The world of the Georgian wits was populated by articulate physician-authors: Garth, Locke, Mandeville, Armstrong, Cheyne, Hartley, Goldsmith, Smollett and dozens of others among the medically educated who never practiced medicine and now rest in unvisited tombs. Doctors were then the only members of society who understood the body's "unseen mechanisms", as Willis called them, and (as a consequence of their broadly classical educations) articulated and even versified them. R. D. Laing and Richard Seltzer, Stephen Jay Gould and Oliver Sacks, are the heirs of this tradition; if not contemporary equivalents, then at least equally articulate in communicating with the broad public. The difference now is that today we are quickly able to access much more technical information about the body than Pope's or Smollett's world could.