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Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture pp 77–99Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Dean Swift on the Great Pox: Or, The Satirist as Physician

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

Abstract

In a note on The Lady’s Dressing Room (1730/2), Swift’s eighteenth-century biographer and editor, John Hawkesworth (c.1715–1773), tried to defend his author against the ever-present charge of ‘coarse indelicacy’ with the argument that whenever the Dean offended against delicacy, he was actually teaching it: ‘He stimulates the mind to sensibility, to correct the faults of habitual negligence; as physicians, to cure a lethargy, have recourse to a blister.’ In a subsequent gloss on the poem’s companion piece, A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed (1734), Hawkesworth continued in the same vein: ‘This poem, for which some have thought no apology could be offered, deserves on the contrary great commendation, as it much more forcibly restrains the thoughtless and the young from the risk of health and life by picking up a prostitute, than the finest declamation on the sordidness of the appetite.’

Et voltu poteram tuo carere et collo manibusque cruribusque et mammis natibusque clunibusque, et, ne singula persequi laborem, tota te poteram, Chloe, carere. (I could dispense with your face, and neck, and hands, and legs, and bosom, and back, and hips. And—not to labour details— I could dispense with the whole of you, Chloe.) Martial, Epigrams, III, liii

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For the publication history of the poem, see S. Karian (2013) ‘Swift as a Manuscript Poet’, in P. Bullard and J. McLaverty (eds), Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 31–50 (pp. 37–39).

  2. 2.

    K. Williams (ed.) (1970) Swift: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), pp. 154–55; my emphases.

  3. 3.

    M. C. Randolph (1941) ‘The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory’, Studies in Philology, 38, 125–57.

  4. 4.

    The Dean was famous for his charity: see G. Faulkner’s ‘Further Account’, first printed in John Nichols’s supplement to the London edition of Swift’s Works (B. Slepian [1964] ‘Some Forgotten Anecdotes About Swift’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 68:1, 33–44 [p. 37]). See also L. A. Landa (1945) ‘Jonathan Swift and Charity’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 44, 337–50.

  5. 5.

    J. Fróes (ed.) (2000) Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr Jonathan Swift (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses), p. 425.

  6. 6.

    H. J. Real (1975) ‘A Recipe for Puppy Water’, The Scriblerian, 7, 121–22.

  7. 7.

    H. Williams (ed.) (1958) The Poems of Jonathan Swift, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn), II, 526. All references are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the text. See also Jonathan Swift (1983) The Complete Poems, P. Rogers (ed.) (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books), p. 828.

  8. 8.

    No 185, p. 1109. For another example of the mercurial bolus, see J. Thorpe (ed.) (1963) The Poems of Sir George Etherege (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 43, ll. 1–8; and for the moral and social issues involved, see R. A. Anselment (1995) The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses), pp. 131–71 (pp. 135, 139); and K. P. Siena (2004) Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press), pp. 30–37.

  9. 9.

    (1708) Pharmacopœia extemporanea sive præceptorum sylloge (London: Benj. Walford, 4th edn), p. 7; see D. F. Passmann and H. J. Vienken (2003) The Library and Reading of Jonathan Swift: A Bio-Bibliographical Handbook, 4 vols (Frankfurt on Main: Peter Lang), I, pp. 655–56. See also (1721) Chapter VI, ‘Of a particular Specifick Bolus for the Venereal Disease’, Of the Symptoms and Cure of a Gonorrhea in Either Sex (London).

  10. 10.

    (1686) Syphilis: Or, A Poetical History of the French Disease (London: Jacob Tonson), pp. 53–54. See also L. Baumgartner and J. F. Fulton (1935) A Bibliography of the Poem Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus by Girolamo Fracastoro of Verona (New Haven, London and Oxford: Yale University Press), particularly pp. 91–93.

  11. 11.

    H. J. Real and H. J. Vienken (1982) ‘The Syphilitic Lady’, The Scriblerian, 15:1, 52–54.

  12. 12.

    C. Peter (1686) Observations on the Venereal Disease, with the True Way of Curing the Same (London: D. Mallet), p. 14.

  13. 13.

    (1676) New and Curious Observations on the Art of Curing the Venereal Disease (London: Thomas Dring and Thomas Burrel), p. 31 (my emphasis). To be sure, in ‘degrees of the Pox, that no internal Medicine [could] reach’, practitioners such as Charles Peter proceeded to ‘manual Operation’, which would include ‘in the Arms and Shins [laying] open all foul Bones’, for example, it being ‘wonderful to observe, how Nature will help to discharge the malignant matter’ (Observations on the Venereal Disease, pp. 39–40). This attempt at a therapy may also be behind the beautiful young nymph’s endeavours to increase the discharge of ‘malignant matter’ by the use of issue peas (II, 583, l. 63).

