in Suffolk coroner verdicts, 181 1767-1800 Table 5.2 Causes of adult male injuries in Joseph Binns's 198 ‘Chirurgical Observations’, c.1633-c.1663 Table 5.3 Male patients with severe venereal cases in Joseph 209 Binns's ‘Chirurgical Observations’, c.1633-c.1663 Table 6.1 Origins of the contents of male-compiled manuscript 242 recipe collections, as a percentage of attributed medical information of domestic use Table 6.2 Content of male-authored recipe collections, as a 248 percentage of medical entries iv List of abbreviations BL British Library, St Pancras, London CL Chetham’s Library, Manchester DUL Durham University Library Special Collections NAS National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh NLS National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh WL Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine, London RCP Royal College of Physicians of London, London RCPSG Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow RCS Royal College of Surgeons of England, London Spelling is modernized throughout and all years given as starting on 1 January. Unless otherwise stated, all places of publication are London. v The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. vi Acknowledgements With many thanks to my supervisors, Chris Brooks and Cathy McClive, and to my examiners. I am also very grateful to Joanne Bailey, Karen Harvey, Richard Maber, Lisa Smith and Margaret Pelling for their generous and much appreciated advice, and to Joanne Bailey and Helen King for the opportunity to consult forthcoming and unpublished works. Particular thanks are offered to Adrian Wilson for five years of advice, suggestions, and friendship. vii Chapter 1: ‘Made not born’? Bodies, being male, and the masculine experience in English and Scottish medicine c.1640-c.1780 This study examines men with bodies, the bodies that they lived with, and the relationships existing between men’s bodies and their masculine identities and anxieties. Although recognizing that the distinction between the individual and the body is itself a site of historiographical contention, it focuses on men as social players, and on the body as that fleshy corporeality that such individuals had or owned (if such a relationship can, indeed, be termed one of ownership). It does so because the men featuring in many studies of post-Restoration masculinity are comparatively disembodied. The ideals they sought to attain are not ones rooted in contemporary understandings of the male corporeality, elevating a certain type of body, making gendered requirements of the flesh, or having physical repercussions. Even the eighteenth-century masculinity ‘based on sport and codes of honor derived from military prowess’ referred to by a history of the nineteenth-century English middle classes, and allegedly expressed through ‘hunting, riding, drinking and “wenching”’, is usually absent.1 Indeed, according to Michèle Cohen, this physically demanding and physically dangerous behaviour was not the hegemonic, textually prescribed, masculine ideal, and it was not until the 1800s that ‘a “martial” masculinity’ emerged.2 Post-1660 ‘masculinity’ has, therefore, generally been approached as something very different to early modern ‘manhood’. As currently depicted, the relationship between 1 Lee Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780- 1850 (1987), p. 110, cited in Michèle Cohen, ‘“Manners” Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750-1830’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005), pp. 312-329, citation at p. 312. 1 the body, manhood, and men’s status was in early modern society a crucial, close, and yet not unproblematic, one.3 Elizabeth Foyster, for example, made notions of physical maleness and femaleness vital to her analysis of the ‘constructing’ of ‘manhood’, arguing that physical strength and a physiologically-explained superior reason were ‘[t]he two key “male” characteristics’, crucial justifications of patriarchal power, and the basis of a ‘manhood’ that was both natural and ‘nurtured’.4 For Foyster, early modern ‘honor’ and a manhood ‘associated… with physical strength’ were performed through bodily and psychological attributes. Problematically, however, this very performance put at risk not only the two strengths but also the identities, roles and reputations conditional upon them.5 However, for historians such as Philip Carter and Anthony Fletcher, at least one element of this notion of male status and identity disappeared after 1660. It was their very ‘association with… violence’ (or with ‘elitism’ or ‘boorishness’) that allegedly now caused the prescriptive literature to reject ‘old style’ ‘manhood’ and ‘many existing forms of manly virtue’, ‘field sports’ included.6 Indeed, according to Fletcher, ‘physical fitness and training in physical courage’ were already relegated to only ‘passing’ mention before the end of the seventeenth century.7 G.
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