Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul [Hardcover]

Roy Porter (Author), Simon Schama (Foreword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0393050750 | ISBN-13: 978-0393050752 | Publication Date: February 2004 | Edition: 1

How did we come to a modern understanding of our bodies and souls? What were the breakthroughs that allowed human beings to see themselves in a new light? Starting with the revolutionary ideas of the Renaissance that challenged the sense of the body as a corrupt vessel for the soul, Roy Porter goes on to chart how - through figures as diverse as Locke, Swift, Johnson and Gibbon - ideas about medicine, politics and religion fundamentally changed notions of self. He shows how the body moved centre stage in the 18th century, writing on the ways in which men and women flaunted, decorated, tanned and dieted themselves: activities that we find familiar but that a Puritan divine would have considered Satanic. Porter also explores how, at the end of the century, the human soul took on a new significance in the works of Godwin, Blane and Byron.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The distinguished historian died shortly after completing this sequel to his monumental Enlightenment (2000). Flesh examines "the triangle of the moral, the material and the medical" in 18th-century Britain. The Reformation's ouster of church dogma brought with it a wave of speculation about the nature of physical and rational being-most importantly Locke's innovative concept of conscious selfhood that dispensed with the immortal soul. In its place arose a dialectic between internal and external identity that focused on life before rather than after death, a conception of self that has remained a foundation of Western thought. Porter considers the many questions and clashes involved in that conception in what he calls a "gallery of contrasting yet interlocking studies" divided into sections. The first concentrates on the mental and moral self as advanced by such influential literary figures as Shaftesbury, Swift and Johnson; another takes up the physical and social self in contemporary preoccupations with mortality, health, manners, race and madness. Most of these discussions feature significant contemporary figures, often in unfamiliar guises: Dr. Johnson on depression, Adam Smith on astronomy, Byron on the state of his teeth. Others are memorable but unremembered, like George Cheyne, a proponent of healthy diet whose own weight at one time reached more than 470 pounds. These studies of individuals are augmented with a wealth of information about health trends, child-rearing fads and hygiene scares that bear a remarkable resemblance to our own times. The final section pursues the self into the Romantic era, when social science and poetics "smudged" the problematic boundaries between inner and outer being with new distinctions between individual and collective experience. Porter's theme is the puritan doctrine of human perfectibility and progressive economic, social and somatic models it spawned. With humor and enthusiasm, he combines a terrific fund of scholarship, canny observation and intelligent synthesis.
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From The New England Journal of Medicine

Roy Porter died too young. One of the most distinguished and prolific medical historians of the day, Porter had recently taken early retirement from the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London when, in the spring of 2002, he collapsed while riding his bicycle and died at the age of 55. This book, alas, will be his last. (Figure) And what a book it is. Porter takes us on a romp through the long 18th century, exploring ideas about health and disease, ruminations about the soul and what awaits us after death, reflections on the declining role of religion, and conceptions of the relationship between the human mind and the body in which it resides. After an early chapter devoted to the time of Hippocrates and Galen, this lively and erudite book centers on English sources, both familiar and little known, from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the rise of Romanticism in the 1800s. Readers should not expect a single, linear path of argument. Instead, Porter combines a broad set of questions with fine-grained detail about the day-to-day world his many subjects embodied in some instances and created in others. He gives us particularly insightful readings of autobiographies and first-person novels that are "preoccupied with the relations between the body and the consciousness belonging to it." His careful, innovative analysis of a wide range of sources alerts us not only to what is present but also to what has been omitted. Even though there is an 80-page, double-columned bibliography, Porter's death meant that his editors were not able to locate the precise editions from which the numerous quotations were taken. There is much here for readers of the Journal. We learn about the creation of dividing lines that today are taken for granted; some founders of modern science, for example, tried hard to prove the supernatural through science. We read about debates over whether the mind can exist without the body and how the mind can divert attention from the ailments of the flesh. Porter gives us much detail (perhaps more than some readers would want) about the travails of the flesh in the 18th century. The Earl of Shaftesbury was troubled at the dawn of that century by the "squalor of snot," and he debated with Bernard de Mandeville, a physician-satirist who grappled willingly with the realities of the flesh and its many emanations. But both men, like others of the day, put aside the religious emphasis on managing the body that had characterized earlier learned discussions. As religion receded in relevance, clergymen gave way to physicians at the bedside in the management of death. Some aspects of the world that Porter describes presage issues and customs of the 21st century. Santorio Santorio, who did early work on the thermometer, lived in a balance machine, weighing his intake and output, measuring, measuring everything. He was followed a century later by Lord Byron, an exercise fanatic who mastered his body through a regimen so rigorous that not an ounce of excess flesh remained. Corpulence became undesirable, the slim look became popular, and long before our current understanding of obesity took root, a cult of thinness had developed, from which we have not yet emerged. Eighteenth-century critics shared our contemporary concern about overpopulation. William Godwin trusted individuals to solve the problem, believing that as medicine enabled people to live forever, sexual urges would abate and reproduction would thus cease. Perhaps the most poignant part of this book comes in Porter's discussion of the great historian and autobiographer Edward Gibbon, author of the classic, six-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon suffered from a whole host of painful and obvious ailments. But those ailments were merely of the body, subordinate to the life of the enlightened mind. Gibbon did not believe in an immortal soul, but he hoped that his Memoirs would mean that "one day his mind [would] be familiar to the grandchildren of those who are yet unborn." As Porter observed, "His mind will thus live on" through his immortal words. One could make the same observation for the words of Roy Porter, and for that we all should be very thankful. Joel D. Howell, M.D., Ph.D.
Copyright © 2004 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 660 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (February 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393050750
• ISBN-13: 978-0393050752
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,298,199 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Read, May 9, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul (Hardcover)