  14. 14.

    J. Fabricius (1994) Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England (London and Bristol, PA: Jessica Kingsley), pp. 27–29.

  15. 15.

    (1722) The Second Part of Whipping-Tom, Quoted from the 3rd ed. (London: Sam Briscoe), pp. 5–6.

  16. 16.

    For this and some of what follows, see W. B. Ober (1989) ‘To Cast a Pox: The Iconography of Syphilis’, The American Journal of Dermatopathology, 11:1, 74–86 (pp. 77, 78). See also Andrea Alciati’s emblem of ‘Nupta contagiosa,’ R. S. Morton (1990) ‘Syphilis in Art: An Entertainment in Four Parts. Part 2’, Genitourinary Medicine, 66, 112–23 (p. 122, Figure 26), and K. Brown (2006) The Pox: The Life and Near Death of a Very Social Disease (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton), facing p. 118.

  17. 17.

    J. Sintelaer (1709) The Scourge of Venus and Mercury: Represented in a Treatise of the Venereal Disease (London: G. Harris et al.), title page.

  18. 18.

    R. Brown (1730) A Letter from a Physician in London to His Friend in the Country, Giving an Account of the Montpellier Practice in Curing the Venereal Disease (London: J. Roberts), pp. 4, 22. It was the aggressive character of ‘salivation’ in particular that made Brown opt for the seemingly more gentle ‘Montpellier’ application of ‘Mercurial Ointment’, which consisted ‘in nothing more than rubbing the Patient’ with it (pp. 8, 12). See also Siena, Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor, pp. 40–41, and passim.

  19. 19.

    J. Marten (1985), A Treatise of All the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease, in Both Sexes (New York and London: Garland), pp. 287–351. For valuable information about Marten, see R. Porter (1996) ‘“Laying Aside Any Private Advantage”: John Marten and Venereal Disease’, L. E. Merians (ed.), The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky), pp. 51–67, and B. K. Mudge (2000) The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 151–57. See also Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England, pp. 33–38; Anselment, The Realms of Apollo, pp. 141–42.

  20. 20.

    (1684) Guide to the Practical Physician (London: Thomas Flesher), p. 361a (my emphasis). See also Blégny, New and Curious Observations on the Art of Curing the Venereal Disease, pp. 121, 124–49, and passim; Marten, A Treatise of All the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease, p. 59.

  21. 21.

    H. J. Real (2007) ‘Facta Sunt Servanda: Or, A Plea for a (Swiftian) Return to Scholarly Sanity’, Poetica, 68, 17–38 (pp. 31–32); see also G. Williams (1994) A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: The Athlone Press), II, pp. 926, 990–91.

  22. 22.

    H. Davis et al. (eds) (1939–68) The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, 16 vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939–68), IX, p. 39. Further quotations are from this edition.

  23. 23.

    In addition to R. Thompson (1979) Unfit for Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic, Obscene and Bawdy Works Written or Published in England in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan), p. 88, see G. Williams, I, pp. 166–67. See also H. Rubenhold (2005) The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and the Extraordinary Story of Harris’s List (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus), pp. 118–27 (pp. 121–22).

  24. 24.

    Prose Works, I, 45; see also Prose Works, X, 146. Imprecise terminology is a notorious issue in the history of sexuality, and it is therefore wise to note that ‘it was widely believed throughout the eighteenth century’ as a medical historian writes, ‘that gonorrhea represents an early stage of syphilis’ and that ‘an untreated clap led to a pox’ (M. E. McAllister [2000] ‘Stories of the Origin of Syphilis in Eighteenth-Century England: Science, Myth, and Prejudice’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 24:1, 22–44 [p. 25]).

  25. 25.

    G. Williams, III, p. 1337.

  26. 26.

    W. C. Wright (ed.) (1930) Translation and Notes (New York and London), pp. 137–41. See also the similar catalogues of venereal symptoms in N. Culpeper (1659) Culpepper’s School of Physick: Or, the English Apothecary (London: John Gadbury), pp. 357–58; and Marten, A Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease, pp. 44–46, 71–72, and passim.

  27. 27.

