Medical Writing | Francis McKee (essay date 1995)
Francis McKee (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: “Honeyed Words: Bernard Mandeville and Medical Discourse,” in Medicine in the Enlightenment, edited by Roy Porter, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995, pp. 223-54.
[In the following essay, McKee discusses the language, discourse, and medical knowledge in Bernard Mandeville's 1711 work A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions.]
In 1711 Bernard Mandeville published the first edition of one of his best known works, A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions. The book aims to teach patients suffering from hypochondria how to question medical rhetoric and it is woven together from a combination of a wide variety of disparate texts—recipes, stories, quotations, diagnosis, case histories, articles, cited authorities etc. The cumulative effect of this mixture is a questioning of the origins of medical discourse and, indeed, the origin of an illness such as hypochondria...
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