Exhibition Booklet - The Royal Society of Medicine

Transcription

Dear Robert
That’s fine. Hope your conversation with Geoff was productive - it seemed sensible to make the link as he was in
the same room
Best Patrick
From: Robert Greenwood [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 30 August 2013 15:56
To: 'Shandy Hall'
Subject: RE: One of Shandy's Physicians?
Dear Patrick
This is the email exchange I referred to this afternoon and which I would like to reproduce in the booklet to go with
Shandy’s Physicians.
Best, Robert
From: Shandy Hall [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 20 March 2013 11:25
To: Robert Greenwood
Hello Robert
The generally accepted (possible) derivation comes from the pubs in Stony Stratford http://www.phrases.org.uk/
meanings/cock%20and%20bull%20story.html#
Since I have been at Shandy Hall I can’t remember any other suggestion…
I’ll check with Geoff Day (Sterne scholar and Trustee) but I am pretty certain that the expression A Sentimental
Journey originates with Sterne. Glad you appreciate our Schwitters connection. We had Eugen Gomringer here in
2009 and Christian Bok and Craig Dworkin have both been artists in res.
Hope we meet before long. I only made it to London once in the last six months – and that included seeing the
Schwitters…
Best Patrick
Sent: 18 March 2013 17:06
To: 'Shandy Hall'
Dear Patrick
Thank you so much. I may well take you up on your offer.
For now, though, would you mind giving me an opinion on two points of Sterneana concerning his possible contributions to the language?
Does the phrase a “cock & bull story” originate with Sterne?
Does the term “a sentimental journal” also originate with Sterne? I am pretty sure it does, and that the popular
song from 1944 written by Les Brown and Ben Homer, with lyrics by Bud Green, therefore pays a largely
unacknowledged tribute to him.
Finally, I am delighted to see that Shandy Hall is sponsoring a performance of the Ursonate. The Schwitters exhibition at Tate Britain is superb.
Best wishes,
Robert.
Sent: 18 March 2013 16:55
Dear Robert
Our messages last year had been floating around what remains of my brain recently and I was intending to ask how
things might be progressing. Excellent news.
If there is anything you would like to borrow for the exhibition that we are able to supply – please, feel free to ask.
Vbest
Patrick
Sent: 18 March 2013 15:16
To: 'Shandy Hall'
Dear Patrick
Please see below for an earlier exchange of emails from last Summer.
I just wanted to let you know that I have been given the go-ahead to mount an exhibition to mark Sterne’s tercentenary. It will be held at the Library of the Royal Society of Medicine from Monday 4th November until 25th January
2014.
Best wishes,
Robert Greenwood.
Sent: 21 August 2012 11:39
I like that interpretation and I am sure Sterne would too. Excellent stuff
Patrick
Sent: 21 August 2012 11:37
To: 'Shandy Hall'
I’m very grateful to you, Patrick, and will, of course, share with you any of my own findings. I’m just off to our basement to look at a couple of ancient journals with biographical articles on Wharton. I wonder if
Wharton’s book included material on the reproductive system and the joke may be that Mrs Wadman has consulted Wharton on that subject but has modestly made out she was researching the brain?
Best,
Robert
Sent: 21 August 2012 11:28
Hello Robert
I’ll check copies of the Shandean to see if anyone has done any work on this section of TS
Dr Patrick Wallis
Lecturer
Department of History
& Institute for the Study of Genetics, Biorisks & Society (IGBiS)
University of Nottingham,
Nottingham NG7 2RD
Is the man interested in Daffy’s Elixir
Sorry for haste again. I have 6 people here who have arrived late
Best
Patrick
Sent: 21 August 2012 11:20
To: 'Shandy Hall'
Thanks for that, Patrick.
It looks like everyone’s got it wrong about Wharton.
All the best,
Robert
Sent: 21 August 2012 11:04
Hello Robert
Here is what Mel New has to say in the Florida edition:
Cf Chambers, s.v. Anatomy: “In effect, Glisson treated particularly of the liver; Wharton of the glands;
Havers of the bones: Graaf of the pancreatic juice, and the parts of generation…. “The best systems of the art, as
it now stands, are those of Verheyen, Drake, Keil, Heister, Winslow &c”
Work, p.636, nn.2,3,*: “James Drake (1667-1707), physician and political writer, was author of a popular medical
treatise called Anthropologia Nova, or a New System of Anatomy.
