Tasting Lichfield, Touching China: Sir John Floyer's Senses

Abstract

A B S T R A C T. Recent years have seen the growth of a new and newly self-conscious cultural historiography of the senses. This article extends and critiques this literature through a case study of the sensory work and worlds of Sir John Floyer, a physician active in Lichfield during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Floyer is best known for his work on pulse-taking, something which he described as contributing to the art of feeling. Less well known is his first book -a discussion of the tastes of the world and their therapeutic possibilities. The article explicates, contextualizes, and relates these two books and uses this analysis to suggest ways of refining and developing the wider historiography of the senses. It demonstrates how they reveal that what Floyer sensed was closely bound up with the changing ways in which he sensed, particularly when he began feeling the pulse in a 'Chinese ' style. This, the article concludes, suggests that historians of the senses need fundamentally to reconsider the model of culture which underpins their work, focusing less on the ways in which people have interpreted or ordered sensory stimuli, and rather analysing the senses as forms of skill or dynamic ways of engaging with the world.In the mid-1680s a Lichfield physician began investigating the properties of soot. He collected samples from a wood fire and a coal fire and popped each one in turn into his mouth, rolling it around his palate in order to distinguish and describe their tastes. 1 About the same time he visited London and went to Chelsea Physic Garden. There he was ' pleas'd with many Curiosities ' and the 'Ingenuity ' of their ordering ; he admired the ' great Number ' of specimens, and chewed the plants. 2 This was not mere recreational grazing: Sir John Floyer was chewing experimentally. He recorded his perceptions of the tastes and smells, having conferred with the keeper, Mr Watts, whose 'Taste and Smell did very much agree with Mine ', and with his companions, the London Collegiate physicians,

State of the Field: Sensory History

“…Historians have examined the use of touch and taste by seventeenth-century physicians, the ears of past intellectuals and the surveilling senses of the nineteenth-century sanitarian. 52 This work has been alert to the need to distinguish between the self-described sensory habits of individuals or groups and the sensory stereotypes appended to them by others. That caution has been inspired by the pioneering sensory historian Alain Corbin, whose work in the 1980s and 1990s marked sensory history's maturation into a new form of social and cultural history.…”

Taste-Based Medicine

“…15. Jenner (2010) has also addressed the rhetorical use of taste and medicine by Floyer's evocation of the ''pristine sensitivity of ancient palates.'' 16.…”

History of Medicine: Health, Medicine and Disease in the Eighteenth Century

“…64 The best of this work succeeds in integrating the senses, and more particularly the emotions, within prevailing understandings of the impact of individual/collective health identities, medical professionalisation, treatment and institutionalisation. 65 However, the debatable potential for any novel historiography of the senses and emotions fundamentally to elucidate ideas/practices demarcating medicine, and notions of the normal and pathological, has yet to be realised. Meanwhile, the broadening out of historical examinations of pain may be contrasted with the subject’s comparative neglect for the eighteenth century, despite recent studies’ partial corrective for this hiatus.…”