Abstract
A friend recently was diagnosed with reflex sympathetic dystrophy. To those who have compassion for her pain, she is an amazing woman, successful as a partner, parent and professional in spite of interspersing nerve blocks between commitments. To those who suspect her cautious words about ‘not feeling well today’ she may seem unpredictable, too apt to reschedule appointments. She fears that her in-laws read her every statement within the context of their concern about whether their son is being manipulated by a malingerer. Because hers is a relatively ‘new’ disease in terms of public awareness, her acquaintances have little direct knowledge and must extrapolate from their experience of related behaviours. As Sander L. Gilman notes, being ill is value-laden: ‘Like any complex text, the signs of illness are read within the conventions of an interpretive community that comprehends them in the light of earlier, powerful readings of what are understood to be similar or parallel texts.’1
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Notes
1. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 7.
In my edition of The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart (New York: OUP, 1994), pp. 96–100; references to Stuart’s letters are indicated by L.A.S. and letter number.
Ida Macalpine, Richard Hunter and C. Rimington, ‘Porphyria in the Royal Houses of Stuart, Hanover, and Prussia: a Follow-up Study of George III’s Illness’, in Porphyria — A Royal Malady: Articles Published in or Commissioned by the British Medical Journal (London: British Medical Association, 1968), p. 23.
Isabel Allende describes her daughter’s death from porphyria in Paula, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (Thorndike, Maine: Hall, 1995). Allende imagines a sorcerer who has put a time bomb in a young girl’s body that everyone forgets until she is 28 and it goes off, p. 82.
Attallah Kappas, Shigeru Sassa, Richard A. Galbraith and Yves Nordmann, ‘The Porphyrias’, in The Metabolic and Molecular Bases of Inherited Disease, ed. Charles R. Scriver et al., (7th edn; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 2103–59; and Jennifer B. Jeans et al., ‘Mortality in Patients with Acute Intermittent Porphyria Requiring Hospitalization: a United States Case Series’, American Journal ofMedical Genetics, 65 (1996), 269–73.
On James and Henry, see Macalpine et al., pp. 26–35; on Elizabeth, I am indebted to John M. Opitz, MD. I am also grateful to physician Robert J. Flaherty, biologist Thomas Valente, and historians of science Monique Bourque and Pierce C. Mullen for conversations about AIP.
Patricia Hill Buchanan, Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), p. 269; and Nancy Lenz Harvey, The Rose and the Thom: the Lives of Mary and Margaret Tudor (New York: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 231–2.
F. David Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992); and Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine: an Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Grey’s A Choice Manuall of Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery (1653) and Talbot’s Natura Exenterata (1655).
The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (1932; reprinted New York: Vintage Books, 1977), vol. 1, pp. 37, 250–2, 259, 302, 343–4, 383, 407–8; vol. 2, pp. 9, 30, 102–3, 109. Although Burton’s work was published six years after Stuart’s death, many ideas were current earlier.
Edward Jorden, A Briefe Discourse ofa Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (London: Windet, 1603), sigs. B1-Hl.
See Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: a Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1951); Elisabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: from Hippocratic Times to Modem Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and its Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Ilza Veith, Hysteria: the History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).
Records of the English Province of the Society ofJesus: Historic Facts Illustrative of the Labours and Sufferings of its Members in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Henry Foley, vol. 1 (London: Burns and Oates, 1877), p. 53.
For example, E.T. Bradley, Life of the Lady Arabella Stuart (London: Bentley, 1889), vol. 1, p. 143; B.C. Hardy, Arbella Stuart: a Biography (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 115–16; Ian McInnes, Arabella: the Life and Times ofthe Lady Arabella Seymour, 1575–1615 (London: Allen, 1968), pp. 112–14; and David N. Durant, Arbella Stuart: a Rival to the Queen (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978), pp. 106–7.
Cited in Marie Theresa (Villers) Lewis, Lives of the Friends and Contemporaries of Lord Chancellor Clarendon (London: Murray, 1852), vol. 3, p. 155.
George Clark, A History of the Royal College of Physicians of London, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 186.
The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N.E. McClure, 2 vols (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 1, pp. 434, 437, 443, 546.
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Steen, S.J. (2001). ‘How Subject to Interpretation’: Lady Arbella Stuart and the Reading of Illness. In: Daybell, J. (eds) Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598669_8
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