Dictionary of protopharmacology: therapeutic practices, 1700–1850

orthodox; for Flynn, although language inscribes and revises reality, the body is a fixed term: a formless mass of base material which frustrates inscription and transcendance. Moreover, it has no anatomy or physiology. Although she mentions George Cheyne's English malady, she does not consider the implications of the psychosomatic nature of this disease. The only creature in her book which enjoys "a nervous presence, a tremulous emotion sympathetic in its neurological connections" (p. 157), is a parrot shot by Robinson Crusoe (a sign of her bias towards the marginal). Her book is deficient because Defoe and Swift are not fully represented here; but neither can they be used, as Flynn does, to represent the full range of opinion in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth-century body in her account is never revered as a temple for the soul or enjoyed as an agent of pleasure. It is always coarse, never refined, and neither governed by humours, animated by hydraulics or aetherialized by circulating nervous spirits and vibrating fibres. Bodies past and present are for Flynn "opaque material that obscure any meaning larger than their corporeal presence". (p. 9) They merely "block" the desire for transcendence which she assumes was the primary ideal of the eighteenth century.