Dr. Rush and Mr. Peale: The Figure of the Animal in Late Eighteenth-Century Medical Discourse

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Dr. Rush and Mr. PealeThe Figure of the Animal in Late Eighteenth-Century Medical Discourse Janie Hinds (bio) Among the common mechanisms for understanding human bodies, in sickness and in health, proliferating among professionals and laypeople alike during the transatlantic long eighteenth century was the nonhuman animal. Often used analogously with the human body, “the animal” body served as a flexible model for health and sickness. In particular, representations of nonhuman animals in the medical discourse of this era exemplified health as maintained through vigorous activity, “natural” for animals but, among humans of the middle and élite classes, learned and maintained to combat a near-natural, culturally sustained tendency to idleness. Always problematical, inactivity has a history of nonnormativity: earlier Judeo-Christian cultures named sloth a sin; the more secular, Western long eighteenth century reconfigured inactivity and called it pathology. By the late eighteenth century, when Benjamin Rush and Charles Willson Peale were contributing to a public understanding of sickness and health in Philadelphia, idleness as figured in official and vernacular medicine had become so pathological as to produce its absolute medical prohibition, and further, to warrant widespread encouragement, at least among the “middling sorts,” of its opposite—constant activity—as prophylaxis against almost every disease. Animals contributed to a common perception of human idleness as pathological, whether “the animal” was viewed as analogous to or biologically the same as the human. Permeated by assumptions inherited from the Old World about social rank, human-nonhuman kinship—the possibility of at least physiological commonalities—buttressed much of this discourse on physical activity. The issue of human-animality at bottom involved the mutually constructive relationship between nature and culture, a mutating ideology that in turn authorized and was shaped by rank and class. The [End Page 641] early modern cultural figure of the animal worked as a discursive agent within a health and fitness sign system already embedded in class stereotypes inherited from America’s English and Continental history—for example, the hearty laborer, healthy as a horse, strong as an ox. I examine this figure by looking at how class coding contributed to understandings about and authority attached to the physiological and medical domains of disease and wellness. The “animal,” as synecdoche for “nature,” attached to working and lower-middling classes by way of contact or proximity: not only did the lower orders participate in animal-like health and strength, but anyone could, through contact, absorb animalistic attributes. Within this medical discourse can be seen an American revision of Old World class and rank structures to identify the lower and middle classes with health and activity and the élite with distance, “objectivity,” and disinterestedness. Common beliefs about sickness and health, idleness and activity circulated through various practices of official and vernacular medicine. Disease and medicine were not the sole province of professional doctors during the eighteenth century, either in Europe or the United States. As Juliet McMaster succinctly puts it, “People in the eighteenth century were used to doctoring themselves and each other” (277). Most could not afford doctors, and medicine was not as distinctly professionalized as it would soon become. Common medical theories and practices developed through various discourses, broadly disseminated orally and in writing. Medical historian Roy Porter elaborates: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the common reader could find out about regimen and remedies in general interest publications such as almanacs as well as in volumes specifically devoted to medical advice, for example, John Wesley’s Primitive physick. … [W]orks such as William Buchan’s Domestic medicine dispensed traditional lay medical lore mixed with élite Edinburgh therapeutics, all filtered and regularized through the pen of the trained physician. The early English novel, to look at another genre, shows how medical issues were often extremely close to the surface. After all, the first great English novelist was author of Journal of the plague year. (“Lay Medical Knowledge” 140) Medical knowledge in the United States circulated similarly, cross-fertilizing in various discourse practices—letters, books, lectures public and professional—among Europe and England’s more famous doctors, [End Page 642] George Cheyne and Erasmus Darwin among them, and those in the United States like Edinburgh-trained Benjamin Rush. The...