Boswell's Clap and Other Essays: Medical Analyses of Literary Men's Afflictions (Medical Humanites) - Hardcover

Ober M.D., Dr. William B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809308894 ISBN 13: 9780809308897

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979

Synopsis

In this cock to Aesculapius,” a distin­guished pathologist shows how simple medical analyses can be applied centu­ries later to reconstruct the scene and as­sign a more probable cause of disability or death.

 

The ten essays selected for this volume range from an investigation of Boswell’s repeated infection with gonorrhea to a critical examination of Plato’s account of Socrates’ death in the Phaedo, subjects both ancient and modern. Other essays include studies of the ailments of two medical doctors William Carlos Wil­liams and Chekhov and the disabili­ties of Swinburne, Lawrence, Rochester, Shadwell, Keats, Collins, Cooper, and Smart.

 

Documenting a wealth of physical and psychological symptoms that bear directly upon the writer’s work when there is a medical question,” Dr. Ober writes, consult a doctor” Dr. Ober diagnoses Swinburne’s masochism and penchant for writing flagellatory verse and facetiae as the combined results of anoxic brain damage at birth, sexual im­potence, and the exposure to flagellation at public school. D. H. Lawrence’s dirty words,” he finds, stemmed from Lawrence’s psychological needs. Law­rence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover while tuberculosis was weakening him physi­cally, and the combination of his re­pressed homosexual tendencies and sexual impotence distorted his view of sexual relations. Rochester’s bisexuality and double life” were at the root of his experience, celebrated in his poetry, of premature ejaculation, Dr. Ober shows. Dr. Ober also shatters two legends by proving that Shadwell did not die of self-administered laudanum and that Soc­rates’ death was not reported accurately by Plato.

 

A pathologist by training and prac­tice, more specifically a histopatholo­gist, Dr. Ober has spent most of his life trying to diagnose diseases by looking through a microscope at pieces of tissue removed from the human body by biopsy, at surgery or autopsy. By applying medical analyses, and evidence from other disciplines as well, Dr. Ober scru­tinizes selected literary subjects and brings to their mind-body problems new and often astonishing interpretations.

About this title

About the Author

William B. Ober, M.D., is Patholo­gist and Director of Laboratories, Hack­ensack Hospital, New Jersey, Visiting Professor of Pathology, New Jersey Col­lege of Medicine at Newark.

Review

The work is awesome for its scholar­ship, refreshing in its information, and delightful as to wit and style.” Nor­man Corwin, Westways

Quite simply, William Ober, M.D., writes better, more delightfully and with greater flexibility than most professional critics. . . . On the importance of wit and libertinism at the court of Charles II: Men rose by their levity and women by their willingness to comply with the law of gravity, shortly to be discovered.’”

R. Z. Sheppard, Time

About this edition

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 1979
• ISBN 10: 0809308894
• ISBN 13: 9780809308897
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312