“Thomas Wharton (1614-1673), a noted anatomist, discussed the nature of the brain in his Adenographia; sive
Glandularum Totius Corporis Descripto.
“Regnier de Graaf (1641 -1673), a celebrated Dutch physician, was the author of works on each of these
subjects; Mrs Wadman probably examined his De Virorum Organis Generationi Inservientibus.”
The James Work edition of TS is a good one 1940 Odyssey Press
Sorry made haste. I’ll look into this more when I’ve spoken to Geoff Day
Best
Patrick
Sent: 21 August 2012 10:09
To: Shandy Hall ([email protected])
Subject: One of Shandy's Physicians?
Dear Patrick
I’ve come across something interesting in my researches towards the exhibition I am hoping to curate here next
year on “Shandy’s Physicians.”
In Book IX Chapter XXVI of Tristram Shandy is a passage that reads:
“[Mrs Wadman] had accordingly read Drake’s anatomy from one end to the other. She had peeped into Wharton
upon the brain, and borrowed Graaf upon the bones and muscles; but could make nothing of it.”
It’s the reference to Wharton that is of most interest. Sterne almost certainly refers here to Thomas
Wharton (1614-1673). In the notes to the Penguin Classics edition of Tristram Shandy, the editor, Graham Petrie,
says that Wharton was “the author of an anatomical work on the structure of the brain.” Interestingly, Petrie does
not name this work – probably because it does not, I think, exist. Wharton’s famous work is “Adenographia: sive,
glandularum totius corporis description” published in 1656. Garrison & Morton’s Medical Bibliography describes it
as “the first thorough account of the glands of the human body, which Wharton classified as excretory, reductive,
and nutrient.”
If anyone had published an important anatomical work on the structure of the brain, it was Thomas Willis (16211675) whose Cerebri anatome: cui accessit nervorum description et usus” (1664) was “the most
complete and accurate account of the nervous system which had hitherto appeared” (Garrison & Morton).
Mrs Wadman is, of course, a character of whom Sterne makes some ribald fun and I wonder if he is here making
some erudite comedy out of the fact that she has consulted all of the wrong books to find out about Uncle Toby’s
injury. There is a clue in that the same passage, with reference to Graaf upon the bones and muscles, includes a
footnote to say “This must be a mistake in Mr. Shandy; for Graaf wrote upon the pancreatic juice, and the parts of
generation.” Of course, the parts of generation are precisely what interest Mrs Wadman.
Do you know of any other commentary on this passage? Is there, perhaps, a concordance to the works of Sterne
that may shed some more light on the subject? I would be grateful if you could please give me your opinion.
In our collection we have works by all three of the authors consulted by Mrs Wadman so I will display them whatever the outcome.
Best wishes,
Robert Greenwood
Assistant Librarian: Rare Books
The Royal Society of Medicine Library
Sterne and Death.
Print made by Thomas Patch 1768
Exhibition Curated by Robert Greenwood— Heritage Officer, RSM Library
Booklet arranged by Ashley Phillips—RSM Library
Acknowledgments
We thought we had lost these, but it turns out they just ended up on the wrong page; so without
further delay the curator would like to thank Ashleigh Blackwood, Clark Lawlor, Patrick Wildgust,
Geoff Day, Andrea Merciar, Ruth Richardson and all at Shandy Hall especially including: Obadiah,
Susannah, and Parson Yorick, and not forgetting Jenny.
The Laurence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall: www.laurencesternetrust.org.uk
Shandy [Of obscure origin; connexion with OE sceand masc., buffoon, charlatan, sceand fem.,
disgrace (see SHOND) is unlikely.] Wild, boisterous; also visionary, empty-headed, half-crazy.
The illustrations on page 10 and 11 of this booklet are from George Cruikshank's illustrations to
Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Wikimedia Commons.
Thanks also to the National Portrait Gallery for allowing us to reproduce Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portrait
of Laurence Sterne for one time use only within (but not on the cover of) a specified book, e-book,
journal or e-journal article or booklet, provided that the publication is non-commercial in purpose
and has a combined print-run/download total of not more than 3,000 copies. It confers no further
rights, and is made on condition that you will notify the Gallery of all reprints beyond this one-time
use and acquire appropriate additional licences for the cumulative print-run/download total, and that
you will caption this image with the name of the artist and the title of the portrait, and credit it: ‘©
National Portrait Gallery, London’, and
that you will not pass it on for third-party
use, crop, change or manipulate it or use
it in any way which is unlawful or
deceptive or which damages the good
name or reputation of the National
Portrait Gallery, the artist or the persons
depicted in the image.
Anyone with information regarding the
copyright owner of the cover design to
Tristram Shandy’s 1974 single,
"Saccharine Sandie Fingers 'N' Thumbs/
Mr Blue" (Tiffany Records) should
contact the curator.
“Nothing odd will do long, Tristram Shandy did not last.”
“ – stop! – go not one foot further into this thorny and
bewilder’d track, - intricate are the steps! Intricate are
the mases of this labyrinth! intricate are the troubles
which the pursuit of this bewitching phantom,
KNOWLEDGE, will bring upon thee. – O my uncle! fly—
fly—fly from it as from a serpent.”
(II: iii)
Sterne’s narrator here implores his Uncle Toby, trying to determine the exact trajectory
of the cannon ball that caused the wound to his groin at the Siege of Namur in 1695, to
be wary of the dangers of getting bogged down in relying on bookish research while in
pursuit of truth and knowledge. “…he was obliged to set off afresh with old Maltus, and
studied him devoutly. -- He proceeded next to Gallileo and Torricellius, wherein, by
certain geometrical rules, infallibly laid down, he found the precise path to be a
PARABOLA, -- or else an HYPERBOLA, -- and that the parameter, or latus rectum, of the
conic section of the said path, was to the quantity and amplitude in a direct ratio, as the
whole line to the sine of double the angle of incidence, form'd by the breech upon a
horizontal plane ; -- and that the semi-parameter…” (II: ii)
Similar pitfalls await anyone who attempts to summarise Laurence Sterne’s novel The
Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in nine volumes between 1759
and 1767. So here goes. What a work it is likely to turn out. Let us begin it.
The York Courant, Tuesday 11 December 1759
Tristram Shandy: A Novel?
Tristram Shandy is a very bookish and learned work. Another library with a collection specialising in the
subject could equally well curate an exhibition of books concerning military history and the science of
fortifications. Tristram’s Uncle Toby finds therapy for the trauma of his wound in overseeing the
reconstruction of military fortifications and sieges on the bowling green of his house. He is aided in this,
his Hobby Horse, by his man-servant Corporal Trim, himself a casualty of war and invalided out from his
soldierly vocation, having suffered, in battle, a catastrophic wound to his knee. Trim finds solace and
compensation in serving Uncle Toby faithfully and to the letter. His devotion also helps, not always
successfully, to suppress his sorrow at the thought of his brother Tom, a prisoner of the Spanish
Inquisition.
Tristram’s father, Walter Shandy, a former Turkey merchant, is determined to find a system to master
the chaos of life, only to be defeated (in fact, self-defeated) in his every attempt. He compiles a
Tristrapaedia” setting out every last detail of his plans for his son’s education. His theory of names
determines that Tristram is the name most to be avoided, so when he commands the servant to tell the
Parson’s curate to Christen the child Trismegistus, the message is garbled and the child is named
Tristram.
The animal spirits are scattered and diffused at the very moment of Tristram’s conception by a question
asked of Walter by Mrs Shandy concerning the household grandfather clock. In trying to impose some
regularity of habit, Mr Shandy winds up the clock and sees to other husbandly duties only on the first
Sunday of every month. The association of ideas this causes in Mrs Shandy’s mind ruins her husband’s
efforts to procreate in a propitious manner creating the right conditions that will, he believes,
determine his son’s future happiness and prospects.
Much dark comedy is made of the fact that “-- Mr. Shandy, my father, Sir, would see nothing in the
light in which others placed it ; -- he placed things in his own light ; -- he would weigh nothing in
common scales ; -- no, -- he was too refined a researcher to lay open to so gross an imposition.” (II: xix)
Concerned that his child should suffer no injury during
childbirth, Walter is attracted to the idea that his son
should be delivered by means of Caesarian section.
