Destroying to Cure: The Representation of Treatment in Eighteenth Century Medical Treatises.

Sophie Vasset (Universite Paris 7 Denis-Diderot, Paris, France)

In one of the most agonizing passages from Part VII of Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe observes: "the physicians and surgeons may be said to have tortured many poor creatures even to death." Defoe reminds us here that illness itself is not the only thing that elicits suffering -- its treatment is at least as painful, and sometimes even worse. Examining representations of treatments and cures is one potentially illuminating way to investigate eighteenth-century representations of illness, as illness was often conceived simultaneously with its curable potential. [For example, dropsical patients could expect to be "tapped," while "suffering from the stone" would have been associated inescapably with lithotomy.] Eighteenth-century medicine regarded treatment mainly as an process of expulsion, or as an intervention, which often implied mutilation. Illnesses were treated with a variety of purgative medical processes and surgical techniques which all implied some kind of physical destruction. Visual representations of cures and treatments in contemporary medical treatises reflect this notion, with series of plates representing surgical tools (most famously in Diderot's and Chambers' Encyclopedias), scenes of operation, or simply afflicted parts of the body where a treatment should be applied. In this paper I will focus on the visual representation of treatment, how it necessarily implied destruction, and how the visual experience of treatment pervades illness narratives in eighteenth-century fiction.