Abstract
An incident towards the close of Sarah Fielding’s sentimental novel The Adventures of David Simple (1753) raises questions central to the concerns of this volume regarding how we interpret historical representations of contagion.1 The novel’s eponymous hero and his wife Camilla have received a request from Mr Ratcliff, their rich but autocratic and treacherous relation, demanding a visit from their son Peter, to whom he stands godfather. David’s difficult decision to refuse this request at the risk of undermining his son’s prospects is made easier when ‘young Peter fell ill of the Smallpox’. Camilla persuades David to write Ratcliff a ‘civil’ letter explaining ‘that the Boy was at present too ill to take a Journey, and they were apprehensive was breeding the Small-pox’ (p. 387). Affronted, Ratcliff replies with a tirade against their ingratitude and deception, to which he adds this postscript:
P.S. … you have rewarded all my dear wife’s good Offices to you, with her Destruction; for, by my being abroad, she unfortunately opened your Letter, and I found her in Fits on my return, with the Fright of seeing the name of the Small-pox in your careless letter: and you know too, she has never had that Distemper, (p. 386)
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Notes
J. R. Smith, The Speckled Monster: Smallpox in England, 1670–1970, with particular reference to Essex (Chelmsford: Essex Record Office, 1987), pp. 179–82.
F. Fenner [et al.], Smallpox and its Eradication (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1988).
G. Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957), p. 241.
R. Porter, in Western Medical Tradition, 880 BC to 1800, ed. L. I. Conrad, M. Neve et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 407–8.
D. E. Shuttleton, ‘A Culture of Disfigurement: Imagining Smallpox in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Imagining and Framing Disease in Cultural History, ed. G. S. Rousseau with M. Gill, D. Haycock and M. Herwig (London: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 68–91.
D. R. Hopkins, Princes and Peasants, Smallpox in History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 22–3.
S. Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 84–111.
S. Jarcho, The Concept of Contagion in Medicine, Literature, and Religion (Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Co., 2000), p. 23.
V. Nutton, ‘The Seeds of Disease; an Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance’, Medical History, 27 (1983) 1–34.
The State of Physick: and of Diseases; with an inquiry into the causes of the late increase of them; but more particularly of the small-pox (London: T. Horne and R. Wilkin, 1718), p. 69. For medical concerns with fear, see A. Luyendijk-Elshout, ‘Of Masks and Mills: The Enlightenment Doctor and his Frightened Patient’, The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, ed. G. S. Rousseau (Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press, 1990).
See W. Riese, introduction to Galen on the Passions and Errors of the Soul, trans. P. W. Harkins (Columba: Ohio State University Press, 1963).
G. Sill, The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Thomas Fuller, Exanthematologia, or an Attempt to Give a Rational Account of Eruptive Fevers, especially of the Measles and Smallpox (1730), p. 104.
G. Harvey, A Treatise of the Small-pox and the Measles; describing their Nature, Causes and Signs (London: W. Freeman, 1696), pp. 7–10. Harvey’s own views on the origins of smallpox add a typical racist slur to the usual misogyny when he suggests that ‘the Ancient Arabian Physicians… observing the promiscuous converse of their women with men, fell into a notion, that their Wombs must necessarily attract thence a great fowlness, which most certainly they did’ and seeing ‘their spurious Issue were surprised at some blotches, crusty Pimples, Ulcers, and pains of Limbs… which to me appears rather a Distemper of the Great Pox, than the Small’ (p. 8).
F. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 109–132.
H. Jones, Inoculation; or Beauty’s Triumph: a Poem in Two Cantos (Bath: C. Pope, 1768). (1768), 7–8.
For a psychoanalytic approach, see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), esp. pp. 71ff.
For literary examples, see the final chapter of R. Anselment, Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1995); and Shuttleton, ‘A Culture of Disfigurement’, pp. 76–80, and Guy Poirier in this volume.
M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), p. 27.
The Enlightenment medico-philosophical context is discussed in G. S. Rousseau, ‘Pineapples, Pregnancy, Pica, and Peregrine Pickle’, in Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays Presented to Lewis M. Knapp, ed. G. S. Rousseau and P.-G. Boucé (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 79–109.
P.-G. Boucé, ‘Imagination, Pregnant Women, and Monsters, in Eighteenth-century England and France’, in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and R. Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 86–100.
M.-H Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
D. Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), with further related references, p. 283, fn 26.
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Shuttleton, D.E. (2005). Contagion by Conceit: Menstruosity and the Rhetoric of Smallpox into the Age of Inoculation. In: Carlin, C.L. (eds) Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522619_15
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