“…what a blaze of light did the accounts of the Cæsarian section, and of the towering
geniuses who had come safe into the world by it, cast upon this hypothesis ? Here you see, he would say,
there was no injury done to the sensorium ; -- no pressure of the head against the pelvis ; -- no propulsion
of the cerebrum towards the cerebellum, either by the oss pubis on this side, or the oss coxcygis on that ; -and, pray, what were the happy consequences ? Why, Sir, your Julius Cæsar, who gave the operation a
name ; -- and your Hermes
Trismegistus, who was born so before ever the operation had a name ; -- your Scipio
Africanus ; your Manlius Torquatus ; our Edward the sixth, -- who, had he lived, would have done the same
honour to the hypothesis : -- These, and many more, who figur'd high in the annals of fame, -- all came side
-way, Sir, into the world. This incision of the abdomen and uterus, ran for six weeks together in my father's
head ; -- he had read, and was satisfied, that wounds in the epigastrium, and those in the matrix, were not
mortal ; -- so that the belly of the mother might be opened extremely well to give a passage to the child. -He mentioned the thing one afternoon to my mother, -- merely as a matter of fact ; -- but seeing her turn as
pale as ashes at the very mention of it, as much as the operation flattered his hopes, -- he thought it as well
to say no more of it, -- contenting himself with admiring -- what he thought was to no purpose to propose.” (II: xix)
Well might Mrs Shandy have turned pale as ashes at the very mention of it, as the first
account of a Caesarean delivery from which the mother recovered was published only in 1798.
Doctor Slop
An injury to Tristram’s nose
caused by Dr Slop’s application of the forceps
“In bringing him into the
world with his vile
instruments, he has
crush'd his nose,
Susannah says, as flat as a
pancake to his face, and
he is making a false bridge
with a piece of cotton and
a thin piece of whalebone
out of Susannah's stays,
to raise it up.”
(III: xxvii)
This is disastrous in
Walter’s opinion due to
his conviction that a good,
straight nose is essential
to a man’s fortunes in life.
When a sash window crashes down on part of the
five-year old Tristram as he urinates through the
open window,
“The chamber-maid had left no ******* *** under the bed : ---- Cannot you contrive,
master, quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me
up into the window seat with the other, -- cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time
to **** *** ** *** ****** ? I was five years old. ---Susannah did not consider that nothing was well hung in our family, ---- so slap came the
sash down like lightening upon us…” (V: xvii)
Walter reacts by consulting the ancients on the
subject of circumcision.
“MY father put on his spectacles -- looked, -- took them off, -- put them into the case -- all
in less than a statutable minute ; and without opening his lips, turned about, and walked
precipitately down stairs : my mother
imagined he had stepped down for lint
and basilicon ; but seeing him return with
a couple of folios under his arm, and
Obadiah following him with a large
reading desk, she took it for granted 'twas
an herbal, and so drew him a chair to the
bed side, that he might consult upon the
case at his ease. --- If it be but right done,
-- said myfather, turning to the Section -de sede vel subjecto circumcisionis, ---- for
he had brought up Spencer de Legibus
Hebræo-rum Ritualibus -- and
Maimonides, in order to confront and
examine us all together. –“
Sterne makes great play with the physical properties of the book as an object. Two
marbled pages act as Sterne’s “motley emblem of my work” and two black pages mark
the death of one of the characters, Parson Yorick, and are intended to express, by the
use of print on the page, a sense of loss and mourning that mere words will always fail
adequately to convey.
A diagram of squiggly lines
describes the movement of the
novel’s plot.
A graceful,
drawn in the
the flourish
Corporal
stick to
idea of
curved line
text shows
made by
Trim with his
convey the
freedom.
The pages number jump at the point where a chapter has been omitted.
“-- NO doubt, Sir -- there is a whole chapter wanting here -- and a chasm of ten pages
made in the book by it -- but the book-binder is neither a fool, or a knave, or a puppy -nor is the book a jot more imperfect, (at least upon that score) -- but, on the contrary,
the book is more perfect and complete by
wanting the chapter, than having it…” (IV: xxv)
The author’s preface appears between Chapters 20 and 21 of Volume 3 and not where it
might be expected at the very beginning.
A blank page invites readers to write their own
description of Widow Wadman.
C H A P. XXXVIII.
TO conceive this right, -- call for pen
and ink -- here's paper ready to your
hand. ---- Sit down, Sir, paint her to
your own mind ---- as like your mistress
as you can ---- as unlike your wife as
your conscience will let you -- 'tis all
one to me ---- please but your own fancy in it.