I cannot believe no one has reviewed Roy Porter's last book. It reminds me of the Metaphysical Club, but it is perhaps a bit more wry. I enjoyed it thoroughly and have added it to my collection of books on the Enlightenment. It was simultaneously funny and intellectual stimulating. Also, Porter makes the subject of the Enlightmentment exciting.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great Enlightenment History..., November 29, 2005

By 

Warner Todd Huston "History Minded" (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul (Hardcover)

Flesh in the Age of Reason is wonderful. I mean, I cannot give this book enough credit. One can easily find books on various aspects of Enlightenment period philosophy. Adams, Hume, Locke, et al., are easy to find. But, put into context with their day, their battles with each other, and the growth of their ideas in that context is something not as easily found.

Roy Porter passed away just after finishing and publishing this work and it is a fitting end to his career. In fact, in retrospect, it seems a fitting exploration for one on the verge of death himself. Was Porter, aware that the end of his days was approaching, was he seeking to locate that final truth? I cannot say, but he certainly gave the rest of us who are still shuffling about this mortal coil a great resource to assist us in our own search.

This book neatly "historicizes" the ebb and flow of Enlightenment philosophy and gives us all something to think about.

Thanks Roy Porter and R.I.P.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars LOCKE'S LEAKING SHOES, September 7, 2010

By 

Niklas Anderberg (the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul (Paperback)

At the tender age of 55, while enjoying early retirement in the county of Sussex, British historian Roy Porter fell of his bike and passed away. Apparently his overcrowded curriculum had gotten the better of him. He wanted to slow down and learn to play the saxophone. His output had been enormous, culminating in his two books on the British Enlightenment. He had just finished Flesh in the Age of Reason but not yet organized the notes. Simon Schama, who has written a moving preface, and the publisher decided to leave it at that instead of trying to untangle the rather disorderly annotations. There is, however, a massive bibliography. Maybe in part because there are no footnotes, the book has an even more literary feel to it and brims with uninterrupted narrative zest.
At the peak of his powers Porter was destined to thrill his readers for many years to come. "Thrill", because his style is filled with a warmth and wit seldom encountered in academia. His books shimmer with the pleasure of writing and this in combination with his vast erudition gave us something very special indeed. In his gargantuan appetite for life one sometimes gets the feeling that he wrote faster than we could read. Porter's writing on Laurence Sterne is hilarious and downright vertiginous; for a non-native reader a dictionary is probably advisory. Even though I haven't read The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, it sounds as if it could have been taken right out of that novel.
In a panoramic sweep he also renders unforgettable portraits of Samuel Johnson (an "ideot" in the words of Hogarth), Erasmus Darwin, William Hazlitt, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Boswell ("that pious drunk and godfearing lecher"), Edward Gibbon, who despite his corpulence and total lack of exercise actually became slightly older than Porter himself, and many others. Later chapters are interestingly devoted to two other idiosyncratic icons: Blake and Byron.
Being specialized in medicine, Porter has an eye for corporeal as well as spiritual matters, often giving the reader a glimpse behind the (sometimes!) shining surface. Without descending into voyeurism or gossip he describes his protagonists with their physical weaknesses and psychological peculiarities in full view.
LOCKE'S LEAKING SHOES refers to a rather shocking piece of advice offered by the famous philosopher on the blessings of early hardening of the young. Children should be systematically exposed to a bracing regime, including unheated bedrooms, cold-water bathing and wearing shoes that would "leak water" when it rained. Enlightened instructions, to be sure.
This book is, or can be seen as, a sequel to his Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000). His overriding idea is that the British contribution to the Enlightenment is underestimated. Pace Jonathan Israel, I'm prepared to believe anything he says. But first and foremost Flesh in the Age of Reason is a treasure trove. How many stars can one give?
Roy Porter is no more. We are all at a loss.