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Telling the Flesh: Life Writing, Citizenship, and the Body in the Letters to Samuel Auguste Tissot by Sonja Boon (review)

Sonja Boon’s valuable study on medical sociability contributes to several academic fields at once: the history of medicine, gender studies, and research into epistolary culture as well as life writing. At its center is the famous Swiss physician Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728–1797), author of the best-selling Avis au peuple sur sa sainté (1761), a practical guide to health, which invited patients seeking medical advice to go for epistolary consultation. The 1,300 surviving patient letters in the Fonds Tissot archive in Lausanne document the Europe-wide response that the doctor elicited from individuals, many of them from the upper echelons of society. As a body of material open to academic consultation, the archive posits an unusual situation for scholars of eighteenth-century epistolary culture: the letters, though written by about a thousand individuals, all have the same recipient. This “body of stories” (4), of autobiographies, these constructions of self, are at the center of Boon’s work on the Tissot archive as a specimen of Enlightenment epistolary culture. She shows how the letters and their authors link corporeal practice and citizenship, perform family and kinship, display physical pleasure and disorder, and stage health as a citizen’s duty. Patients addressed Tissot with manifold queries: “You would accomplish a great work if you could bring to health a respectable mother who is very useful to those who surround her” (85); “The seizure was preceded by an abuse of sweet pastries” (114); “. . . there is something strange about my situation, but of what are hypochondriacs not capable?” (220).