“We now prescribe, like doctors in despair”: The Satirist-as-Doctor Metaphor in Early Eighteenth-Century Print

When John Dryden famously stated that the ‘true’ satirist is ‘no more an enemy to the offender than the physician to the patient, when he prescribes harsh remedies to an inveterate disease’, he was participating in what Mary Claire Randolph has termed the ‘medical model of satire.’[i]

This figurative conception of satire, which uses language associated with the practice of medicine to articulate, critique and contest rival theories of satire, appears across a wide range of early modern texts. The satirist retained a metaphorical association with the medical practitioner into the eighteenth century.

Although the suggestion that satire might literally prove a ‘harsh remedy’ to medically-diagnosable faults in its victim’s character and personality became a largely figurative conceit, it is also true that many satirists were also employed as medical practitioners during this period. Examples include: John Arbuthnot, Samuel Garth, Mark Akenside and later comic novelists Tobias Smollett and Oliver Goldsmith. This paper will explore the ways in which the specific metaphor of the satirist-as-doctor was deployed within a broader culture of medical mockery, developing alongside the public’s growing public understanding of —and scepticism towards — both medicine and satire.

[i] John Dryden, ‘Preface to Absalom and Achithophel’, in H. T. Swedenberg Jr and Vinton A. Dearing (eds.) The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols (Berkley: University of California Press, 1956-90), vol 2, pp. 3-38 (p.5); Mary Claire Randolph, ‘The Medical Concept of Satire in English Renaissance Satiric Theory: Its Possible Relationships and Implications’, Studies in Philology, 38.2 (1941), 125-57 (125).