Abstract
The chapter presents the multimodal analysis of three handbills printed for irregular medical practitioners (especially surgeons) in the second half of the seventeenth century. These cultural artefacts, besides describing irregulars’ usually multiple medicaments, include conspicuous images and/or particular fonts used to catch the reader’s eye and improve sales, thus showing their authors’ sophisticated care for typography. The chapter considers how such details interacted with the language of advertising in the early stages of mass communication and marketing procedures. It is this interaction between linguistic and visual features that can lead to such a reversal of status between text and images that words may be interpreted as paratextual additions to visual texts. In conclusion, a source of one of the images is pinpointed so as to show how irregulars popularised scientific publications.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Mountebanks sold quack medicines from platforms where music and other entertainments were also performed. The case of John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, is famous: around 1676, after being banished from court, he mounted a stage in the City and, disguised as a mountebank under the pseudonym of Dr. Alexander Bendo, performed ‘cures’ for some months (see Mullini 2015: 197–203).
- 2.
Irregular practitioners were not necessarily illiterate: some of them had university education, although the College of Physicians seldom acknowledged medical degrees when obtained abroad, even if in famous continental medical schools.
- 3.
- 4.
See the Bibliography. Individual adverts will be quoted by their collection shelfmark, followed—between square brackets—by the number pencilled on each of them.
- 5.
- 6.
This results from the special corpus I created for a previous research by transcribing 307 of the 416 leaflets: the total amount of words is 200,583 (see Mullini 2015).
- 7.
In the British Library collections there is only one handbill whose structure resembles Dr. Russell’s: it is C112f9[126], selling “The Famous Water of Talk and Pearl”, but no surgical operation is shown there.
- 8.
van Leeuwen (2005: 13) speaks of “rhyme” when “two elements, although separate, have a quality in common … a colour, a feature of form … etc.”.
- 9.
Distillation tools were used by apothecaries to prepare herbal remedies, but also by those who, following ancient philosophical and cabalistic thinking and occult traditions, tried to turn cheap metals, such as lead, into gold. Alchemy, though, was also the basis of chemistry which, especially after Paracelsus (1493–1541), started to produce chemical remedies for healthcare, even though magic and esoteric belief remained connected to it.
- 10.
J. Russel, professor of physick, and oculist, Bodleian Library. The same frame (but after the substitution of two images) was used by a later practitioner (Harley 5931[76]): this reveals, at least, that this page layout was so successful that it was employed as a brand.
- 11.
The positive face is defined as a person’s desire to be appreciated by others. For this concept, see Brown and Levinson (1987: 61).
- 12.
Very probably because of the relevance of venereal diseases and of the pressing demand for cures for them in late seventeenth century (see Siena 2004), this paragraph is signalled by a manicule, thus attracting the reader’s eye sooner than other parts of the narrative.
- 13.
Around 1590, roman type superseded black letter (see King 2013), but in the last quarter of the seventeenth century the title-pages of some medical treatises included at least one black-letter line (see images in Taavitsainen and Pahta 2010, CD ROM, “EMEMT Gallery”). On the semiotic and social meaning of black-letter texts in the period as “typographic nostalgia”, see Lesser (2006: esp. 107).
- 14.
- 15.
It is well-known that wig-wearing became fashionable during the Restoration as a status symbol.
- 16.
In the corpus (see note 6), the words “eye” and “eyes” (connected to the cures offered by medical practitioners) occur 49 and 142 times, respectively. “Eyes” ranks fifth in a 25-item list of the body parts most frequently mentioned in the adverts, after “head”, “stomach”, “reins”, and “teeth”, which are present 473, 223, 212, and 167 times respectively. The list was obtained by processing the corpus with a concordancer.
Bibliography
551a32: A Collection of 231 Advertisements, etc. The Greater Part English and Chiefly Relating to Quack Medicines, the Rest German Descriptions of Commemorative Coins and Medals [1675-1715] (BL shelfmark).
Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Brown, Penelope, and Steven Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
C112f9: A Collection of 185 Advertisements, Chiefly Relating to Quack Medicines. The Greater Part English, the Rest French, German and Italian [1660-1716] (BL shelfmark).
Defoe, Daniel. 1722. A Journal of the Plague Year. London: Printed for E. Nutt; J. Roberts; A. Dodd; and J. Graves. Accessed via Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Furdell, Elizabeth Lane. 2002. Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern London. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.
Harley 5931. J. Bagford, Collection for the History of Printing (BL shelfmark).
King, John N. 2013. Introduction. In Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design. Milton Park: Routledge.
Leech, Geoffrey N. 1966. A Linguistic Study of Advertising in Great Britain. London: Longmans.
Lesser, Zachary. 2006. Typographic Nostalgia: Play-Reading, Popularity, and the Meanings of Black Letter. In The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Marta Straznicky, 99–126. Amherst/Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.
Matthews, Leslie G. 1964. Licensed Mountebanks in Britain. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 19 (1): 30–45.
Mullini, Roberta. 2015. Healing Words. The Printed Handbills of Early Modern London Quacks. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
———. 2016. ‘I Cornelius à Tilbourn’: Hotchpotches, Poisons, Antidotes and Royal Gifts. In Chlorophyll Killers, ed. Jan Marten I. Klaver and Giuseppe Puntarello, 119–148. Fano: Aras.
Pelling, Margaret. 1998. The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England. London: Longman.
———. 2003. Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians and Irregular Practitioners 1550–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Porter, Roy. 1989. Health for Sale: Quackery in England 1650–1850. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Scultetus, Johannes. 1674. The Chyrurgeons Store-House: Furnished with Forty Three Tables Cut in Brass, in Which Are All Sorts of Instruments, Both Ancient and Modern; Useful to the Performance of All Manual Operations. London: Printed for John Starkey. Accessed via Early English Books Online.
Siena, Kevin P. 2004. Venereal Diseases, Hospitals and the Urban Poor: London’s “Foul Wards”, 1600–1800. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.
Taavitsainen, Irma, and Päivi Pahta, eds. 2010. Early Modern English Medical Texts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Thompson, C.J.S. 1928. Quacks of Old London. London: Brentano’s.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. 2005. Introducing Social Semiotics. Milton Park: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mullini, R. (2018). Graphic Surgical Practice in the Handbills of Seventeenth-Century London Irregulars. In: Tweed, H.C., Scott, D.G. (eds) Medical Paratexts from Medieval to Modern. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73426-2_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73426-2_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-73425-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-73426-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)