THIS BOOK considers Samuel Johnson as a patient, as an amateur doctor, and as a writer about medicine. Everyone calls him ‘Doctor Johnson’ and the title no doubt acknowledges his scholarship, his learning and authority. But it also suggests how persistently he is thought of as a sage, and – perhaps less consciously – as a healer. To look at Johnson as a sufferer, and as physician, both of the body and the mind, becomes inseparable, then, from thinking about the sources and nature of that cultural authority.

In the first of these roles Johnson has gained some fame or notoriety among doctors. A continuous stream of articles on his melancholy and depression, his gout, his abnormal movements, his ‘alcohol problem’ (to give only some more recent examples), has appeared in the pages of medical and medical-historical journals. That Johnson was a ‘dabbler in physick’ and that he cultivated the acquaintance of doctors is almost as well-known, though neither the extent of his medical friendships, nor the nature of his medical knowledge is much recognised. You would not guess from Boswell, or from modern biographies, that at least four of his closest friends were doctors, and that three of these friendships lasted over decades. But it is in the third role, as a writer about medical matters, that Johnson is so often overlooked. As I will show, he wrote a good many pieces which touch on or discuss doctoring, medicine, hospitals and medical experimentation.