TOBIAS SMOLLETT is undoubtedly better known as a novelist, but this chapter interrogates two of his lesser-known writings, his medical treatise, An Essay on the External Use of Water (1752), and his travel book, Travels through France and Italy (1766). These two works testify to the diversity of his skills and the complexity of his career. If Dr Johnson could sarcastically quip ‘The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England!’, Smollett went further afield and started as a surgeon in the Navy around 1740. Both the Essay and the Travels correspond to different stages in his life. He wrote the Essay as a result of his stay in Bath, where he had briefly and unsuccessfully tried to start a practice. There he must have been caught up the in sulphur controversy that opposed the Chemists to the Galenists. The Travels, on the other hand, narrates his tour of the Continent that lasted two years (1763–65), and consists in a series of forty-one letters sent to a limited number of addressees.

In these two books Smollett blew apart a degree of consensus, laying the foundations of the new social practices that were created or recreated in Enlightenment Britain. He wrote the second book in the context of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), during a period of unprecedented English domination which inevitably entailed the possibility of decline. Smollett is generally perceived as an arch-conservative and identified with the benign but cantankerous representative of the landed gentry, Matthew Bramble, who is the main character in his last novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). This chapter will challenge this perception, in the wake of Terence Bowers's critical study, and will redefine Smollett's contribution to a renewal of the recently forged British model of sociability, through his perception and description of the British body.

Contesting some new medical and social practices in Britain: the Bath model and the open society under attack

The eighteenth century in Britain has been called the ‘age of watering places’, and the development of new medical practices encouraged sociability. The Pump Room at Bath, designed at the beginning of the century, had become a hotbed of sociability due to its architecture and the ritualisation of both drinking the waters and bathing.