    This London edition of Syphilis: Sive, Morbus Gallicus was printed by Jonah Bowyer and dedicated to Swift’s friend Dr Richard Mead (Baumgartner and Fulton, A Bibliography of the Poem Syphilis, pp. 49–50).

  28. 28.

    Peter, Observations on the Venereal Disease, pp. 15–16 (reprinted in Anselment, The Realms of Apollo, p. 133).

  29. 29.

    Scepticism about the medical profession’s ability to treat the disease satisfactorily was widespread: see J. Arrizabalaga, J. Henderson, and R. French (1997) The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 28–32.

  30. 30.

    D. Woolley (ed.) (1999–2014) The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D., 5 vols (Frankfurt: Peter Lang), I, p. 209n6. Regrettably, I was alerted to Anna Marie Roos’s (2011) brilliant recent monograph, Web of Nature: Martin Lister (1639–1712), the First Arachnologist (Leiden and Boston: Brill), only after the final version of this chapter had been prepared for the press. For her illuminating remarks about Lister’s unorthodox views on the pathogenesis of syphilis, its origins, transmission and therapeutical methods, see pp. 335–60.

  31. 31.

    Quoted from Marten, A Treatise of All the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease, p. 47.

  32. 32.

    B. Fabian and I. Primer (eds) (1981) A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases, Collected Works of Bernard Mandeville, II (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms), pp. 48–49.

  33. 33.

    I. Ehrenpreis (1983) Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, III: Dean Swift (London: Methuen and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 103; see H. Bunker Wright and M. K. Spears (1971) The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd ed.), I, pp. 456–58. One should perhaps not hold this sarcasm too much against Prior, given the fact that jokes about the effects of venereal disease seem to have been commonplace (see e.g. R. Thompson (ed.) [1976] ‘The Plain-Dealing Pedlar Well Furnished with Sundry Sorts of Choice Wares,’ in Samuel Pepys’ ‘Penny Merriments’ [London: Constable], pp. 130–31).

  34. 34.

    On this aspect, see H. J. Real and H. J. Vienken (1988) ‘Disciplining on the Sly: Swift’s The Lady’s Dressing Room’, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 13, 39–50.

  35. 35.

    An aspect that has figured prominently in recent criticism. See, among others, W. I. Miller (1997) The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press), pp. 66–70; T. Chico (2005) Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press), pp. 132–42, and passim; L. Barnett (2007) Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 146–48; P. J. Smith (2012) Between Two Stools: Scatology and its Representations in English Literature, Chaucer to Swift (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press), pp. 205–11; A. Marshall (2013) The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 208, 212–13; but it is incidentally not central inasmuch as stench, dirt and decay are epiphenomena of the disease. For The Lady’s Dressing Room as filled up ‘with literal waste’, see S. Gee (2010) Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press), pp. 108–11.

  36. 36.

    I have made some of these points in an earlier essay, co-authored with H. J. Vienken (1981) ‘“Those Odious Common Whores of which this Town is Full”: Swift’s A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 6, 241–59 (p. 245). See also B. S. Hammond (1995) ‘Corinna’s Dream’, The Eighteenth Century, 36:2, 99–118, and, more recently, S. Carter (2004) Purchasing Power: Representing Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century English Popular Print Culture (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate), pp.149–50, 168.

  37. 37.

    See Real and Vienken, ‘“Those Odious Common Whores of which this Town is Full”’, p. 243.

  38. 38.

    Prose Works, XI, p. 253 (IV, vi, 4).

  39. 39.

    Ehrenpreis, Dean Swift, p. 105.

  40. 40.

    Peter, Observations on the Venereal Disease, p. 1.

  41. 41.

    C. Quétel (1990) History of Syphilis, J. Braddock and B. Pike (trans.) (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 9–27, 33–49. For this and some of what follows, see also R. Davenport-Hines (1990) Sex, Death and Punishment: Attitudes to Sex and Sexuality in Britain since the Renaissance (London: Collins), pp. 16–54; Brown, The Pox: The Life and Near Death of a Very Social Disease, pp. 1–28, 29–55, and passim; B. Mandeville (1973) ‘A Modest Defence of Publick Stews’, in R. I. Cook (ed.), The Augustan Reprint Society, no 162 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library), p. 77.

  42. 42.

