Book Description

Roy Porter's two key assumptions are, first, that the human body is the chief signifier and communicator of all manner of meanings - religious, moral, political and medical alike - and, second, that pre-scientific medicine was an art which depended heavily on performance, ritual, rhetoric and theatre. In a text at once robustly humorous and learned, Porter argues that great symbolic weight was attached to contrasting conceptions of the healthy and diseased body, and that such ideas were mapped onto antithetical notions of the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly.