Margaret Healy

Medicine, Metaphor, and “Crisis” in the Early Modern Social Body

In the political turmoil of mid seventeenth-century England, both socio-political utopias and dystopias were repeatedly imagined through corporeal images and medical metaphors and narratives. The new iatrochemistry—Paracelsian and subsequently Helmontian medicine—featured especially prominently in this intriguing textual landscape. Focusing on this particular healing paradigm, and drawing on insights from cultural theory of the body and medical history, this intertextual analysis of medical writings, civil war playlets and political treatises by Harrington, Winstanley, Coppe and Hobbes, seeks better to understand the complex interplay of medical, political and religious ideas and discourses around the nexus of the body in the turbulent revolutionary years. The findings challenge the notion that there was an ontological relationship between chemical medicine and radical politics in these years of crisis, demonstrating that, on the contrary, political writers drew upon medical ideas and metaphors selectively and often inconsistently in order to lend persuasive authority to their arguments.

Wearing powerful words and objects: healing prosthetics

ABSTRACT In Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Freud proposed that in striving to overcome the vulnerability of our bodies in the face of nature we create supplementary tools (including writing) in order to remove the limits to human functioning. He famously envisaged a civilisation trajectory in which man, striving to overcome his limitations, would increasingly resemble a ‘prosthetic God’ [James Strachey (ed), Sigmund Freud: Civilization and its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere (London: The Hogarth Press, 1963), p. 29]. This essay offers a window of understanding onto pre-modern involvement in the ongoing process of extending the limits of self-hood and making the vulnerable, sick and suffering body comprehensible through the prosthetic use of words, symbols and narrative. Studying the widespread medical use of apotropaic textual amulets, word charms and talismans, this essay asks questions about the imagination, memory and healing, arguing that wearing word prosthetics (attached to the body or inscribed on the skin as tattoos) and performing the rituals they often prescribed (reciting, counting, praying, remembering) constituted a highly affective and valuable form of placebo medicine in earlier periods. Further, it contends that complex textual amulets can be apprehended as narrative prosthesis and thus as precursors to the novel in their ability to extend the limits of self-hood and impose some kind of narrative order on chaotic and painful life experience.

The Plaguy Body: Part I

Whilst Bullein’s socially aspiring and reprehensible Medicus located the worst focus of the 1563 London plague in the ‘sluttishe, beastly people, that keepe their houses and lodynges uncleane . . . their laboure and travaile immoderate’ (p. 51), the complete Dialogue conveys the opposite impression. A rich merchant and an affluent citizen fall victims to the pestilence, their sins as extortioners increasing their susceptibility to infection. Interestingly, no poor people catch the disease in the Dialogue, though they do suffer when their rich masters succumb to plague. Significantly, though, Medicus’ negative, judgemental account of the living conditions and habits of the ‘beastly people’ appears to anticipate dominant constructions of the ‘base sort’ in later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century elite discourses — particularly those of the Protestant establishment (in church, medicine and state). By putting such words into the mouth of a greedy, unpleasant, extortioner/physician, Bullein was undoubtedly highlighting, and expressing timely disapproval of, his society’s increasing tendency to identify the growing numbers of ‘have nots’ (the unemployed, immigrants, disbanded soldiers, who were flocking to the capital) as the disease polluters and criminals of the metropolis — the burgeoning ‘plaguy body’ of early modern London.

The Glutted, Unvented Body

We have seen how, through the course of the sixteenth century, the age-old sin of lechery evolved into a complex notion of ‘fornication’, synthesizing medical, religious and political discourses into an intriguing saga of bodily corruption. The related sin of appetite — gluttony — was not to be outdone: it emerged, too, with formidable ideological resonances that were to have profound repercussions, not least for the constitution of the country. This may sound rather extreme but an illustration of a decapitated paunch printed in 1651 (see Plate 8) suggests one major consequence.1 At this stage, however, I shall dwell on the medical dimension of this image, for it provides a useful point of entry into a seventeenth-century pathological landscape of ‘excess’ inhabited by — amongst other uncanny forms that will be encountered in this chapter — glutted, unvented bodies.

The Pocky Body: Part I

It is a curious fact that when the London theatres reopened after the major bubonic plague epidemic of 1603, a cluster of plays emerged which, through their imagery, allusions and themes, directed their attention not to ‘the’ plague but to the venereal sister plague — the French Pox. Prostitutes, courtesans, panders, bawds, and lecherous males with their attendant ‘infection’ became commonplace types on the Jacobean stage for a number of interrelated reasons that it will be the purpose of this chapter to explore.

Conclusion: Thinking through the Body

Beckwith’s rich evocation of Christ’s body as the bearer of social and cultural meaning on the late medieval stage is an extremely helpful springboard for apprehending the aesthetic deployment of symbolic diseased bodies in the Reformation years and beyond. Consider, for example, the blotchy, rotting body sitting on its grave in The Daunce and Song of Death (see Plate 1). Like Dalila’s deformed, pock-marked body in Nice Wanton, to the sixteenth-century mind-set this could simultaneously represent an individual diseased body, the sick Church, the decaying nation and a corrupt soul tainted by sin: in this ‘circular and rhetorical universe of values’, characterized by flow and instability, ‘each set of categories … refers to the others, and meaning is constructed and deferred through these interrelationships’. A body spectacularly marked by its affliction (recalling Christ’s wounds) was thus an inscribed document of social and cultural understanding and as such it could function as a densely symbolic text, both reflecting and modifying circulating meanings.

The Humoral-Paracelsan Body

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.