    Also called the Columbian theory (see Ober, ‘To Cast a Pox: The Iconography of Syphilis’, pp. 75–76; McAllister, ‘Stories of the Origin of Syphilis in Eighteenth-Century England’, pp. 22–44; Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, pp. 16–27; and M. B. Campbell (1992) ‘Carnal Knowledge: Fracastoro’s De Syphilis and the Discovery of the New World’, in D. Segal (ed.), Crossing Cultures: Essays in the Displacement of Western Civilization [Tucson and London: The University of Arizona Press], pp. 3–32). For the variety of names in use for the Great Pox throughout Europe, at times not differentiated from smallpox at first, as well as its dissemination during the early years, see E. Wickersheimer (1937) ‘Sur la Syphilis aux XVe et XVIe siècles’, Humanisme et Renaissance, 4, 157–207.

  43. 43.

    McAllister, ‘Stories of the Origin of Syphilis in Eighteenth-Century England’, p. 28.

  44. 44.

    For this and what follows, see Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England, pp. 57–83 (p. 57), and passim; Anselment, The Realms of Apollo, pp. 132–71 (p. 137); and Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, pp. 88–112, and passim. See also D. Wolfthal (2010) In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 82–95, and passim.

  45. 45.

    D. Erasmus von Rotterdam (1967–1980) Ausgewählte Schriften, W. Welzig (ed.) 8 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft), VI, pp. 198–211 (pp. 202–3). In other dialogues, Erasmus instead refers to the ‘Neapolitan pox [neapolitana scabies]’ and also to the ‘French disease [gallica scabies]’ (Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Welzig, VI, 573, 481).

  46. 46.

    In addition to Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England, passim, see D. Salkeld (2012) Shakespeare Among the Courtesans: Prostitution, Literature, and Drama, 1500–1650 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate), pp. 27–45, and passim.

  47. 47.

    T. Fuller (1642) ‘The Harlot’, in The Profane State, The Holy State (Cambridge: by Roger Daniel for John Williams), pp. 357–60 (p. 360).

  48. 48.

    Quoted from Anselment, The Realms of Apollo, p. 134. For a survey of London low life, especially its ‘sin city’, Covent Garden and its manifold erotic pastimes, see E. J. Burford (1986) Wits, Wenchers, and Wantons: London’s Low Life. Covent Garden in the Eighteenth Century (London: Robert Hale), passim.

  49. 49.

    J. D. Rolleston (1943) ‘Venereal Disease in Pepys’s Diary’, British Journal of Venereal Diseases, 19:4, 169–73 (p. 172). For the problem of child prostitution more generally, see also D. Cruickshank (2009) The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital (London: Random House), pp. 52–55.

  50. 50.

    See [R. Ames] (1691) The Female Fire-Ships: A Satyr Against Whoring (London: E. Richardson), pp. 3–4.

  51. 51.

    R. S. Morton (1990) ‘Syphilis in Art: An Entertainment in Four Parts. Part 3’, Genitourinary Medicine, 66, 208–21 (pp. 212–13, Figure 33). See also J. B. Radner (1976) ‘The Youthful Harlot’s Curse: The Prostitute as Symbol of the City in 18th-Century English Literature’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 2:3, 59–64. The fact that many of the young streetwalkers were indeed girls from the country, ‘led astray’ and ‘then forsaken’, was also emphasized by the Swiss visitor, César de Saussure (1995) A Foreign View of England in 1725–1729, Madame van Muyden (trans. and ed.) (London: Caliban Books), p. 126.

  52. 52.

    R. O. Bucholz and J. P. Ward (2012) London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 205–6.

  53. 53.

    The quotation is from the English translation, Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England ([London, 1719], p. 60). For the ‘visibility of prostitutes’ in eighteenth-century London, see also Cruickshank, The Secret History of Georgian London, pp. 25–55, and passim; and C. Grant (2012) ‘Visible Prostitutes: Mandeville, Hogarth and “A Harlot’s Progress”’, in A. Lewis and M. Ellis (eds), Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture: Sex, Commerce and Morality (London: Pickering and Chatto), pp. 99–113.

  54. 54.

    I have presented some of the evidence in H. J. Real (2010) ‘Confessions of a Coffee Drinker: Or, How Coffee Became Sex(y)’, The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer, 24:3, 6–13 (pp. 9–10). See also [Ames], The Female Fire-Ships, p. 14.

  55. 55.

    De Saussure, A Foreign View of England in 1725–1729, pp. 102–3 (my emphasis).

  56. 56.

    B. Cowan (2005) The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 118–19; Carter, Purchasing Power, pp. 11–12.

  57. 57.

    W. A. Speck (1980) ‘The Harlot’s Progress in Eighteenth-Century England’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 3:2, 127–39 (pp. 127–29).