Sterne mocked the pretentions of the novel at an early stage of its development. It is hard not to read his
account of the homunculus as a satire on what the reader is expected to believe of those mere marks on
the page that are presented as literary characters:
“-- engender'd in the same course of nature,-- endowed with the same loco-motive
powers and faculties with us : ---- That he consists, as we do, of skin, hair, fat, flesh, veins, arteries, ligaments, nerves, cartileges, bones, marrow, brains, glands, genitals, humours, and articulations ; ---- is a
Being of as much activity, ---- and, in all senses of the word, as much and as truly our fellow-creature as
my Lord Chancellor of England. -- He may be benefited, he may be injured, -- he may obtain redress ; -- in
a word, he has all the claims and rights of humanity…” (I: ii)
Sterne everywhere sabotages the reader’s expectation of plot and linear narrative. The account of the
life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, is interrupted and so digressive to the point that its hero is not even born until the fourth volume. The reader is treated to the praise of digression, Walter’s
theory of names, Walter’s theory of noses, an account of Tristram’s travels through France, and Slawkenbergius’s Tale. The Curse of Ernulphus is recited at length by Dr Slop against the person who tied up his
bag of obstetrical instruments so tightly and with so many complicated knots that it could not be untied
without injury and without great loss of valuable time (therefore, perhaps, a metaphor for the very book
we are reading), and, when a sermon falls from a book, Corporal Trim is invited to read it aloud. Trim
later recounts the story of Le Fever, and attempts to tell Uncle Toby the Story of the King of Bohemia and
his Seven Castles.
To flout the rules and reader expectations of the realist novel is still a hazardous enterprise, such that
the novelist David Peace can, in 2013, be castigated by a reviewer of his novel Red or Dead for “the
parched, stripped-down cadences of the prose [that] have squeezed the life out of nearly everything the
average fiction-reader holds dear.” The reviewer continues:”… it would take a very charitable reader not
to suspect that the kind of narrative sanctity he aspires to has been bought at the expense of human
interest”, and concludes: “You can only assume that Peace wrote it for that most reliable, persistent and
forgiving audience: himself.”
In some ways, Sterne anticipated those twentieth and twenty-first century modernist authors who
challenge the conventions of the realist novel, and suffered a similar critical reception. Dr Samuel Johnson is reported to have said: “Nothing odd will do long.' Tristram Shandy' did not last.” In 1765, a
Cambridge don wrote of Tristram Shandy: “…however much it may be talked about at present, yet,
depend upon it, in the course of twenty years, should any one wish to refer to the book in question, he
will be obliged to go to an antiquary to inquire for it.” The twentieth-century critic F.R. Leavis
presumably had no recourse to an antiquary to find a copy, but nevertheless objected to Sterne’s
“irresponsible (and nasty) trifling.”
Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Ford Madox Ford’s The
Good Soldier are all examples of novels where it becomes clear that the person telling us the story does
not fully understand its implications, or the motives and worth of the characters described. The narrator,
then, is unreliable and far from omniscient in a way we might not expect of the narrator in the novels of,
say, Charles Dickens. Much the same can be said of Tristram, who may even be said to be overomniscient. How much reliance should we place on a narrator seemingly able to offer meticulously
detailed accounts of entire events and conversations that took place before his birth or in the very earliest
years of his infancy?
The novelist B.S. Johnson (1933-1973) inserted black pages into the narrative of his 1963 novel Travelling
People to show that a character had suffered a heart attack and died. His novel Albert Angelo (1964)
includes pages with square holes cut into them, and, in an attempt to find a format that would convey the
randomness of experience and memory in a way impossible by the writerly imposition of a linear
narrative, Johnson’s novel The Unfortunates (1969) consists of twenty-seven unbound sections to be read
in any order that the reader may prefer. Of necessity, this work is in the form of a book-sized box.
Johnson also, in the manner of Sterne, took to directly addressing the reader, and the American novelist
Gilbert Sorrentino (1929-2006) in his 1969 novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things assures the reader
that they may skip a particular chapter since it will add nothing to the book’s “plot,” tells the reader that
he would rather be reading Tristram Shandy, and later incorporates into the narrative the information
that the clarinettist Pee Wee Russell has just died. The first
pages of Sorrentino’s novel Mulligan Stew (1979) consist of
the rejection letters he received from publishers to whom
he had submitted the novel’s manuscript.
Recalling Sterne’s declaration in A Sentimental Journey, “I
begun and begun again; and though I had nothing to say,
and that nothing might have been express’d in half a dozen
lines, I made half a dozen different beginnings, and could no
way please myself”, the first page of At Swim Two Birds
(1939), a novel by Sterne’s fellow Irishman, Flann O’Brien
(1911-1966) offers the reader three alternative openings:
“One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did
not agree with.”
