Leaky Bodies, Bawdy Books: Gonorrhea and Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain
- 1 January 2016
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Project MUSE in Literature and Medicine
- Vol. 34 (2), 320-340
- https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2016.0016
Abstract
In eighteenth-century Britain, reading lewd books was understood to exacerbate gonorrhea. That pathology corresponded to a specific physiological model, which historians describe as the leaky male body. This article demonstrates how the connection between reading and gonorrhea correlated to three phenomena: 1) the neuro-sexual economy of bodily fluids; 2) the effects of reading on the sensible mind and body; and 3) the crossover of erotic and medical literatures. Aware of the physiological power of imagination, authors intentionally wrote to elicit strong physiological and sexual responses in readers. Concerns about the pathological and moral consequences of reading provocative material similarly informed criticisms of both the outright pornographic and the ostensibly medical. Partly in response to such criticisms, medical authors developed a more careful, decorous, and objective tone for writing about sexual topics. Ultimately, the culture of sensibility receded, as did anxieties about involuntary leaks of bodily fluids caused by reading.Keywords
This publication has 20 references indexed in Scilit:
- Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth CenturyPublished by Springer Science and Business Media LLC ,2012
- The medical practice of the sexed body: women, men and disease in Britain , circa 1600-1740.Social History of Medicine, 2005
- "Only to Sink Deeper": Venereal Disease in Sense and SensibilityEighteenth-Century Fiction, 2004
- The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and PresentThe Sixteenth Century Journal, 2002
- Stories of the Origin of Syphilis in Eighteenth-Century England: Science, Myth, and PrejudiceEighteenth-Century Life, 2000
- The Evolution of Medical Research Writing from 1735 to 1985: The Case of the Edinburgh Medical JournalApplied Linguistics, 1992
- Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and the Activity of the Experimental Article in ScienceCollege Composition and Communication, 1989
- Laurence Sterne: The Later Years.Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1987
- Observations on man, his frame, his duty and his expectations, 1749.Published by American Psychological Association (APA) ,1948
- ART. XXXIII.???A Treatise on the Venereal DiseaseThe American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 1859