Exhibition : Dr. Samuel Johnson and eighteenth century medicine , 5 January - 2 March 1984 / Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.

  • Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine
Date:
1984]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Exhibition : Dr. Samuel Johnson and eighteenth century medicine , 5 January - 2 March 1984 / Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    1 Introduction To display Johnson's connections with eighteenth century medicine is a task which involves the whole life of Johnson and the whole history of eighteenth century medicine and literature. The interrelation of the literary with the medical world and Johnson's involvement with both means that one picks up the end of a thread unaware of where it will lead. An agreement between John Newbery, the publisher and seller of patent medicines, and Mrs Mary Packe [see case 14] can lead to the fact that it was John's nephew Francis to whom Johnson sold the manuscript of 'The Vicar of Wakefield' to pay Goldsmith's rent and rescue him from arrest for debt [see case 12]; but it can also lead to Johnson's visit to Christopher Smart confined as a mental patient in St. Luke's or Bethlem Hospital, since Smart's signature as witness appears on the document and he is known to have worked for Newbery. Equally it can lead to Dr. Robert James, Johnson's Lichfield friend, to whose Medicinal Dictionary Johnson made substantial contributions and whose fever powder the publisher Newbery assiduously promoted even in the children's book Goody Two Shoes in which Margery's father was 'seized with a violent fever in a place where Dr. James's fever powder was not to be had and where he died miserably'. Johnson too was loud in its praises and defended it even after James's death when the legal case concerning its formula still continued. Indeed, the whole of the literary world seems to have had its fevers assuaged by it. Horace Walpole extravagantly averred that he would take James's powder if his house were on fire. Nor within the literary or the medical world were the boundaries clear-cut. Of the ten members of the Ivy Lane Club founded by Johnson in 1749,