Abstract
The last reported case of naturally acquired smallpox occurred in Somalia in 1977, but the smallpox virus (variola major) survives under laboratory management.1 As I write, there are newly intensified fears of smallpox being released by terrorists as a biological weapon. Smallpox still haunts the popular imagination as we share the desire of our ancestors to understand and thus control this deadly, disfiguring disease. This essay is concerned to show how the peculiarly gruesome visibility of smallpox meant that historically it was closely associated, at both a popular and scholarly level, with the psychosomatic power of the imagination. It will be argued that, for physicians and imaginative writers alike, the disfigurements of smallpox — both real and imagined — served as constant reminders of the everpresent threat of a monstrous disruption to the governable boundaries of the socialized body.
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Notes
Henry Mackenzie, ‘Life of the Author’ prefacing The Poems of Thomas Blacklock (London, 1791).
Isobel Grundy, ‘Medical Advance and Female Fame: Inoculation and its After-Effects’, in Lumen XIII (1994), 13–42, is an important riposte to the standard histories: Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957) and Peter Razzell, The Conquest of Smallpox (Firle: Caliban Books, 1977) (as well as Creighton, Razzell, Smith and Hopkins above); for vaccination see John Baron, The Life of Edward Jenner, 2 vols (London, 1827, 1838), E. M. Crookshank, History and Pathology of Vaccination (Philadelphia, 1889), Edward J. Edwardes, A Concise History of Small-pox and Vaccination in Europe (London, 1902), F. D. Drewitt, The Life ofEdward Jenner (London, 1931); Peter Razell, Edward Jenner’s Cowpox Vaccine: The History of a Medical Myth (Firle: Caliban Books, 1980); Derrick Baxby, Jenner’s Smallpox Vaccine: The Riddle of Vaccinia Virus and its Origins (London: Heinemann, 1981), Paul Saunders, Edward Jenner: the Cheltenham Years 1795–1823 (Hanover, USA and London: University Press of New England, 1982) and W. Le Fanu, A Bio-bibliography of Edward Jenner (London: Harvey and Blythe, 1951); see also James Johnston Abraham, Lettsome 1744 —1815: His Life, Times, Friends and Descendents (London: Heinemann, 1933).
Creighton, A History of Epidemics, 588 (Coleridge to Jenner).
Grundy ‘Medical Advance’, 15; another exception is Jill Campbell, ‘Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the “Glass Revers’d” of Female Old Age’ in Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum (eds), ‘Defects’: Engendering the Modern Body (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2000) 213–51 (though the emphasis here is on the discourse of female aging).
Raymond Anselment, The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995) 196.
G. S. Rousseau, ‘Medicine and the Muses: an Approach to Literature and Medicine’ in Marie Mulvey Robert and Roy Porter (eds), Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1993) 23–57, passim.
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor [1978] and Aids and its Metaphors [1989] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991); Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau, Gout: the Patrician Malady (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998); Margaret Healy, Fictions ofDisease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
Martin Lleulyn, ‘An Elegie on the Death of the Most Illustrious Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester’ (Oxford, 1660) (quoted in Anselment, Realms, 194).
Richard Mead, ‘Discourse on Smallpox and Measles’ in The Medical Works of Richard Mead (London, 1762) 154.
William Thompson, Sickness: a Poem (Oxford, 1745) 243.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) 1.
Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society (London: Sage, revised edn 1996) 213–14, 222–4.
Johann Casper Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy; designed to promote the knowledge and love of mankind, 3 volumes in 5 (London, 1789–98) I, 100; and II, Chapter iii; Temple Luttrell, ‘Physiognomy, if Always an Index of the Mind?’, The Edinburgh Magazine or Literary Amusement, Thursday 14 March 1782, 306.
Henry Jones, Inoculation; or Beauty’s Triumph,: a Poem in Two Cantos (Bath, 1768) 7–8.
Michel Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968) 27.
Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, edited by Harold Williams, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) II, 217.
Thomas Woodward, 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, 1718) 69.
Thomas Fuller, Exanthematalogia, or, An Attempt to give a rational account of eruptive fevers, especially of the measles and small pox (London, 1730) 190–3.
Charles E. Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge University Press: 1992) 295.
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© 2003 George Rousseau, Miranda Gill, David B. Haycock and Malte Herwig
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Shuttleton, D. (2003). A Culture of Disfigurement: Imagining Smallpox in the Long Eighteenth Century. In: Rousseau, G.S., Gill, M., Haycock, D., Herwig, M. (eds) Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524323_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524323_3
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