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Phyllis Hembry's systematic 1990 investigation into English spas remains the referential scholarly work on the subject. Eighteenth-century printed texts on Bath are copious and diverse, ranging from medical treatises and controversies to songs and satirical poems. By contrast, the publications on the remaining 345 spas, springs and watering places vary greatly in quantity, genre and tone. Some small cold-water spas, like St Mungo's Well in Yorkshire, generated a lot of medical literature, medium-sized spa towns like Scarborough had their own yearly publication of
psychoanalytic knowledge and the Freudian legacy in France. Several chapters condemned Dolto in particular. 10 Other critics took issue less with Dolto personally so much as the use made of her ideas, methods and reputation by her successors, imitators and disciples – the sort of people denounced by Élisabeth Roudinesco on Dolto’s centenary in 2008 as the ‘idolaters [who] keep on sanctifying her’. 11 For Dominique Mehl, Dolto’s major legacy was to inaugurate an entire genre of mass media intervention by psychoanalysts, while
entertained a deep connection with local Catholic politics (mostly in Ireland and Wales). Others, such as stopped wells found in cellars, were the object of post-Reformation tales. Some local urban wells had their waters analysed and advertised by medical doctors and yet held on to their patron saint's name. Finally, although medical treatises on waters did multiply in eighteenth-century Britain, many of them had already been published in previous centuries. The genre started as early as the fourteenth century, as Marylin Nicoud argues, and the scientific discourse on
‘ ordinaire ’ or, worse, ‘ vulgaire ’. 43 Such terms also served to police gender norms. Simone de Beauvoir recalled that a real ‘lady’ [ une dame ‘comme il faut’ ] ought not to show too much bosom, or wear short skirts, or dye her hair, or have it bobbed, or make up, or sprawl on a divan, or kiss her husband in the underground passages of the metro: if she transgressed these rules, she was ‘not a lady’ [ elle avait mauvais genre ]. 44 The most egregious marker of
publications do testify to a wider curiosity about the nature and effects of mineral waters than the self-serving interest pointed at by Porter and Hembry, in line with Bramble's criticism of ‘medical encomiasts’. Promotion and competition are too obvious in all these treatises to be ignored, but were not the only reasons for their publication: promotional discourse was often woven in a larger interest in therapeutics, puzzling cases and natural history. Water treatises were a lively medical genre with a long history rooted in the late medieval period in Italy
Although this piece cannot be attributed to the rising genre of scientific poetry, the playful use of mineral elements to evoke desire introduces a discrepancy between the poetic appeal to the object of desire and a mock analysis of their mineral component. 32 The tone evolves as the poet is aroused by the spectacle of Celia bathing: ’Tis only now the uxorious wave Does your divine Perfection view
combating gambling was a matter of public health for the nation. Beyond the preservation of the interests of the landed aristocracy, the number of gambling-related suicides raised major concerns. Some heartbreaking stories made the news and circulated in various literary genres. Goldsmith's Life of Richard Nash included several such narratives, probably meant to warn readers while satisfying their thirst for narrative tension, in line with the novel-writing strategies of the century. Goldsmith used the effective novelistic trope of inserting a letter within the book at
, as Giana Pomata explains in her study of the evolution of this medical genre. 58 Having said that, the high level of Wall's entrepreneurial spirit is beyond doubt: he later became the head of a porcelain company in Worcester. Wall's self-promotion and the successful attempt at becoming a scientific authority on the medical use of Malvern waters must have played a part in his treatise. The accumulation of successful case histories in Wall's book reminds the reader of similar quack rhetoric found
, ‘his interpretive instincts, however, were good’. 32 The life of Richard Nash reads indeed like a collection of anecdotes, a major form pervading the literary genres involved in spreading knowledge in the eighteenth century, from medical treatises to periodicals and biographies. Goldsmith's perspective on Beau Nash, however, is not hagiographical. He makes several forays into the ambivalence of the character, and most notably into his complex relationship
Figure 12.1 William Hogarth, frontispiece to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) (detail) 253 Burlesque bellies belief that life – and character – could be faithfully rendered only if they were shown ‘in progress’, the bodies in his pictures are always represented in action,4 physiologically registering and displaying (as in the painting of Schutz) the consequences of the characters’ modes of life. One of the most eloquent exercises in the genre – and also, interestingly, one of Hogarth’s most famous pictures – is A Midnight Modern Conversation (1733), in