John Taylor: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Famous Oculist and Quack

Abstract

This paper attempts to shed light on the satires against the notorious oculist John Taylor (1703-72) during his sojourn in Dublin in the spring of 1732. Taylor studied at London’s St Thomas’s Hospital under the pioneering British surgeon William Cheselden. He operated on celebrities all over Europe, travelling in a coach decorated with the motto: ‘Qui dat videre dat vivere (He who gives sight, gives life)’, and marketing himself unabashedly with boisterous shows and expositions of his rare skills as a surgeon. In 1736, Taylor was appointed royal eye surgeon to George II. In March 1750, he operated on Bach’s cataracts in Leipzig, which led to Bach’s becoming perfectly blind, and in August 1758 on Handel, which apparently occasioned the composer’s death in April 1759. During his second visit to Ireland in March and April of 1732, Taylor was attacked in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal as ‘a person of unparallel’d impudence, undeniable assurance, an asserter of scandalous falsehoods, a mountebank, and a quack, who imposes on the public and extorts money from the poor’. At the same time, Taylor became the subject of several satirical attacks and the victim of an April Fool’s joke, most probably organised by Trinity College students, among them, the juvenile William Dunkin, friend and protégé of Jonathan Swift. The paper examines Taylor’s life and literary (self-)representation; it also tries to identify the authors behind the hilarious practical jokes on the mountebank.