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In his enormously popular and influential medical treatise The English Malady (1733), George Cheyne declares in a moment of literary self-awareness that he has written his work in "a plain narrative stile, with the fewest terms of art possible" (363). The famous doctor's "plain" style, we can assume, was generally effective since Cheyne was, as Roy Porter notes, "perhaps the most popular English writer of practical medical works targeted at the "general reader"" (ix). Interestingly, however, Cheyne adds that he has adopted this accessible "narrative stile" to appeal to readers who have never before encountered "a physical book" (363). By "physical book" Cheyne is not referring, of course, to The English Malady's status as a material, printed artefact. Instead, he uses the term in its common eighteenth-century usage to refer to a book of "Physick" or medicine. The famous doctor, then, claims to have adjusted his writing to address a wider untrained public, who would not be familiar with the specialized scientific terms and concepts used by the field of medicine, a field that in eighteenth-century Britain was in the midst of unprecedented institutional and commercial expansion.¹

DOI: 10.1057/9781137346346_4

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