Abstract
In fashion and disease, time is of the essence. Both states are determined against historical precedent: fashion is legible in its difference from what has preceded it, while diagnosis also marks a shift into abnormality, as ‘a cultural expression of what society is prepared to accept as normal and what it feels should be treated’. This chapter will use a study of the ‘à la mode disease’ (syphilis/the pox) to explore the intersections of disease, fashion and temporality in the early eighteenth century. It will focus on the work of a prominent syphilis surgeon and physician, Daniel Turner (1667–1741), whose textbook Syphilis. A Practical Dissertation on the Venereal Disease (1717)) was reprinted several times in the first half of the century. In this text, Turner displays a keen awareness of the pox’s competing temporalities—its history, causes, pathology, progression, treatment, cure and afterlife.
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Notes
- 1.
A. Jutel (2009) ‘Sociology of Diagnosis: A Preliminary Review’, Sociology of Health and Illness, 31:2, 279.
- 2.
For a detailed discussion of Turner’s career, see P. K. Wilson (1999) Surgery, Skin and Syphilis: Daniel Turner’s London (1667–1741) (Amsterdam: Rodopi).
- 3.
S. Lochlann Jain (2007) ‘Living in Prognosis: Toward an Elegiac Politics’, Representations, 98:1, 78.
- 4.
‘à la mode, adv., adj., n., and prep.’. Oxford English Dictionary Online. September 2015. Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/4521?redirectedFrom=a+la+mode (accessed 4 March 2014); Gordon Williams (1994) A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols (Atlantic Highlands: Athlone), 1, pp. 13–14.
- 5.
G. Harvey (1689) The Art of Curing Diseases by Expectation (London: James Partridge), sig. E8v.
- 6.
On English Francophilia and the pox, see R. Hentschell (2005) ‘Luxury and Lechery: Hunting the French Pox in Early Modern England’, in K. Siena (ed.), Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies), pp. 133–58.
- 7.
D. Turner (1717) Syphilis. A Practical Dissertation on the Venereal Disease (London: R. Bonwicke et al.), sig. D2r; original emphasis.
- 8.
1697 and 1684, respectively: ‘toilet, n.’. Oxford English Dictionary Online. September 2015. Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/202921?rskey=6iJ6QV&result=2&isAdvanced=false (accessed 19 November 2015); ‘tête-à-tête, adv., n., and adj.’. Oxford English Dictionary Online. September 2015. Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/199795?rskey=Kd7KQe&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed 19 November 2015).
- 9.
In Williams vol. 1, p. 13; ‘à la mode, adv., adj., n., and prep.’ Oxford English Dictionary Online.
- 10.
J. Craik (1994) The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London and New York: Routledge), p. 6.
- 11.
N. Ward (1709) The Secret History of Clubs (London: np), sig. D2v.
- 12.
N. Ward and T. Brown (1705) The Legacy for the Ladies (London: H. Meere), sig. M4v.
- 13.
P. Glennie and N. Thrift (2009) Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press); S. Sherman (1996) Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries and English Diurnal Form 1660–1785 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press).
- 14.
Glennie and Thrift, Shaping the Day, p. 198; Sherman, Telling Time, p. 4.
- 15.
Glennie and Thrift, Shaping the Day, p. 24.
- 16.
A. Cunningham and O. P. Grell (2000) The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine, and Death in Reformation Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press).
- 17.
A recent overview of this research, and argument for pre-Columbian English cases, is provided in Don Walker, Natasha Powers, Brian Connell and Rebecca Redfern (2015) ‘Evidence of skeletal treponematosis from the medieval burial ground of St. Mary Spital, London, and implications for the origins of the disease in Europe’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 156:1, 90–101.
- 18.
A. Pope (1735) ‘The Second Satire of Dr John Donne’, in H. Davis (ed.) (1966) Pope: Poetical Works (London: Oxford University Press), lines 47–49.
- 19.
A. Skuse (2014) ‘Wombs, Worms and Wolves: Constructing Cancer in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine, 27:4, 645–46.
- 20.
J. Stacey and M. Bryson (2012) ‘Queering the Temporality of Cancer Survivorship’, Aporia, 4:1, 12.
- 21.
C. Quétel (1990) History of Syphilis, trans. J. Braddock and B. Pike (London: Polity Press and Basil Blackwell), p. 84.
- 22.
J. Emsley (2005), The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 35, 39.
- 23.
Turner dismisses the claimed effectiveness of medicinal defences against the pox and suggests a lack of propriety in promoting any future effective preventative—a view he shared with men such as Joseph Cam in A Practical Treatise: Or, Second Thoughts on the Consequences of Venereal Disease (London: 1729, 3rd edn), sigs. E2v–E3r, and Daniel Sennert in Two Treatises (London: 1660), sig. F2r–v (Siena, pp. 18–19).
- 24.
S. L. Macey, (1976) ‘Hogarth and the Iconography of Time’, in R. C. Rosbottom (ed.), Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 5, 41–54; P. Wagner (2001) ‘Representations of Time in Hogarth’s Paintings and Engravings’, in D. Bindman, F. Ogée and P. Wagner (eds), Hogarth: Representing Nature’s Machines (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press), pp. 102–22.
- 25.
F. Haslam (1996) From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine in Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), p. 102.
- 26.
On the increased emphasis on the eighteenth-century bawd as perpetuator of prostitution, see S. Carter (2004) Purchasing Power: Representing Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century English Popular Print Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate).
- 27.
N. F. Lowe (1996) ‘The Meaning of Venereal Disease in Hogarth’s Graphic Art’, in L. E. Merians (ed.), The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky), p. 169.
- 28.
E. Cock (2016) ‘Affecting glory from vices: Negotiating Shame in Prostitution Texts, 1660–1750’, in P. Maddern and J. McEwan (eds), Performing Emotions in the Medieval and Early Modern World (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming).
- 29.
In E. Soulier-Détis (2010) Guess at the Rest: Cracking the Hogarth Code (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2010), p. 28; emphasis added.
- 30.
M. Palmer Tilley (1950) A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Collection of the Proverbs Found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the Period (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), B184. See also ‘Go to bed with the lamb and rise with the lark’ (B186), ‘He that lies long in bed his estate feels it’ (B188), and ‘He that has the Name (fame) to be an early riser may sleep till noon’ (N26).
- 31.
D. Bindman (1981) Hogarth (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 58.
Bibliography
Floyer, J. (1707) The Physician’s Pulse-Watch; Or, an Essay to Explain the Old Art of Feeling the Pulse, and to Improve it by the Help of a Pulse-Watch (London: Sam Smith and Benjamin Walford).
Turner, D. (1717) Syphilis. A Practical Dissertation on the Venereal Disease (London: R. Bonwicke, et al).
Ward, E. (1709) The Secret History of Clubs: Particularly the Kit-Cat, Beef-Stake, Vertuosos, Quacks, Knights of the Golden-Fleece, Florists, Beaus, &c (London: np).
Ward, E. and T. Brown (1705) The Legacy for the Ladies: Or, Characters of the Women of the Age (London: H. Meere).
Wiseman, R. (1676) Severall Chirurgicall Treatises (London: E. Flesher and J. Macock).
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Cock, E. (2016). The à la Mode Disease: Syphilis and Temporality. In: Ingram, A., Wetherall Dickson, L. (eds) Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59718-2_4
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