Abstract
A recurring motif from medieval and early modern writings is the human body as a fortified (materially and/or spiritually) yet vulnerable enclosure — castle, ship, city or temple — threatened constantly by ‘enimie’ incursions which can only be averted through sound and vigilant regimen. In the absence of empirical knowledge about the body’s functioning (and of effective cures), elaborate myths designated as ‘medical’ form a culture’s ‘bulwarke of defence’ against the disorder of disease which threatens the collapse of the individual body and, in the case of epidemic disease, of whole cities and thus of civilized existence, too.2 Medical myths such as these are intriguing constructs claiming to speak with an authoritative voice about harmony and strife, about the relation between body and mind (and/or soul), and about an individual’s relation with his environment and his society.3 They have a natural (though not inevitable) inclination to prophecy; and, like all fictions, each time they are retold they are subject to permutation, the story accommodating itself to the designs of its teller and the demands of the time.
Even as it is better to stande fast still, than to fall and rise againe, better to keepe still a Castell or Citie, than after we have suffered the enimie to enter, to rescue it againe.
Thomas Cogan, The Haven of Health (1584)1
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Notes
See Meyer Fortes, ‘Foreword’, in Social Anthropology and Medicine, ed. J. B. Loudon (London: Academic Press, 1979) p. xvii.
Roy Porter (ed.), The Popularization of Medicine (London: Routledge, 1992) p. 3.
Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London: Routledge, 1996); p. 74. See also Marcel Mauss, ‘Les Techniques du corps’, Journal de la Psychologie, 32 (March–April 1936).
Henry Sigerist, Civilization and Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) p. 149.
Ibid., p. 149; Vivian Nutton, ‘Social History of Graeco-Roman Medicine’, Medicine in Society: Historical Essays, ed. Andrew Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) p. 23.
L. Clendening, Source Book of Medical History (New York: P. B. Hoeber, 1942) p. 13.
G. E. R. Lloyd, ‘Introduction’, in Hippocratic Writings, trans. J. Chadwick and W. N. Mann, ed. G. E. R. Lloyd, paperback edn (1978; London: Penguin Classics, 1983) p. 10.
Vivian Nutton, ‘Humoralism’, Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, vol. 1, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (2 vols; London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 281–91.
Sigerist, Civilization and Disease, p. 150. Hippocrates, ‘The Sacred Disease’, in Lloyd (ed.), Hippocratic Writings, p. 240: as this text about epilepsy makes clear, this was not a rejection of the supernatural, but rather an unwillingness to implicate its operations (particularly malevolent ones) in the medical understanding of disease processes. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (California: University of California Press, 1973) p. 68.
Sigerist, Civilization and Disease, p. 151; F. David Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark: Univeristy of Delaware Press, 1992) p. 82.
On humoral medicine see Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: an Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) pp. 104–6. Andrew Wear (ed.), ‘Making Sense of the Environment in Early Modern England’, Medicine in Society, pp. 119–47; Sigerist, Civilization and Disease, pp. 149–51.
Hippocrates, ‘Epidemics Bks I, II, III’, in Lloyd, Hippocratic Writings, pp. 87–138; Vivian Nutton, ‘The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance’, Medical History, 27 (1983) pp. 1–34; Andrew Wear, ‘The History of Personal Hygiene’, Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, vol. 1, pp. 1283–308.
This corresponds with Slack’s ‘category 7’ although I have included discursive regimens focusing on specific diseases; see Paul Slack, ‘Mirrors of Health and Treasures of Poor Men: the Uses of the Vernacular Medical Literature of Tudor England’, Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) p. 245.
Vesalius’ famous anatomical treatise De humani corporis fabrica was published in 1543. On the impact of the new anatomy see Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995).
Charles Webster, ‘Paracelsus: Medicine as Popular Protest’, Medicine and the Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (London: Routledge, 1993) p. 62. Barbara Gutmann Rosenkratz, ‘Case Histories — An Introduction’, In Time of Plague, ed. Arien Mack (New York and London: New York University Press, 1991) p. 75, rightly draws attention to the ‘measure of confidence lent to new voices of authority in time of plague’.
L. Clendening, ‘Paracelsus’, Source Book of Medical History (New York & London: P. B. Hoeber, 1942) p. 95. Sigerist, Civilization and Disease, pp. 155–6.
Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) argues a decisive shift to a Paracelsan bodily paradigm in this period.
Nobert Elias, The Civilizing Process: the History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1939; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), see my Introduction, p. 13.
On the Quadruplex Exposition see Woodburn O. Ross, Introduction, Middle English Sermons, ed. W. Ross from British Museum MS. Royal 18B xxiii, for the Early English Text Society, Original Series No. 209 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940) p. vi.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) ed. Holbrook Jackson (London: J. M. Dent, 1972) p. 374.
Webster, ‘Alchemical and Paracelsian Medicine’, p. 313. Charles Webster opposes the erroneous view expressed by Paul H. Kocher in Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (California: Huntington Library Publications, 1953) pp. 256–7, that by the end of the sixteenth century mystical explanations of disease ‘had been pretty well washed out of the medical books’.
On the relation between science and demonology in the seventeenth century, see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
See Michael MacDonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case (London: Routledge, 1991).
See Margaret Healy, ‘Plausibility in Renaissance Domestic Tragedy’, At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and Sue Wiseman (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1999).
Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, in Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies, ed. K. Sturgess (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985)
Catherine Belsey, ‘Desire’s Excess and the English Renaissance Theatre’, Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 95
Rick Bowers, ‘A Woman Killed with Kindness: Plausibility on a Smaller Scale’, Studies in English Literature, 24 (Spring 1984) p. 298.
Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) p. 114.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Moscow, 1965), trans. Helen Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968) p. 359.
John Donne, ‘Expostulation 22’, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975) p. 119, ll. 21–8.
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
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© 2001 Margaret Healy
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Healy, M. (2001). The Humoral-Paracelsan Body. In: Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510647_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510647_2
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