Fortune of physicians

JOHNSON'S KNOWLEDGE of medicine, then, often brought him into conflict with the professional opinions of his physicians. His medical learning may have been unique among eighteenth-century amateurs, but he was of course far from the only ‘dabbler’ in medicine who took it upon themselves to dictate treatment:

Baretti's libellous account of Mrs Thrale clearly implies that it would be thought scandalous for her to take the treatment of her children out of the hands of Jebb. We have no way of knowing whether eighteenth-century ladies often treated their doctors in this fashion, or how much eighteenth-century patients obeyed and how much they disregarded their medical advisers, or whether selfmedication was less or even more prevalent than today.