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A man of common understanding: venereal disease, myth and reading as a protective practice in eighteenth-century Britain

Kavanagh, Declan (2024) A man of common understanding: venereal disease, myth and reading as a protective practice in eighteenth-century Britain. In: Ingram, Allan and Williams, Helen and Lawlor, Clark, eds. Myth and (mis)information: Constructing the medical professions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature and culture. Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 117-135. ISBN 978-1-5261-6682-1. (Access to this publication is currently restricted. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:104742)

Abstract

The discourse on venereal disease, written across numerous treatises and dissertations throughout the period, worked to focalise questions of male sexual desire and agency. In this chapter, I explore the medical writing on venereal disease alongside the prose fiction of Tobias Smollett and the life writing of James Boswell in order to showcase how writing about sexual infection in this period provided a canvas upon which questions of male ability and debility were writ large. Reading medical observations on the disease reveals how men were sometimes encouraged not to fear medical knowledge but to become men of common understanding; to be, in other words, agents of their own self-recovery. While writers like Smollett used the novel form to model men’s mastery of their own sexual health, private diary accounts like Boswell’s instead foreground his distrust of medical intervention in the wake of his infection, before detailing the anxieties that underpinned the distemper’s cure.

Item Type: Book section
Uncontrolled keywords: venereal disease; Tobias Smollett; medicine; eighteenth century; James Boswell
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of English
Depositing User: Declan Kavanagh
Date Deposited: 25 Jan 2024 14:02 UTC
Last Modified: 26 Jan 2024 11:26 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/104742 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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