(DOWNLOAD) "Thomas Beddoes and the Physiology of Romantic Medicine." by Studies in Romanticism # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Thomas Beddoes and the Physiology of Romantic Medicine.
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2006
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 236 KB
Description
THOMAS BEDDOES HAS RECENTLY RECEIVED CONSIDERED ATTENTION Alternatively as a medical practitioner whose German interests had "a decisive influence on" his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (1) or as an advocate of public hygiene "devoted to the value of health." (2) As a figure who represents the porous borders among discourses of well-being, politics, and literature, he compellingly embodies a Romantic medicine that sought to produce health as a social ideal. But Beddoes is also a thinker of the way in which Romantic medicine was itself haunted by a dis-ease that suggested the impossibility of something as basic as health. My task in this essay is to examine the ways in which Beddoes' elaboration of hypochondria in the Romantic period structures a medically-inflected understanding of wellbeing. While the literary and philosophical contours of Romantic hypochondria need to be further parsed in works by Schelling, Mary Shelley, de Quincey, and Hegel--not to mention those texts by more palpable hypochondriacs like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley--I want to attend to a still under-read but crucially important medical text by Beddoes that sought to understand the conceptual physiology of hypochondria and its implications specifically for a sense of Romantic health. The three volumes of Thomas Beddoes' Hygeia: or Essays Moral and Medical, on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of our Middling and Affluent Classes (1802-3) constitute a text that deserves to be read on its own merits for the rich examination it offers of the contours of a deployment of health in Georgian Britain. Hygeia offers a capacious understanding of the "physical or ideal pleasure and pain" affecting the minds and bodies of the middle classes in Britain, and assigns particular priority to nervous disorders among an increasingly hypochondriacal society. (3) But this is already to pose several concerns at once, each of them crucial for understanding the concept of Romantic health that Beddoes will develop and the ways in which the illness of hypochondria provides a conceptual reserve upon which he draws as he works and unworks the possibility of health. Beddoes, the prominent and controversial Bristol physician, opens Hygeia with a gesture that is, in retrospect, expressive of much more than simple humility. Admitting the difficult task he has set himself in a work that proposes to treat medically the ills of the increasingly wealthy merchant classes in Britain, Beddoes remarks, "a writer in my situation finds himself obliged to fix upon an imaginary standard of capacity" (1:7). If Beddoes must imagine himself to be capable of providing care, the work of his text likewise dictates that he imagine much more than just medical expertise. Medical advice flourished in the Romantic era, and the particular project of Hygeia bears patient consideration of the ways in which it sought not so much to target an already existing bourgeois clientele but to produce that readership as the object of the medical treatments it offered. This also means, as Beddoes indicates, that the physician responsible for such a health must appear capable of caring for a bourgeois body politic, which is to say, capable of diagnosing what constitutes specifically bourgeois wellbeing and illness.