Understanding Jonathan Swift’s medical and literary life

The Dean Disordered bridges biography and literary criticism to examine the chronic afflictions suffered by the great Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, investigating not only how these ailments affected his day-to-day social life and ambitions but also how he represented them in his correspondence and imaginative writings. By historicizing Swift’s medical issues, Paul William Child returns the creator of the iconic character of Gulliver (a surgeon, notably) to the humoral body that he knew. Child situates Swift’s complaints within the theory of illness as an imbalance of fluid humors that had persisted since classical days, considering how Swift tried to make sense of and contain his own humors through narrative explanation, medical interventions and regimen, performances in the “sick role,” and imaginative representations. Rather than accepting modern diagnoses of Swift’s illnesses, The Dean Disordered reconstructs the medical culture of his time. The book opens a window into Swift’s experience of illness and prompts us to read both the man and his works anew.