Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Paul William Child, author of The Dean Disordered: Jonathan Swift and Humoral Medicine

What inspired you to write this book? 

While there is always the inspiration of the great literary criticism, biography, and medical history that has come before me, my own book was not so much inspired in a white flash as it was milled out over many years, one question about Jonathan Swift and his health and his writings leading to another, leading to another and yet another. Burrowing deeper into Swift’s accounts of his illnesses and their medical contexts, I recognized that our modern diagnoses of his chronic ailments, long regarded as an article of casual faith, demanded scrutiny. My attention turned from those clinical diagnoses to reconstructing what he thought he suffered from, in his own medical terms, and to what he thought he could do about his chronic disorders. But my persistent concern: So what if we diagnose Swift’s illnesses according to his own humoral understanding of the body rather than our clinical one? Why does that even matter? Working my way through the inquiry, I came to realize that understanding his body and ailments on his own terms opens new ways of seeing his life and new ways of reading imaginative works such as Gulliver’s Travels and the so-called scatological poems.

What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? 

Having long accepted without second thought that Swift suffered from what the modern clinic says he suffered from—Ménière’s disease, an idiopathic, incurable inner ear disorder that made him totter dizzily, deafened him, at times terrified and disabled him—I learned to listen instead to the man himself and understand his illnesses on his own terms, as imbalances of the fluid humoral body in which he lived. My hope is that by historicizing his experiences of illness, readers will see new possibilities for understanding Swift himself and the ways that he represented himself in his imaginative writings.

The years that I gave to this study did little to serve whatever modest career ambitions I had. But I learned that I could never have completed it as a younger man. It is about an ill and aging person who finds himself increasingly isolated and irrelevant. The study, I hope, tells us something about all of ourselves, as we negotiate our own inevitable illnesses and aging, trying to understand and express them as best we can, in our own imperfect ways, as did Swift.

What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? 

What surprised me most was just how much there is to say about Swift and his health. The study began with offhand questions prodded—provoked in irritation, perhaps—by his relentless complaints in correspondence about his “Giddiness,” deafness, and “Noise in the Ears.” What emerged organically from investigating these questions was a wobbly, hardly containable study of early modern medicine; Swift’s understanding and representation of his own illnesses and his often-desperate attempts to maintain humoral balance; the impact of his chronic ailments and disabilities on his social life and identity; the stories that other people have told about the Dean’s disorders (including now my own, I suppose); and the ways in which we might read his imaginative works anew in light of this new (older) understanding of his health. There’s much-much to talk about. I hope only that I’ve managed to put it all together neatly enough to make sense.

What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?

Because Swift thrived on self-invention—often slipping in and out of character, telling stories about himself in different ways, mimicking persons from all social classes—there are numerous, often conflicting anecdotes about his behaviors and social performances, some of which I cite in the book. The abiding memory for me is not a story so much as an image: In his attempts to maintain humoral balance in an unsteady, fluid body, Swift exercised in ways we might consider obsessive even today: running, walking, rowing, horseback riding, swimming (an unusual, likely amusing sight in 18th-century Britain). In his later years, he flouted his doctors’ cautions that he was overdoing it. Toward the end, after he had slipped into senility, he continued to tramp through the halls and up and down the stairs of the St. Patrick’s deanery—if we are to believe the testimony of his cousin Martha Whiteway, for as many as ten hours a day. What had begun as exercise for controlling his illnesses and disciplining his body became a defiant act against the doctors and, at last, the image of a restless, lonely, haunted genius always in motion, even when he no longer knew where he was going.

What’s next? 

The Dean Disordered is likely my only book-length study, the product of many years of plodding research and writing. Retirement from teaching lies ahead, but my scholarly work continues, including two articles in progress derived from the book. The first examines the problems with retrospective diagnoses of literary figures’ ailments. Challenging retrospective diagnoses is now a commonplace of medical history, but my emphasis is on how returning writers from the past (Swift, in particular) to their own medical contexts and conceptions of the body and illness leads to more historically nuanced interpretations of their imaginative works. This “theorizing” in hand, the second article reads anew Swift’s notorious scatological poems, every naughty schoolboy’s favorites: “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” “Cassinus and Peter,” “Strephon and Chloe,” “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed.” These “unspeakables” have long offended the sensibilities of polite readers, elicited charges of misogyny, and provoked diagnoses of psychopathy. Without dismissing such responses cavalierly, I suggest that if we read the poems in the context of Swift’s own humoral understanding of the body, we might see the “nymphs” not only as females but also as messy humoral bodies. Because humoralism gendered bodies, maintaining that women’s are moister and more porous than men’s, the women’s struggles to tame their unruly flesh—the same challenge that Swift confronted daily—render the nymphs, in their messy humoral nature, honestly human. This reading highlights the poems’ attention to corporeal realities, offering one historically grounded perspective that complements, rather than excludes, other interpretations.