One plot element of O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman (written in 1940; published 1967) derives in part
from a passage in Tristram Shandy : “A man and his HOBBY-HORSE, tho' I cannot say that they act and
re-act exactly after the same manner in which the soul and body do upon each other : Yet doubtless
there is a communication between them of some kind, and my opinion rather is, that there is something
in it more of the manner of electrified bodies, -- and that by means of the heated parts of the rider, which
come immediately into contact with the back of the HOBBY-HORSE. -- By long journies and much friction,
it so happens that the body of the rider is at length fill'd as full of HOBBY-HORSICAL matter as it can hold ;
---- so that if you are able to give but a clear description of the nature of the one, you may form a pretty
exact notion of the genius and character of the other.” (I: xxiv) and involves the phenomenon whereby
cyclists may turn into their own bicycles: “The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of
their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities
mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of
them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and
half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so
much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one
foot at kerbstones.” (O’Brien).
Readers of The Third Policeman are additionally treated to long and detailed footnotes concerning the life
and opinions of the philosopher and scientist De Selby whose experiments include an attempt to dilute
water, and whose theories include his contention that what we commonly refer to as “night” is but the
accretion of black air due to volcanic eruptions too fine to be seen with the naked eye, and that sleep is
really a sequence of fainting fits occurring very close together. The De Selby footnotes provide a parallel
narrative to the novel without once advancing its action. De Selby is simply the unnamed narrator’s
hobby horse and must, therefore, be ridden at any and every opportunity.
Some of the pessimistic and deeply melancholic tone of some of Samuel Beckett’s characters
“…these sudden rages, they made my life a misery. Many other things too did this, my sore throat for
example, I have never known what it is to be without a sore throat, but the rages were the worst, like a
great wind suddenly rising in me, no, I can't
describe.” Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) From
an Abandoned Work.(1958)
recall Sterne’s depiction of his hero:
“ON the fifth day of November, 1718, which to the æra fixed on, was as near nine kalendar months as
any husband could in reason have expected, -- was I Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, brought forth into this
scurvy and disasterous world of ours. -- I wish I had been born in the Moon, or in any of the planets,
(except Jupiter or Saturn, because I never could bear cold weather) for it could not well have fared worse
with me in any of them (tho' I will not answer for Venus) than it has in this vile, dirty planet of ours, -which o' my conscience, with reverence be it spoken, I take to be made up of the shreds and clippings of
the rest ; ---- not but the planet is well enough, provided a man could be born in it to a great title or to a
great estate; or could any how contrive to be called up to publick charges, and employments of dignity or
power ; -- but that is not my case ; ---- and therefore every man will speak of the fair as his own market
has gone in it ; -- for which cause I affirm it over again to be one of the vilest worlds that ever was made ;
-- for I can truly say, that from the first hour I drew my breath in it, to this, that I can now scarce draw it
at all, for an asthma I got in scating against the wind in Flanders; -- I have been the continual sport of
what the world calls Fortune ; and though I will not wrong her by saying, She has ever made me feel the
weight of any great or signal evil ; -- yet with all the good temper in the world, I affirm it of her, That in
every stage of my life, and at every turn and corner where she could get fairly at me, the ungracious
Duchess has pelted me with a set of as pitiful misadventures and cross accidents as ever small HERO sustained.” (I: v)
Such novelists, like Sterne, present the act of reading as an event and an experience in and of itself. B.S.
Johnson questioned the value of the realist novel that does little more than to answer the question ‘what
happens next?’ thereby serving a utilitarian purpose outside of itself and ranking the novel alongside
recipe books, guidebooks, self-help manuals, and other books of instruction.
What, then, before we run out of space, is Tristram Shandy?
“…a careless kind of a civil, nonsensical, good-humoured Shandean book, which will do all your hearts
good.” (VI: xvii)
Why did Sterne write Tristram Shandy?
“- ‘tis wrote, an’ please your worships against the spleen; in order, by a more frequent and a more convulsive elevation and depression of the diaphragm, and the succussations of the
intercostal and abdominal muscles in laughter, to drive the gall and other bitter juices from the gall bladder, liver and sweet-bread of his majesty's subjects, with all the inimicitious
passions which belong to them, down into their duodenums.”
“L--d! said my mother, what is all this story about? ---(IX: xxxiii)
“A C O C K
and a
B U L L, said
Yorick ---- And one
of the best
of its kind,
I ever heard.”
Laurence Sterne by Sir Joshua Reynolds; oil on canvas, 1760
‘© National Portrait Gallery, London’

Exhibition Booklet - The Royal Society of Medicine

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