Headnote

This dialogue in Latino-Anglicus was apparently left unfinished. Autograph materials containing the major part, not apparently the source of the printed edition, are found in SwJ 396. Further variant material is found in SwJ 393. This dialogue, like the earlier ‘Castilian’ material, may well have had a dimension of collaborative improvisation. Mayhew, noting that the piece was well advanced by December 1735, when Swift was working on it during a visit to Sheridan, suggests that its incomplete state may be related to the death in February 1736 of Theophilus Harrison, the son of Swift's cousin Mrs Whiteway, himself a medical student: Mrs Whiteway had written to Swift on 2 December 1735 that ‘My son intreats you will finish your Latina Anglia treatise; which he desires you will immediately send him a copy of.’ Swift's Dublin physician Richard Helsham would also have had a professional interest in the joke. Other manuscript puns from this stage of Swift's life confirm a preoccupation with encroaching illness. Child, in ‘Jonathan Swift's Latin Quacks’, suggests that the ‘unstable form in which one language converges into another and both converge into nonsense … projects the instability of Swift's own body, “disordered” by noise and deafness and vertigo’.

The range of language games within which this dialogue finds its context is described in Mayhew's ‘Anglo-Latin Games and a Fragment of Polite Conversation’. In order to discern the sense, the Latin words must be read aloud in such a way as to form English words (so the conversation would begin: ‘Is his Honour sick? Pray let us feel his pulse. It does beat very slow today’). The process of translating between the word as read and the word as heard is by no means easy or automatic: Child, who provides a parallel text in Latino-Anglicus and English, notes the ‘dizzying excursions between ear and eye’ required of the reader.

Swift evidently respected Richard Mead (1673–1754: ‘Fourth Doctor. Ire membri re ad it in Doctor me ades Esse’). The Second Doctor cites an older authority, the French physician Jean Fernel (1497–1558).