Abstract/Summary

This article discusses Joseph Addison’s 1710 satiric essay “Noses” as a fantasy of bodily alteration that responded to scientific and cultural developments of the previous hundred years. It shows how Addison’s essay draws upon and expands the nose-reconstruction operation detailed in Gaspare Tagliacozzi’s 1597 De Curtorum Chirurgia. Over the course of the seventeenth century, this operation became associated with the practice of allografting, grafting body parts between two individuals of the same species. This association was augmented by scientific experiments and theories, including blood transfusion, dissection, and the doctrine of sympathy. In Addison’s satire, the notion of a new nose made from the flesh of another person becomes a vehicle for wider questions about the meaning of bodily identity, and the social status indexed to that identity, in the face of new medical possibilities.