Cipher against Ciphers: Jonathan Swift's Latino-Anglicus Satire of Medicine

Abstract

Best remembered for Gulliver's Travels and “A Modest Proposal,” the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift also delighted in word puzzles, elaborate rhyming exercises, constrained writing, and cryptographs. Among his favorite word games was his “Latino-Anglicus,” an ingenious cipher in which an English plaintext is encrypted in a “Latin” ciphertext. Although the “Latino-Anglicus” has long been dismissed as “trifling,” Swift could, in fact, put the amusing form to serious satiric purpose, as in “A Consultation of Four Physicians upon a Lord That Was Dying,” which caricatures pretentious and venal academic doctors of his day.

Keywords:

• 18th-century medicine
• 18th-century satire
• Jonathan Swift
• Latino-Anglicus
• medical satire

Notes

¹The trick of Swift's and Sheridan's Latino-Anglicus, maintains George Mayhew, “was to use individual Latin words, the sounds of which combined to produce English sense when read off” [10, p. 135]. Swift's biographer Irvin Ehrenpreis calls their play “polylingual punning” [5, p. 821, vol. 3].

²In 1722, The Royal College of Physicians of London, legal arbiter of medical practice and privilege in England, declared that when “physicians meet to confer on the condition of a patient, they must consult together with the greatest decorum, after first excluding all bystanders; further, the matter shall be discussed in Latin, on pain of a five shilling fine” [16, p. 6] (author's translation).

³George Mayhew transcribed a manuscript version of the work from Huntington MS 14341, which differs both substantively and accidentally from Faulkner's first printed version [11, pp. 144–145]; see also [10, pp. 141–142]. Fagone's mistranscription of several lines from an early edition of Swift's works may explain his problem in deciphering them [6, pp. 335–336].

⁴In The Circe of Giovanni Battista Gelli, a conversation ensues between Ulysses and a “Snake, who had been a Physician.” Ulysses says, “Why prithee every body knows that the Mystery of a Physician is half a cheat, neither are other professions exempt from this Scandal, for we do nothing else but trick, and put false Dice upon one another.” The snake responds, “And if ‘tis their fortune to meet with a silly credulous Patient, Lord! what a Cully they make of him: then they cheat by wholesale, and are sure to enrich themselves at the unthinking Blockhead's expence” [2, p. 45].

⁵The expression “thieves’ Latin” is a synonym for the secret language or cant of thieves and vagabonds (OED).

⁶Swift had exploited the stereotype of homicidal physician in his early “Ode to Dr. William Sancroft,” likening “wild reformers” of the Low Church party to doctors who “by their college-arts methodically kill” [15, pp. 67, 611n].

⁷Among other social historians who have charted this shift are Geoffrey Holmes [9], Rosemary O'Day [13], and Wilfrid Prest [14].

⁸In one example, Sheridan rails against Tighe: “Dic is abest. Dic is a serpenti se. Dic is a turdi se. Dic is a fartor. Dic is pisti se. Dic is a vix en. Dic is as qui ter in nasty fusti musti cur. Dic is arantur. Dic is ab a boni se” [20, p. 364, vol. 4]. Sheridan's Latino-Anglicus rant translates as a string of indelicate epithets: “Dick is a beast. Dick is a serpent, I say. Dick is a turd, I say. Dick is a farter. Dick is pissed, I say. Dick is a vixen. Dick is a squittering, nasty, fusty, musty cur. Dick is a ranter. Dick is a baboon, I say.”