Bodies Politic Cover; Imprint page; Contents; Acknowledgements; Preface; 1. Introductory: Framing the Picture; 2. The Body Grotesque and Monstrous; 3. The Body Healthy and Beautiful; 4. Imagining Disease; Plate Section I; 5. Prototypes of Practitioners; 6. Profiles of Patients; 7. Outsiders and Intruders; Plate Section II; 8. Professional Problems; 9. The Medical Politician and the Body Politic; 10. Victorian Developments; Afterword; References; Select Bibliography; Photographic Acknowledgements; Index
Summary
In a historical tour de force, Roy Porter takes a critical look at representations of the body in death, disease and health, and at images of the healing arts in Britain from the mid-seventeenth to the twentieth century. Porter's key assumptions are that the human body is the chief signifier and communicator of all manner of meanings - religious, moral, political and medical - and that pre-scientific medicine was an art which depended heavily on ritual, rhetoric and theatre. Porter argues that great symbolic weight was attached to contrasting conceptions of the healthy and diseased body, and
