Bodies Politic
Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900
Roy Porter
Reaktion 2021
Pb, 384pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781789142792
Roy Porter (1946-2002) was one of the most productive historians of his generation, having authored or edited – staggeringly – over 100 books. An immensely popular teacher and public speaker, he brought the history of medicine to a wide audience, humanising the patients and practitioners he studied in the process.
Bodies Politic was among the last of Porter’s books to be published in his lifetime. Thematically it speaks to some of his core areas of interest: the development in the 18th century of a “medical marketplace” for the skills and services of (mostly) medical men, both orthodox and alternative. What did mark a change was its choice of sources, with Porter here diving deeper into the visual satires of Rowlandson, Gillray and Hogarth, and through them, seeing a society where illness has become symbolic for the health of the country.
A good deal of this material may now be familiar to readers – the invigorating properties of James Graham’s “Electrical Bed” and the acquisition of the body of the “Irish Giant” Charles Byrne by the surgeon John Hunter, for example – but if this material or period is new to you, Porter offers a whistle-stop tour, in prose both engaging and learned.
To the fortean eye, the book explores the cultural constructions of social “insiders” and “outsiders”: whether this is around what makes for a normal or grotesque body or for an orthodox or alternative practitioner. Furthermore, this is a book suffused with patients’ fear of medicine (no matter how loudly its practitioners are declaring their knowledge and skill).
As the book is 20 years old, some of its contents have slightly aged. For instance, Porter’s stylistic quirks have not dated well, with his addiction to alliteration not being the marker of wit it once was. However, Bodies Politic is a reminder of how the history of medicine can be more than just a retelling of heroic discoveries and can say something about the society and culture it operated in (pun intended). There is thus still more than enough to enjoy here, but my main problem with this edition lies not with its author but with its publisher.
When the book was first published by Reaktion in 2001, the British Medical Journal noted that “one hopes that it can be published again doing justice to the illustrative material”. If anything, this republication has made things worse: the faint black and white reproductions of colour illustrations is a hangover from the first edition; but now the book’s original colour plates have also been rendered in black and white (no doubt for cost reasons).
Even worse, the new edition expunges the original index; this is bad enough, as Porter’s range of themes and array of quotations really makes one necessary, but it is even more embarrassing since his original acknowledgements have been retained and the indexer is praised for her efforts. All in all, a disappointing decision and a missed opportunity, in what in most other respects remains an absorbing entry point into the work of a great historian. Ross MacFarlane
★★★