Portraits are underused in the medical biographies of patients, yet they can illuminate health concerns and even health itself in many ways. Tying portraiture and medicine together analytically yields many insights into Pope’s medical biography – from his response to satirical ridicule to his friends’ concern for his health – without abandoning his portraits as works of ‘art’.
MackM. Alexander Pope: a life, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985, pp. 185–185.
2.
Wimsatt WK. The portraits of Alexander Pope. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965.
3.
See, e.g., Mack, 1985, p.333; Piper D. The image of the poet: British poets and their portraits. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982; Deutsch H. The “Truest Copies” and the “Mean Original”: Pope, deformity and the poetics of self-exposure. Eighteenth-Century Studies 1993; 27: 1–26..
4.
LippincottL. Selling art in Georgian London: the rise of Arthur Pond, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985.
5.
De BollaP. The education of the eye: painting, landscapes and architecture in eighteenth-century Britain, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, pp. 24–24.
6.
PriorJ. Life of Edmond Malone, editor of Shakespeare, London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1860, pp. 428–429.
7.
BirchT. Heads of illustrious personages…, London: John and Paul Knapton, 1748–51, pp. 55–56.
8.
IrelandS. Graphic illustrations of Hogarth, London: R Paulder, 1794, pp. 38–38.
9.
The following caricatures are housed in the British Museum’s (vast) collection of personal satires: BM Satires 1812, 1935, 1937. Cf. also National Portrait Gallery D27575.
See, e.g., Pope to Swift, 30th August 1726, Correspondence of Alexander Pope. 5 Vols. In: Sherburn G (ed) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956, ii, 393; Pope to Oxford, 16th March 1731/2, ibid., iii, 278; Bathurst to Pope, ibid., iii, 130, 299, 503–504..
14.
Pope to Martha Blount, 4th September 1728, ibid., ii, 513–514.
15.
JordanovaLJ. The look of the past: visual and material evidence in historical practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 188ff–188ff.
16.
Pope to Richardson, n.d., Correspondence of Alexander Pope, iii, 326.
17.
Correspondence of Alexander Pope, iii, 427, 435; ibid., iv, 85, 206, 253, 255, 269, 445, 473–474.
18.
Pope to Bethel, 28th November 1740, Correspondence of Alexander Pope, iv, 299.
19.
Pope to Bethel, 20th February 1743/4, Correspondence of Alexander Pope, iv, 499–500.
20.
MackM. The garden and the city: retirement and politics in the later poetry of Pope, 1731–1743, Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1969, pp. 252–252.
21.
Bethel to Pope, 25th March 1744, Correspondence of Alexander Pope, iv, 511–512.
22.
Pointon M. Hanging the head: portraiture and social formation in eighteenth-century England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993; Jordanova LJ. Defining features: medical and scientific portraits. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.
23.
Memorials of the Late Richard Pulteney M.D., 19; Royal College of Physicians, London, MS-MATOW/441.
24.
HansonCA. The English virtuoso: art, medicine and antiquarianism in the age of empiricism, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
25.
Pope to Oxford, 8th Oct. 1724, Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ii, 264.
26.
Prior, 1860, pp.428–429.
27.
Correspondence of Alexander Pope, iv, 91.
28.
The series is also touched on by Gibson-Wood, C. Jonathan Richardson: art theorist of the English enlightenment. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, p.120ff.
