Swift and the physicians: aspects of satire and status.

GEORGE ELIOT wrote that "about the year 1829 the dark territories of pathology were a fine America for a spirited young adventurer." The adventurer was Lydgate, who had preferred Rasselas or Gulliver to the Bible or Bayle's dictionary until he discovered the medical profession, "the finest in the world, presenting the most perfect interchange between science and art, offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good".1 In 1726, when Swift's Gulliver's travels appeared, pathology had yet to emerge even into twilight: this spirited young surgeon was to end his adventure in the dark territories of misanthropy, condemning his professional colleagues as deceivers all: "a Sort of People bred up among us, in the Profession or Pretense of curing the Sick".2 Whereas Lydgate cared "not only for 'cases' but for John and Elizabeth", Gulliver comes to loathe every human individual in a generic hatred. It seems fair to say that the medical profession had a bad press throughout the eighteenth century: it is worth asking why the worst notices were served up by Swift. Admittedly, in Swift's time, surgery "was still a crude art ... little in advance of Hippocratic teaching".3 The physician's doppelgdnger was the quack, the medically unqualified and self-advertising empiric, frantically competing with an emerging (and eventually exclusive) professional body. Often without formal training, the surgeons were lower than the apothecaries and physicians, and it was not until 1745 that the surgeons broke their umbilical liaison with the barbers, Whose tasks included delousing, polling and some minor surgery. But even if one grants the dubious professional boundary to the surgeon's art, Swift's cynical comments on the medical profession are obsessive in their frequency. In 1711 he believed that the queen's life was in danger from mutual disagreement among her physicians (a perhaps not unlikely eventuality) ;4 in private, he equated surgeons with butchers,5 and in Gulliver's travels he set the physician in the company of "a Lawyer, a Pickpocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a Lord, a Gamester, a Politician, a Whoremunger ... an Evidence, a Suborner, a Traytor" (p. 280). When not attacking the physician per se, Swift's satire is memorably at its most savage when using anatomical or surgical metaphors. No opportunity is missed to savage their credibility, at a time when the medical profession was lurching unsteadily into being, burdened with charlatanism. Wide permutations on high social status and low professional competence made its members very vulnerable to satiric attack.