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. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From the New England Journal of Medicine, July 15, 2004
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.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* A modern world crowded with diet centers, health clubs, tanning studios, and body-piercing parlors might have perplexed eighteenth-century intellectuals such as John Locke and Joseph Priestley. But in this posthumously published masterpiece, a gifted social historian illuminates the cultural genealogy linking today's idolaters of the body to their surprising Enlightenment predecessors. Porter ultimately locates the fetishism of the body in a much larger cultural Enlightenment reassessment of human identity necessitated by the fading of religious conviction. In rejecting a Christian orthodoxy that simultaneously scourged the fleshy body and glorified it, Enlightenment thinkers engendered a wide range of diverse and often conflicting new attitudes. But Porter's shrewd scrutiny of these attitudes reveals how many of the newly secularized social elite (including radical theorists such as Godwin, Hazlitt, and Owen) distrusted physical appetites--and the unruly masses who succumbed to them--just as deeply as the traditional Christian clerics they displaced. Enlightenment progressives railed against indulgence, however, not to save souls but rather to liberate minds, newly conceived as autonomous and self-generating. In the Enlightenment's revolutionary doctrines of the self, Porter thus identifies the origins of the modern confidence in the power of each ego to fashion its own script for authenticity. At a time when postmodernists are poking holes in that confidence, this penetrating analysis of its wellsprings deserves a large readership. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Starting with the grim Britain of the Civil War era, with its punishing sense of the body as a corrupt vessel for the soul, Roy Porter charts 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 Enlightenment (with its explosion or rational thinking and scientific invention of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) provided a lens through which we can best see the profound shift from the theocentric, otherwordly, Dark Ages to the modern, earthly, body-centered world we live in today. As man made in God's image gave way to the Enlightenment's notion of the Self-made man, the body moved center stage. Porter writes brilliantly 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. And he explores how, at the end of the century, the human soul took on a new significance in the works of Godwin, Blake, and Byron.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

The world Porter is describing at the end of the book, Byron's world, is a recognizably modern one. The genie of free inquiry is out of its bottle. Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud no longer feel just possible, but inevitable; so too, perhaps, Hitler and Stalin. To show us this, the mind evolving from one dominated by the spectral forces of religion to one that emerges into the 19th century somewhat self-astonished, troubled by its new latitudes, prey to fads and demagogues, but armed with a heady sense of its own seemingly limitless possibilities, is a heroic feat of scholarship and a very fine epitaph to a career that ended far too soon. — Andrew Miller

The Washington Post

Porter ranges far beyond the speculations of mere philosophers in this learned book. His subject is broad enough to encompass all forms of the presentation of self in everyday life. — Michael Dirda

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. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews