Sonja Boon on Telling the Flesh: Reading (and writing about) the letters to Tissot

Sonja Boon is associate professor of gender studies at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and author of the new book, TELLING THE FLESH: Life Writing, Citizenship, and the Body in the Letters to Samuel Auguste Tissot.

In her recent blog post, Sonja reflects on the process of reading and later publishing a book about the letters written to the 18th-century Swiss physician. The following is an excerpt from her blog.

I first met Samuel Auguste Tissot in 2007. Well. Met is perhaps the wrong word given that he died over 200 years ago. But I made his acquaintance, shall we say, via the woman who was the subject of my doctoral thesis, Suzanne Curchod Necker. Madame Necker, inveterate sufferer, was one of his patients.

And as I was working with archival material related to her life at the Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Lausanne at the time, and as that collection houses the incredibly rich Fonds Tissot, I decided to go poking around, at least at a superficial level.

What I found were fascinating letters written by people just like Madame Necker. People who lived complicated, messy lives and whose bodies told them complicated, messy stories.

I couldn’t spend much time with them, because Madame Necker was most insistent that I pay attention to her (my supervisory committee and my degree requirements were also most insistent on this point…), but I transcribed a few letters just to play with them when I had time.

Fast forward to 2010. Read more >

TELLING THE FLESH

Life Writing, Citizenship, and the Body in the Letters to Samuel Auguste Tissot

By SONJA BOON

An engaging exploration of the stories our bodies tell and the stories we tell about our bodies.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, celebrated Swiss physician Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728-1797) received over 1,200 medical consultation letters from across Europe and beyond. Written by individuals seeking respite from a range of ailments, these letters offer valuable insight into the nature of physical suffering.

Plaintive, desperate, querulous, fearful, frustrated, and sometimes arrogant and self-interested in tone, the letters to Tissot not only express the struggle of individuals to understand the body and its workings, but also reveal the close connections between embodiment and politics. Using these identities and experiences as examples, Sonja Boon argues that the complaints voiced in the letters were intimately linked to broader social and political discourses of citizenship in the late eighteenth century.

Contributing to the fields of literary criticism, history, gender and sexuality studies, and history of medicine, Telling the Flesh establishes a compelling argument about the connections between health, politics, and identity.

To learn more about Telling the Flesh, click here.
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