  58. 58.

    E. and J. Chamberlayne (1707) Angliæ Notitia: Or, the Present State of England (London: S. Smith et al., 22nd edn), pp. 426–27; G. Miège (1708) L’Etat present de la Grande-Bretagne après son heureuse union en 1707 (Amsterdam: chez les Wetsteins), pp. 270–71; de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in 1725–1729, pp. 187–89. See also P. Griffiths (2007) ‘Building Bridewell: London’s Self-Images, 1550–1640’ in N. L. Jones and D. Woolf (eds), Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 228–48.

  59. 59.

    (1700) An Account of the Societies for Reformation of Manners, in England and Ireland (London: B. Aylmer and A. Bell, 3rd edn), pp. 17–18. See also J. Strype (ed.) (1720) A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, 2 vols (London: A. Churchill et al.), II, p. 30.

  60. 60.

    See, however, D. Defoe (1970) ‘Reformation of Manners’, in F.H. Ellis (ed.), Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714, VI: 1697–1704 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 398–400, 401, and passim.

  61. 61.

    D. Defoe (1728) Augusta Triumphans: Or, the Way to Make London the Most Flourishing City in the Universe (London: J. Roberts et al.), p. 27. Augusta Triumphans has not been ‘de-canonized’ by the two most eminent authorities on the subject; see P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens (1988) The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), p. 80.

  62. 62.

    W. Maitland (1739) The History of London from its Foundation by the Romans to the Present Time (London: Samuel Richardson), p. 661.

  63. 63.

    A Modest Defence of Publick Stews, ed. Cook, pp. 1–2, 12–15, 19–20, and passim.

  64. 64.

    Grant, ‘Visible Prostitutes: Mandeville, Hogarth and “A Harlot’s Progress”’, pp. 106–07.

  65. 65.

    A Modest Defence of Publick Stews, ed. Cook, pp. 59–61. See also Real and Vienken, ‘“Those Odious Common Whores of which this Town is Full”: Swift’s A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’, p. 247.

  66. 66.

    For this and some of the details, I am indebted to the rich study by Siena, Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor, pp. 62–95, and passim.

  67. 67.

    In addition to Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, pp. 131–42, see P. K. Wilson, ‘Exposing the Secret Disease: Recognizing and Treating Syphilis in Daniel Turner’s London’, in Merians (ed.), The Secret Malady, pp. 68–84.

  68. 68.

    Siena, Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor, pp. 41–42.

  69. 69.

    For this, and what follows, I am indebted to D. W. R. Bahlman (1968 [1957]) The Moral Revolution of 1688 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books), pp. 1–30 (pp. 3–4, 8, and passim).

  70. 70.

    Quoted from Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688, p. 3. For more on Dunton’s Night-Walker, see P. Wagner (1990) Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London: Paladin Grafton Books), pp. 133–43 (p. 134).

  71. 71.

    Cruickshank, The Secret History of Georgian London, pp. xvi–xvii.

  72. 72.

    Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688, pp. 3–4.

  73. 73.

    K. Juhas (2013) ‘Death Frightened to Death: Swift’s Transformation of the Death-and-the-Maiden Motif’, K. Juhas, H. J. Real, and S. Simon (eds), Reading Swift: Papers from The Sixth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Munich: Wilhelm Fink), pp. 433–58; R. Ferguson (2014) ‘Metamorphosis and Mortality: Swift’s Death and Daphne,’ Swift Studies, 29, 52–75.

  74. 74.

    In addition to L. Feinberg (1967) Introduction to Satire (Ames, IA: The Iowa State University Press), p. 71, see most of the titles listed in n. 35.

  75. 75.

    H. J. Real and H. J. Vienken (1986) ‘Psychoanalytic Criticism and Swift: The History of a Failure’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1, 127–41 (p. 141).

  76. 76.

    K. Haynes (2003) English Literature and Ancient Languages (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 58.

  77. 77.

    I am again indebted, for inspiration, encouragement and bibliographical support, to ‘my people’ at the Ehrenpreis Centre, Dr Kirsten Juhas and Ulrich Elkmann; and to Dr Marga Munkelt, Münster, and Erika, my wife, for just being there when I needed them.

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  1. Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Münster, Germany

    Hermann J. Real

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  1. Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

    Allan Ingram

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    Leigh Wetherall Dickson

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Real, H.J. (2016). Dean Swift on the Great Pox: Or, The Satirist as Physician. In: Ingram, A., Wetherall Dickson, L. (eds) Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59718-2_5

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