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Portrait of gout sufferer: William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708-78). After a painting by Brompton. (Copyright q The Wellcome Library, London (reference L0000044); reproduced with permission.)
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This essay seeks to assess the renegade Thomas Beddoes through the filter of the gout diagnosis in his time. It stretches out to cover his whole life and emphasizes the need for a broad comparative historical and biographical approach. Gout is shown to have functioned then as more than a malady; it was also part of a social code embedding class, ra...
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Penned by a seasoned physician with 30 years of experience, this book is an essay that conducts a profound analysis of the doctor-patient relationship. It addresses topics such as the current dominance of scientism as a guide for medical practice, the difference between shamanism and quackery, the legitimacy of the use of placebos, the role that li...
Citations
While historians of science have focused significant attention on Erasmus Darwin's scientific ideas and milieu, relatively little attention has been paid to Darwin as a literary writer. In The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times, Martin Priestman situates Darwin's three major poems - The Loves of the Plants (1789), The Economy of Vegetation (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803) - and Darwin himself within a large, polymathic late-Enlightenment network of other scientists, writers, thinkers and social movers and shakers. Interpreting Darwin's poetry in terms of Darwin's broader sense of the poetic text as a material space, he posits a significant shift from the Enlightenment's emphases on conceptual spaces to the Romantic period's emphases on historical time. He shows how Darwin's poetry illuminates his stance toward all the major physical sciences and his well-formulated theories of evolution and materially based psychology. Priestman's study also offers the first substantial accounts of Darwin's mythological theories and their links to Enlightenment Rosicrucianism and Freemansonry, and of the reading of history that emerges from the fragment-poem The Progress of Society, a first-ever printed edition of which is included in an appendix. Ultimately, Priestman's book offers readers a sustained account of Darwin's polymathic Enlightenment worldview and cognate poetics in a period when texts are too often judged by their adherence to a retrospectively constructed 'Romanticism'.
Coleridge's account of the imagination in Biographia Literaria as a phenomenon that functions to ‘idealize and to unify’ is still highly influential. But Coleridge's contemporaries explored alternative accounts of the phenomenon. For Thomas Beddoes the imagination was a vital stimulus of scientific enquiry and political activism. Beddoes's work demonstrates the extent to which the Romantic literary imagination was informed by investigations in other fields. This essay analyses Beddoes's exploration of the imagination in his scientific, political and medical practice. Beddoes's writings emphasise the importance of imaginative enquiry across all his works, and challenge the regulative effects of disciplinary distinctions.
