Swift Pope and the Doctors - Allan Ingram Gebunden

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 writi ng. 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.