This book explores the impacts particularly on their writing of the serious illnesses of
Swift and Pope alongside their respective understandings of health issues and within their
period context. Both Swift and Pope spent most of their lives suffering from serious illness
Ménière's Disease (Swift) and Pott's Disease (Pope). This was at a time when medical
understanding of these conditions was minimal. This book examines the effects of illness on
each writer's relations with doctors treatment and medicine more widely and how far and in
what ways their own experiences affected their writing. The book explains the contemporary
medical context and subsequent specialist knowledge of the illnesses and places each alongside
both writers' attempts to come to terms with their suffering not least with respect to the
different forms and styles of their works. Each writer's extensive correspondence is drawn on
as well as a range of texts.
