The Doctor as Man of Letters: Mid-Georgian Transformations

Abstract

Sir John Hill developed both his dramaturgy and practice of writing prose satire from his perspective as a student of natural history and the medical sciences. His yoking of medicine and acting was novel in mid-Georgian London but did not seem idiosyncratic to him. His importing from one realm to another was his primary contribution to dramaturgy—specifically, importing scientific theories which the actor, as well as writer, then needed to know. This chapter probes the precise niche of Hill’s contribution to the development of early modern dramaturgy. It does so by exploring Hill’s mind set, especially his role as a medical man active in various ways in the theatre of the mid-eighteenth century; by tracing the historical typology of the doctor as man of letters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; by unravelling how Hill became known among his contemporaries as the ‘rhyming apothecary’ and what significance this classification held for his performative ventures; by viewing his pronouncements on acting, especially as published in The Actor (1750), in relation to his medical theories; by following the doctor–writer type in central London’s coffeehouses; and by exploring how the doctor-as- man-of-letters rose, or did not rise, to the stature of Enlightenment thinker.