Professor Stephen Pender (University of Windsor, Ontario) will give a paper titled \u2018To Lose the Physician: Friendship and Medical Counsel in Early Modern Europe\u2019. All are welcome.<\/p>\n
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Abstract<\/u>
\nIn 1772, the physician John Gregory stipulates that practitioners should have sympathy for sufferers, a feeling that \u201cnaturally engages\u201d a patient and is \u201cof the utmost consequence to his recovery.\u201d\u00a0 Sympathy points Gregory towards notions of friendship: \u201cif there is any time a propriety in easy, cheerful, soothing behaviour,\u201d it is at the bedside, \u201cwhere it is so necessary to forget the physician in the friend.\u201d\u00a0 The physician lost in the friend: Gregory\u2019s conception of physician-patient interaction has a long history, culminating in early modern assertions about physicians\u2019 conduct.\u00a0 Early modern medical thought drew on a long history of physician-as-friend \u2014 from Hippocrates\u2019 claim that doctors should know \u201cthe use of what conduces to friendship\u201d through Celsus insistence that patients be enlivened by \u201centertaining talk\u201d to Seneca\u2019s physician, whom he calls \u201cfriend\u201d for his \u201ccheering words\u201d \u2014 in order to argue that physicians\u2019 advice should conform to the \u201ccounsell of friends,\u201d in Joseph Hall\u2019s words.\u00a0 This is especially true of emotional distemper: as Robert Burton argues in 1621, when a patient is riven with \u201cheart-eating passions,\u201d his \u201cfriends or Physician must be ready to supply that which is wanting.\u201d\u00a0 A physician must do his \u201cduty,\u201d and \u201cFriends must do theirs.\u201d\u00a0 In recent work on friendship, specifically on the abiding attention to Cicero\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Thus this paper explores claims like Laurent Joubert\u2019s in 1578: the \u201cfeelings a physician has for the patient are … so great that they deserve to be put before all else.\u201d<\/p>\n
Biography<\/u><\/p>\n
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<\/em>, Early Science and Medicine<\/em>, the British Journal for the History of Science<\/em>, Philosophy and Rhetoric<\/em>, and the Intellectual History Review<\/em>, 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. \u2018The Anglican Patient: Boyle and the \u2018Medicalized Self\u2019 in Early Modern England\u2019, was published in The Seventeenth Century<\/em> (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<\/em>, which was supported by a SSHRCC grant in intellectual history.<\/p>\n