Homocysteine in Health and Disease

Bodies Politic: Diseases, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650±1900How do you picture history?Conventional visual images from the past portray their subjects in an ostensibly realistic manner, but others convey more personal messages from the artist.Such messages may be coded, or transmitted with brutal directness.Individual people, events and places are transformed into stereotypes and metaphors to provide comment on more general social or political situations, usually with strong overtones of parody, protest or subversion.The subjects are to varying degrees remodelled to form caricatures, which range from the comical to the repulsive.Such images are often supplementary to or indeed directly linked with verbal images in the novels, plays, poems and pamphlets of the times and, to this extent, the visual and the verbal cannot be separated.Both provide valuable commentary on the historical contexts in which they are set.Bodies Politic 1 is one of a new series entitled `Picturing History', and British medicine between 1650 and 1900 provides abundant material for Professor Roy Porter to develop several questionsÐnotably, `How did the body and healing practices . . .supply metaphoric commentary upon the wider world of politics and the body politic?'.The emphasis inevitably falls on `the long eighteenth century', on metropolitan rather than provincial practice, and on patients `of the better sort' with time and money at their disposal.Views of the body itself were inherently con¯icting during this periodÐloathsome object or divine handiwork?Thus Gibbon disliked `. . . the naked frankness of Montaigne who exposes all his malady and the operation of each dose of physic on his nerves and bowels', and he was painfully distressed by his own last and unpleasant illnessÐ `varnish the business for the ladies'.Gibbon's less fastidious contemporaries were, however, deeply interested in other people's bodily misfortunes.Publicity was guaranteed for giants, dwarfs and the malformed, and visits to `the Poore lunatiques' at Bethlem hospital provided (according to taste) edi®cation or raucous sport up until 1770.Mary Toft from Godalming, who claimed to give birth to litters of rabbits, was displayed in London in 1726, and was recorded by Hogarth.Rare but profound enjoyment was to be had from botched executions, and the case of Ann Green, hanged in Oxford in 1650, was widely reported.Anthony a Á Wood recorded that `she was carried away to be anatomized by