MANY OF Johnson's friends besides Levet were doctors, and many of his friendships took on a medical or therapeutic cast. As is the case with most people who suffer from chronic illness, friendship and therapy, of various kinds, became deeply intertwined. His doctors became friends, and his friends, like Mrs Thrale, became doctors. This chapter, by way of an epilogue, will examine some of the other relationships in Johnson's life which have this therapeutic aspect. Picking up threads from earlier chapters, it will glance at some of the medical figures who populated that long life, but it will also review some of the conflicts, the struggles for various forms of power, that were an inevitable part of Johnson's relationships to his medical attendants. Johnson had his own medical convictions, which he did not suppress. So I shall also discuss the way in which Johnson, by virtue of his learning and his experience of illness, became himself a counsellor, a doctor-figure for his friends, and consider especially the role he played in the sometimes complementary history of James Boswell.

Johnson's letter to Dr Lawrence announcing the death of ‘our old friend Mr Levett’ symbolises his position at the confluence of many streams of eighteenth-century medicine. Focusing on him, we can see our way through some of the labyrinthine recesses, the confusion of obsolete practices, genuine advances, preposterous claims and conflicting theories that characterised a medicine only loosely and unsatisfactorily organised as a profession, and still largely – though this took many different forms – governed by an entrepreneurial spirit.