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Medical Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain

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Medical Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2018 Medical Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain Katherine Richards [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Richards, Katherine, "Medical Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain" (2018). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 3734. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/3734 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Medical Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain Katherine R. Richards Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature Marilyn Francus, Ph.D., chair Laura Engel, Ph.D. Lara Farina, Ph.D. Catherine Gouge, Ph.D. John Lamb, Ph.D. Department of English Morgantown, West Virginia 2018 Keywords: Eighteenth Century, Celebrity Studies, Medical History, Britain Copyright 2018 Katherine Richards Abstract Medical Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain Katherine Richards Medical Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain argues that the cultural mechanisms responsible for creating and sustaining celebrity culture helped create and sustain commercialized medicine in eighteenth-century Britain. I identify the process by which celebrity and medical culture impact one another as a sociocultural phenomenon that I term medical celebrity. The following chapters present four case studies of how medical celebrity impacted the development of the medical profession, the medical market, cultural representations and perceptions of health and illness, and the patient experience. I engage with the work done by scholars in contemporary and early celebrity studies to shed light on the memoirs, biographies, letters, etc. of culturally significant medical practitioners and patients. As such, I create case studies of the famous surgeons John and William Hunter, the infamous pamphlet war following Robert Walpole’s medical treatment and death, two notoriously ill and healthy actresses, Susannah Cibber and Margaret “Peg” Woffington, and Frances Burney’s infamous letter detailing her mastectomy. This dissertation serves as a typology of medical celebrity, thereby identifying the sociocultural phenomenon at the root of the discussions by medical historians and eighteenth-century scholars who examine intersections between celebrity and medical culture. Ultimately, I argue that eighteenth-century medical celebrity was foundational to contemporary British and American culture and we must examine the function of medical celebrity in contemporary culture in order to understand the development of the medical profession, lived experiences of patients and practitioners, cultural representations and perceptions of medicine, and the medical market. iii Dedication To Hannah and to Him. Without you--none of this. iv Acknowledgements I would like to first thank my Dissertation Chair, Dr. Marilyn Francus, for her persistent dedication to me and to this project; without her eye for detail, questions, suggestions, and incredible hard work, this project would certainly never have come to fruition. I would also like to thank the members of my committee: Dr. Laura Engel, Dr. Lara Farina, Dr. Catherine Gouge, and Dr. John Lamb. Thank you for all of your feedback, the time and energy you put into the project, and all of your hard work. I would not have been able to complete this dissertation without the generous funding I received from the Department of English and Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University. I am very grateful for the various fellowships and scholarships I received to complete this project. Thank you to my friends and colleagues who were with me in the program: Hatley Clifford, Allyson Demaagd, and Rachel Hoag. You each brought fun and happiness to an incredibly arduous process. To my mom and dad, Pam and Milani Richards—thank you for always supporting me, always offering encouragement, always providing a much-needed place to escape, and always loving me. You both taught me at an early age that my thoughts and opinions mattered. Thank you. To Donna—you saw me, and you told me I could do this long ago, and that has shaped the last decade of my life. Thank you. To Blake and Lauren—you will never know how much joy you both bring to my life. This could not have been completed without those surprising moments of laughter and happiness. Thank you. To Melissa and Matt—for so much. Thank you. To Hannah—I wrote over 200 pages about the eighteenth century, and I am never short for words on any subject. For your devotion, dedication, countless readings and edits, immeasurable patience, and inherent belief in me—for all of this I have no words except that I owe this to you. Thank you. v Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 35 Blood Brothers: The Medical Celebrity and Fame of John and William Hunter Chapter 2 97 “that Mankind might reap the proper benefit”: John Ranby’s Narrative of Sir Robert Walpole’s Final Illness, Celebrity, and the Medical Market Chapter 3 136 The Medical Celebrity of Actresses: Susannah Cibber’s Illness and Margaret “Peg” Woffington’s Health Chapter 4 183 Medical Celebrity and the Patient Experience: Celebrity and Fame in Frances Burney’s Mastectomy Letter Coda 216 Works Cited 221 1 Introduction In the 1994 film The Madness of King George, based on the play by Alan Bennett, the king is bound and gagged by his physician, who is willing to torture his patient for the sake of making him well. At the conclusion of this gripping scene, Nigel Hawthorne, who plays George III, shouts in disbelief, “I am the king of England!” to which the physician, played by Sir Ian Holm, replies with self-righteous indignation, “No, sir! You are the patient!” This scene illustrates how perceptions of the most powerful and revered figures can change when that person is faced with illness, but it also demonstrates the power that medical practitioners in the eighteenth century had to influence those perceptions. While the movie dramatizes portions of the story, “the mad king who lost America” is often remembered in relation to his illness and experience as a patient in addition to his duties and role as king. George III’s periods of ill health began in the 1780s, forty years before his death, and plagued much of his reign (Macleod 54). His illness affected his mental faculties significantly, and in 1811 the Regency Act was passed, which allowed his son to perform many of his father’s royal duties (Black 407). This illness, which we now attribute to a blood disorder known as porphyria, was common knowledge at court and throughout the nation during the time, so much so that in 1789, the Brook’s Club at the King’s Theatre threw a gala featuring famous performers to celebrate one of his periods of good health and clarity (Hogan 1148). While George III had a tremendous amount of celebrity prior to his illness, once he became ill, the public’s fascination with the king shifted. He became someone who was not simply famous, but famous for being ill, a sentiment which carried through into modern depictions such as Bennett’s play. With the change in public perception of the king’s body came the disillusionment of a separate body physical and body politic, as the king’s medical body became neither sacred nor private. Rather, 2 his medical condition, state of health, treatment, and physicians became objects of fascination and discussion for the public. But the public’s curiosity in the medical experience of a famous figure was not limited to George III. Similar instances occurred throughout the century, such as Queen Anne’s public battle with gout or the public frenzy around newspaper reports of Mary Toft who claimed to give birth to rabbits. These instances reveal that illness, treatment, patients, medical practices, anatomy, and the medical experience of an individual often captured public interest. A quick perusal through eighteenth-century newspapers, magazines, novels, caricatures, and other forms of print media provides an abundance of advertisements for medicines and medical treatments, reports of sickness and death, individuals who experience all forms of illness and treatment, medical practitioners parodied on stage, images of quack physicians behaving nefariously, and more. These representations of medical culture and the culture’s experience with medicine exist in far greater numbers than in previous centuries. From our vantage point, eighteenth-century Britain, as a result, seems particularly preoccupied with both medical and scientific subjects. However, public interest in such matters was not unique to the eighteenth century; rather, it was in the eighteenth century that industries capable of producing content for that public interest arose. These industries, such as the manufacturing of consumer goods and print media, were part of the increase in cultural mechanisms for creating and sustaining public interest in individuals as subjects. These cultural mechanisms that elevate the experience of the individual to the level of public interest are those cultural mechanisms that celebrity theorists such as Joseph Roach, Chris Rojek, and Graeme Turner argue create and maintain celebrity. They include but are not limited to reputation, desire, publicity, media production, representation, public personas, public perception, narrative, marketing, and advertising.
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