Abstract
It is notable that two of the books Roy Porter wrote late in his shortened life, The Enlightenment and Flesh in the Age of Reason,1 were the ones he cared about most — or so he told friends and colleagues at the time. More clearly than in many of his other works, they show him engaging with age-old problems about the nature of humanity: the relationships between mind and body, reason and flesh, spiritual journeys and material conditions, the conscious self that senses its ability to make free choices and the passionate will that knows it is trapped by nature’s laws. From this perspective, it is easy to see why he turned to the study of the history of medicine with such enthusiasm after being persuaded to come to the Wellcome Institute in 1979, for not only were medical people themselves often impelled to consider such problems carefully and to write about them suggestively, but a range of topics within the medical field brought them into relief. Were diseases caused by forces beyond our control or by bad behaviour? Were institutions like the early modern madhouse really meant to care for their inmates, to salve the consciences of the great and the good, or to remove difficult characters from families and communities? Did medical innovations lead to better health or line the pockets of those who sold the treatments? The whole range of life — from comedy to tragedy, from money-grubbing to sincere philanthropy, from material interests to religious persuasion, from biology to philosophy — is at the medical historian’s disposal, and for someone with an appetite for historical curiosities as large as Roy’s, and for cocking a snoot at the overly self-assured, medical history was a playground.
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Notes
Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001);
Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (London: Allen Lane, 2003).
‘Four Weddings and a Few Books’, Hunter Davies interviews, Roy Porter, Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 7 December 1997: 8–11. Quoted on p. 14 of the essay on Roy Porter’s life by Carole Reeves, at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/histmed/PDFS/Bibiography/Lifeandideas.pdf (hereafter cited as ‘Reeves’).
Roy Porter, ‘William Hunter: A Surgeon and a Gentleman’, in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World, eds William F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 7–34;
Roy Porter, Edward Gibbon: Making History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988).
Geoff Eley and Kieth Nield, ‘Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?’ Social History 5 (1980): 249–71.
Susan Reverby and David Rosner, ‘Beyond “the Great Doctors”’, in Health Care in America: Essays in Social History, ed. Reverby and Rosner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), pp. 3–16.
Perhaps the single most important advocate for this kind of politics-in-history among those concerned with the history of science and medicine was Bob Young, who lectured for a period in Cambridge and who first introduced Roy to the history of science. Also see Roger Cooter, ‘“Framing” the End of the Social History of Medicine’, in Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner, eds, Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 309–37.
Dorothy Porter wrote that Roy was ‘Never really a Marxist intellectually or politically’, while he ‘identified himself to my mother as politically “an old Labour man”, an essential qualification as far as she was concerned to be allowed to date her daughter’: Dorothy Porter, ‘Obtituary: Roy Porter’, History Workshop Journal 54, no. 1 (2002): 266;
Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994).
Roy Porter, ‘Interview with E. P. Thompson’, Socialist History 6 (1994): 29–33. This is an edited transcript of the interview first broadcast on ‘Nightwaves’, BBC Radio 3, 20 May 1993. Cited in Reeves, p. 8.
For instance: ‘Slowly but surely the constraints of the client economy were being replaced by the rather different controls of the open market. The producer and distributor found that they had a new and more impersonal master with whom to struggle for success.’ Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 202.
Some of these ideas were already at work in John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
Simon Schama, ‘The Unruly Realm: Appetite and Restraint in Seventeenth-Century Holland’, Daedalus 108 (1979): 103–23,
and for contingency, see especially his later work, Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle o f the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989), which was based on lectures he gave in Cambridge in 1969–70.
Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), pp. 358, 359, 362.
Roy Porter, ‘Medicina e illuminismo nell’Inghilterra del settecento’, Quaderni Storici 40 (1979): 155–80, reprinted as ‘Medicine and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England’, Society for the Social History of Medicine 25 (1979): 27–40. Quoted in Reeves, pp. 71–2.
Roy Porter, ‘The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below’, Theory and Society 14 (1985): 175–98.
I. S. L. Loudon, ‘A Doctor’s Cash Book: The Economy of General Practice in the 1830s’, Medical History 27 (1983): 249–68;
Matthew Ramsey, ‘The Politics of Professional Monopoly in Nineteenth-Century Medicine: The French Model and its Rivals’, in Professions and the French State, 1700–1900, ed. Gerald Geisen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), pp. 225–305;
Katherine Park, Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 85–117. In my 1981 dissertation, I drew attention to the importance of the growing market economy of early modern England for explaining medical change; this became the ‘medical marketplace’ in my The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 28–69.
Roy Porter, Health for Sale: Quackery in England 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 41, 39.
Indeed, when republished, the book was given a more appropriate title: Roy Porter, Quacks: Fakers and Charlatans in English Medicine (London: Tempus, 2000).
Roy Porter, Disease, Medicine and Society in England 1550–1860 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), p. 35.
Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 166.
Jonathan Andrews et al., The History of Bethlem (London: Routledge, 1997).
Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter, ‘The Rise of the English Drugs Industry: The Role of Thomas Corbyn’, Medical History 33 (1989): 282;
John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, Drugs and Narcotics in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
For an example of the kind of work done there, see John Brewer, ed., Consumption and Culture in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Bibliography, Report, compiled by Dorothy K. Auyong, Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter (Los Angeles: The UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1991); Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, eds, The Consumption of Culhire, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (London: Routledge, 1995).
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© 2007 Harold J. Cook
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Cook, H.J. (2007). Roy Porter and the Persons of History. In: Bivins, R., Pickstone, J.V. (eds) Medicine, Madness and Social History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235359_2
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