{"title":"John Taylor: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Famous Oculist and Quack","authors":"D. Passmann, H. J. Real","doi":"10.3828/eci.2022.7","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\nThis paper attempts to shed light on the satires against the notorious oculist John Taylor (1703-72) during his sojourn in Dublin in the spring of 1732. Taylor studied at London’s St Thomas’s Hospital under the pioneering British surgeon William Cheselden. He operated on celebrities all over Europe, travelling in a coach decorated with the motto: ‘Qui dat videre dat vivere (He who gives sight, gives life)’, and marketing himself unabashedly with boisterous shows and expositions of his rare skills as a surgeon. In 1736, Taylor was appointed royal eye surgeon to George II. In March 1750, he operated on Bach’s cataracts in Leipzig, which led to Bach’s becoming perfectly blind, and in August 1758 on Handel, which apparently occasioned the composer’s death in April 1759. During his second visit to Ireland in March and April of 1732, Taylor was attacked in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal as ‘a person of unparallel’d impudence, undeniable assurance, an asserter of scandalous falsehoods, a mountebank, and a quack, who imposes on the public and extorts money from the poor’. At the same time, Taylor became the subject of several satirical attacks and the victim of an April Fool’s joke, most probably organised by Trinity College students, among them, the juvenile William Dunkin, friend and protégé of Jonathan Swift. The paper examines Taylor’s life and literary (self-)representation; it also tries to identify the authors behind the hilarious practical jokes on the mountebank.","PeriodicalId":217296,"journal":{"name":"Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Volume 37, Issue 1","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Volume 37, Issue 1","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eci.2022.7","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper attempts to shed light on the satires against the notorious oculist John Taylor (1703-72) during his sojourn in Dublin in the spring of 1732. Taylor studied at London’s St Thomas’s Hospital under the pioneering British surgeon William Cheselden. He operated on celebrities all over Europe, travelling in a coach decorated with the motto: ‘Qui dat videre dat vivere (He who gives sight, gives life)’, and marketing himself unabashedly with boisterous shows and expositions of his rare skills as a surgeon. In 1736, Taylor was appointed royal eye surgeon to George II. In March 1750, he operated on Bach’s cataracts in Leipzig, which led to Bach’s becoming perfectly blind, and in August 1758 on Handel, which apparently occasioned the composer’s death in April 1759. During his second visit to Ireland in March and April of 1732, Taylor was attacked in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal as ‘a person of unparallel’d impudence, undeniable assurance, an asserter of scandalous falsehoods, a mountebank, and a quack, who imposes on the public and extorts money from the poor’. At the same time, Taylor became the subject of several satirical attacks and the victim of an April Fool’s joke, most probably organised by Trinity College students, among them, the juvenile William Dunkin, friend and protégé of Jonathan Swift. The paper examines Taylor’s life and literary (self-)representation; it also tries to identify the authors behind the hilarious practical jokes on the mountebank.
本文试图揭示1732年春天,声名狼藉的眼科医生约翰·泰勒(1703-72)在都柏林逗留期间对他的讽刺。泰勒在伦敦圣托马斯医院学习,师从英国外科先驱威廉·切塞尔登。他为欧洲各地的名人做手术,乘坐一辆装饰着“Qui dat videre dat vivere(他给人以光明,给人以生命)”座右铭的马车旅行,并毫不害羞地通过热闹的表演和展示他作为外科医生的罕见技能来推销自己。1736年,泰勒被任命为乔治二世的皇家眼科医生。1750年3月,他在莱比锡为巴赫的白内障做了手术,导致巴赫完全失明。1758年8月,他为亨德尔做了手术,这显然导致了作曲家亨德尔于1759年4月去世。1732年3月和4月,泰勒第二次访问爱尔兰时,福克纳的《都柏林日报》(Dublin Journal)对他进行了攻击,称他是“一个无比厚颜无耻的人,无可否认的自信,一个诽谤性谎言的断言者,一个骗子,一个骗子,他向公众施加压力,向穷人勒索钱财”。与此同时,泰勒成为了几次讽刺攻击的对象,并成为一个愚人节玩笑的受害者,这个玩笑很可能是由三一学院的学生组织的,其中就有乔纳森·斯威夫特的朋友兼前雇员、少年威廉·邓金。本文考察了泰勒的生平和文学(自我)表现;它还试图找出滑稽恶作剧背后的作者。