Aesthetics and Anesthetics at the Revolution

Abstract

As Byron well knew, we are extremely distrustful of physicians. The medical care which Juan undergoes, like the treatment Byron received at Missolonghi, almost kills him. But what Byron also points to here is a general ambivalence that may be the source of this antimedical prej udice: we need the physician, and are forced to trust him, during times of ill-health. Sickness and its attendant pains disempower us, and the only hope for re-empowerment is to submit ourselves to the expert in bodily matters. In other words, physical reempowerment necessitates a further disempowerment, as we resign control of ourselves to the hands of another. Questions of empowerment are political questions. Thus the resig nation of the individual to the physician has the overtones of a kind of tyranny. But as this passage from Donju?n points out, this resignation is potentially liberating, and ultimately for our own good. Medicine's liberating potential was trumpeted at the end of the eighteenth century as perhaps at no other time. With a marked development in the theory and technology of healing, medicine offered a nouveau r?gime of personal