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Lunchtime Seminar: Stephen Pender, ‘To Lose the Physician: Friendship and Medical Counsel in Early Modern Europe’

Wednesday 9th October, 2019

13:00-14:30, Scape 3.01, Mile End Campus, Queen Mary University of London

Professor Stephen Pender (University of Windsor, Ontario) will give a paper titled ‘To Lose the Physician: Friendship and Medical Counsel in Early Modern Europe’. All are welcome.

Abstract
In 1772, the physician John Gregory stipulates that practitioners should have sympathy for sufferers, a feeling that “naturally engages” a patient and is “of the utmost consequence to his recovery.”  Sympathy points Gregory towards notions of friendship: “if there is any time a propriety in easy, cheerful, soothing behaviour,” it is at the bedside, “where it is so necessary to forget the physician in the friend.”  The physician lost in the friend: Gregory’s conception of physician-patient interaction has a long history, culminating in early modern assertions about physicians’ conduct.  Early modern medical thought drew on a long history of physician-as-friend — from Hippocrates’ claim that doctors should know “the use of what conduces to friendship” through Celsus insistence that patients be enlivened by “entertaining talk” to Seneca’s physician, whom he calls “friend” for his “cheering words” — in order to argue that physicians’ advice should conform to the “counsell of friends,” in Joseph Hall’s words.  This is especially true of emotional distemper: as Robert Burton argues in 1621, when a patient is riven with “heart-eating passions,” his “friends or Physician must be ready to supply that which is wanting.”  A physician must do his “duty,” and “Friends must do theirs.”  In recent work on friendship, specifically on the abiding attention to Cicero’s De amicitia, no scholar, to my knowledge, has treated the intrication of frank talk, consolation, and counsel that is brought into relief at the early modern bedside by the physician-as-friend.  Thus this paper explores claims like Laurent Joubert’s in 1578: the “feelings a physician has for the patient are … so great that they deserve to be put before all else.”

Biography

Stephen Pender is Professor of English at the University of Windsor, Ontario, in Canada. He is a specialist in early modern literature and intellectual history, the history of rhetoric, and the history of medicine. Recently, he has published articles in Rhetorica, Early Science and Medicine, the British Journal for the History of Science, Philosophy and Rhetoric, and the Intellectual History Review, as well as several chapters in collections of essays including, most recently, a paper on the history of laughter, and a forthcoming chapter on John Donne and medicine for Cambridge University Press. ‘The Anglican Patient: Boyle and the ‘Medicalized Self’ in Early Modern England’, was published in The Seventeenth Century (2015). He is currently at work on the relationship between rhetoric, medicine, and the passions in early modern England, to be published in a monograph, Therapy and the Passions in Early Modern England: Rhetoric, Medicine, Moral Philosophy, which was supported by a SSHRCC grant in intellectual history.

The talk will take place in room 3.01, Scape, Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, see bit.ly/QMcampusmap. On this map, Scape is the building numbered 64 and is located on Mile End Road, opposite to the main university campus.