Semester
Fall
Date of Graduation
2018
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Type
PhD
College
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Department
English
Committee Chair
Marilyn Francus
Committee Co-Chair
Laura Engel
Committee Member
Laura Engel
Committee Member
Lara Farina
Committee Member
Catherine Gouge
Committee Member
John Lamb
Abstract
Medical Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain argues that the cultural mechanisms responsible for creating and sustaining celebrity culture helped create and sustain commercialized medicine in eighteenth-century Britain. I identify the process by which celebrity and medical culture impact one another as a sociocultural phenomenon that I term medical celebrity. The following chapters present four case studies of how medical celebrity impacted the development of the medical profession, the medical market, cultural representations and perceptions of health and illness, and the patient experience. I engage with the work done by scholars in contemporary and early celebrity studies to shed light on the memoirs, biographies, letters, etc. of culturally significant medical practitioners and patients. As such, I create case studies of the famous surgeons John and William Hunter, the infamous pamphlet war following Robert Walpole’s medical treatment and death, two notoriously ill and healthy actresses, Susannah Cibber and Margaret “Peg” Woffington, and Frances Burney’s infamous letter detailing her mastectomy. This dissertation serves as a typology of medical celebrity, thereby identifying the sociocultural phenomenon at the root of the discussions by medical historians and eighteenth-century scholars who examine intersections between celebrity and medical culture. Ultimately, I argue that eighteenth-century medical celebrity was foundational to contemporary British and American culture and we must examine the function of medical celebrity in contemporary culture in order to understand the development of the medical profession, lived experiences of patients and practitioners, cultural representations and perceptions of medicine, and the medical market.
Recommended Citation
Richards, Katherine, "Medical Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain" (2018). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 3734.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/3734