Book contents
3 - Transactions of the medical world
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2009
Summary
Fortune of physicians
JOHNSON'S KNOWLEDGE of medicine, then, often brought him into conflict with the professional opinions of his physicians. His medical learning may have been unique among eighteenth-century amateurs, but he was of course far from the only ‘dabbler’ in medicine who took it upon themselves to dictate treatment:
We had been at Bath but a day, when, on the arrival of the post, Madam proved so very wise, as to show me a letter from Dr. Jebb, afterwards Sir Richard, in which she was pretty bluntly reprimanded for her playing the physician with her children, and earnestly entreated at the same time to forbear giving her daughter what she termed tin pills …
In the act of giving me the Doctor's letter to read, See, See, said Madam with a pert promptitude that always formed one of her chief characteristics, see what fools these physicians are! They presume to know better how to manage children than their mothers themselves!
Baretti's libellous account of Mrs Thrale clearly implies that it would be thought scandalous for her to take the treatment of her children out of the hands of Jebb. We have no way of knowing whether eighteenth-century ladies often treated their doctors in this fashion, or how much eighteenth-century patients obeyed and how much they disregarded their medical advisers, or whether selfmedication was less or even more prevalent than today.
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- Samuel Johnson in the Medical WorldThe Doctor and the Patient, pp. 90 - 140Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991