Review of Noelle Gallagher’s “Satire as Medicine in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century: The History of a Metaphor”

摘要

In this focused piece, Noelle Gallagher unpacks the nuances and the development of the satire-as-medicine commonplace from 1660 to 1760, examining the work of both canonic and understudied authors as they engage with and modify this rhetoric to suit a variety of social, political, and aesthetic goals. Gallagher surveys the many uses and implications of the metaphor by lining up medical and satiric theories and showing how satirists tend to use the trope strategically, "identifying satire as a therapeutic practice sometimes in alignment with, and sometimes in opposition to, the work of contemporary medical practitioners" (18). Ultimately, she suggests that writers employ the satire/medicine commonplace not only to license potentially libelous claims (thus positioning their verbal affronts as unpleasant but necessary cures or therapies), but also to engage with a series of larger cultural debates central to both literary and medical practice, "including the clash between the ancients and the moderns, the divisions between the arts and the sciences, and the shift from a patronage-based system of production to a commercialised marketplace" (18). Gallagher suggests that this metaphor persists with such resilience across the period both because it is remarkably flexible and because it reflects the then-dominant model of health that links physical and mental states of being