Historians of science and medicine have long argued for the need to recover non-specialist views of medicine and health, as research has often concentrated on practitioner accounts. In this paper, we examine medical discourse in the British periodical the Monthly Review. Published monthly from 1749 to 1844, the Monthly was greatly influential in its time. However, it has received limited scholarly attention, due in part to the unwieldy size of its corpus, which spans 96 years and 246 volumes, each composed of three–six monthly issues. We employ statistical topic modelling to analyse the Monthly, revealing the presentation and prevalence of various public medical discourses, as well as how these discourses varied over the course of the periodical’s almost 100 years. As the Monthly aimed to review every published text, it provides records of and contemporary discussions about thousands of texts currently lost from archives. This analysis of the Monthly ultimately sheds light on the medical topics and texts that featured prominently in British public discourse during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
This essay examines Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s changing efforts to grapple with his unprecedented celebrity through each of his major autobiographical texts (the Confessions, the Dialogues, and the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire). It argues that Rousseau advocates a new, if ultimately untenable, model of celebrity that emphasizes the authenticity of the author’s embodied person. With this new model, Rousseau suggests that his person must be read along with his texts. Highlighting the author’s fraught attempts to manage his celebrity through his autobiographical texts, the essay explores the inherent slippages between Rousseau’s embodied person, textual representation, and celebrity persona.
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