Iatrochemical Healing in Shakespeare and Donne: the Diseased and Cured Body in the English Literary Imagination, 1590-1638
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Iatrochemical Healing in Shakespeare and Donne: The Diseased and Cured Body in the English Literary Imagination, 1590-1638 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERISTY OF MINNESOTA BY Christopher Ross Larkin IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY David Haley, Advisor April 2013 © Christopher Ross Larkin 2013 i Acknowledgements I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, David Haley. His insightful feedback, continual support and encouragement, and exceptional abilities as a mentor and editor drove this project to completion. I am grateful for his attention to the shortcomings and strengths of my ideas as the dissertation developed through the rocky early stages, and for his perseverance in helping me to improve on what I had done. I thank John Watkins, chair of my committee, for sharing his passion of reading the past through engaging his students. I have notebooks full of his graduate seminar insights. I thank Tom Clayton for serving on my committee, and for insisting that we take our authors seriously. My passion for John Donne began in his poetry seminar. I thank Jole Shackelford for many hours of discussion and coffee during seminars in History of Medicine. Where I oversimplify or butcher medicine in the dissertation, I hope it reflects my budding fascination with the history and not Jole’s mastery. My parents, Dr. Jeff and Kathy Larkin, deserve more thanks than I could possibly express. They taught me to read early and to read often. They supported me every moment of my life, in every way. Thank you, Mom and Dad. You are the best. I thank Keith and Dr. Torild Homstad for constant encouragement and moral support. I thank Andy, Tippy, Chloe, Hans, Jodi, Haakon, and the rest of my family for constant positivity. Friends near and far, the fantastic people of the Seward neighborhood, my colleagues and students at Minnesota and UW-Stout, and every teacher I have had in my 26 years as a student, I thank you. You are all awesome people. ii For Maia My Best Beloved iii Abstract English authors near the beginning of the seventeenth century explore and exploit tensions between traditional Galenic and newer Paracelsian models of contagion and cure. Medicine is both a subject and a metaphor. Shakespeare and Donne are skeptical about medicine’s ability to cure. They treat new ideas cautiously yet allow room for the potential utility of chemical medicines and modern anatomies. Shakespeare engages the Galen-Paracelsus debate in All’s Well That Ends Well, ultimately presenting an alchemical female healer superior to both schools. Comparison with King John and The Merry Wives of Windsor reveals Shakespeare’s move away from traditional humoral medicine so satirized in the period toward a newer medicine based on chemical models of contagion and cure. The later plays then drift away from the debate toward concepts of cosmic sympathies. Donne’s poetry and prose works demonstrate a medical understanding of the ailing body that allows him to test and exceed the boundaries of both metaphor and the human body. Attention to anatomical detail provides Donne with rich imagery for exploring his complex personal brand of dualism. In the ecstatic writings, including Ignatius His Conclave and Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Donne shows complicated condemnation and exaltation of chemical medicines as both physic and metaphorical vehicle. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis presents a utopian quasi- scientific community that includes explicit research facilities for chemical medicines. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy demonstrates the limitations of humoral medicine and explicitly encourages laboratory alchemy for the production of nonorganic medicines. iv Table of Contents Chapter One: There is no Health: An Introduction to the Project 1 Chapter Two: Dr. She: Alchemical, Paracelsian, Divine, and Sexual Healing in All’s Well That Ends Well 21 Chapter Three: Cold Comfort: Moving Toward a Chemical Shakespeare 72 Chapter Four: Rack’t Carcasses Make Ill Anatomies: Donne’s Medical Dualism 112 Chapter Five: That Abler Soule: Donne’s Ecstatic Bodies 169 Chapter Six: Serious Diligence: Burton, Bacon, and the Desire for Progress 199 Works Cited: 232 Larkin 1 Chapter One There is No Health: An Introduction to the Project Nicholas Breton’s forty-page prose work The Good and the Badde, or Descriptions of the Worthies and Unworthies of This Age is a handbook of expectations for the citizens of 1616 London. It presents sets of character comparisons, in which a brief encomium of a “worthy” character is followed by vituperation of the “unworthy” example. We see how a king, a lawyer, a bishop, a judge, or a young man ought to and ought not to behave. Sandwiched between the soldier and the merchant—after the lazy untrained coward and before the swindler—we find the physician. A Worthy Physician1 A worthy physician is the enemy of sickness, in purging nature from corruption. His action is most in feeling of pulses, and his discourses chiefly of the natures of diseases. He is a great searcher out of simples, and accordingly makes his composition. He persuades abstinence and patience for the benefit of health, while purging and bleeding are the chief courses of his counsel. The Apothecary and the Surgeon are his two chief attendants, with whom conferring upon time, grows temperate in his cures. Surfeits and wantonness are great agents for his employment, when by the secret of his skill, out of others weakness he gathers his own strength. In sum, he is a necessary member for an unnecessary malady, to find a disease and to cure the diseased. While the first line syntactically suggests removing what is natural from a body of corruption, it is safe to assume Breton demonstrates rhetorical hyperbaton typical of works in this period, and we can translate it to read “purging corruption from [out of] nature.” Characterized in active, warlike conflict against disease, the physician’s role is 1 I have modernized the spelling of passages from Breton. Larkin 2 one of separation: nature on one side, corruption on the other. These remain common tropes: modern advertising on city bus shelters presents expert physicians surrounded by soft fonts, pastel colors, and diction dripping with positive connotation. The concept of separating corrupt from pure is at least scriptural in age. Most noteworthy for this study is the presentation of the physician in the second sentence: the worthy physician feels for a pulse and is conversant in the ways diseases occur and develop. He is hands-on and competent. The pursuit of “simples,” or basic herbal remedies, combined with a guidance-counselor’s promotion of self-control and patience, add up to a medical professional who follows established traditional methods and acts on them carefully. The need for careful consideration is repeated in the “conferring upon time” with his druggist and surgeon, and the “temperate” nature of his cures. Nothing is drastic, nothing is new, nothing is imbalanced or out of control. In fact, the physical and immoral excesses of the populace perversely guarantee the physician’s job security through the creation of more disease. The last line presents the physician as a kind of somatic Orkin man, here to find the rodent and clear the house: he would not have needed to be called if we had been more careful about the dishes, food, and garbage. An Unworthy Physician An unlearned and so unworthy physician is a kind of horse-leech whose cure is most in drawing of blood and a desperate purge either to cure or kill as it hits. His discourse is most of the cures that he hath done and them far off. And not a receipt under a hundred pounds though it be not worth three half pence. Upon the market day he is much haunted with urinals where if he find anything (though he know nothing) yet he will say somewhat, which if it hit to some purpose, with a few fustian words, he will seem a piece of strange stuff. He is never without old merry tales, and stale jests to make old folks laugh, and comfits, or plums in his pocket, to please the little children. Yea, and he will be talking of complexions, Larkin 3 though he know nothing of their dispositions. And if his medicine do a feat, he is a made man among fools. But being wholly unlearned, and oft- times unhonest let me thus briefly describe him: He is a plain kind of mountebank, and a true quacksalver, a danger for the sick to deal withal, and a dizard in the world to talk withal. This description is a vituperative catalogue drawn from the period’s vocabulary of negative medical stereotypes. We should note that the first word used to characterize the unworthy physician is “unlearned,” whereas the worthy physician’s education or credentials are not directly addressed. The unschooled, smarmy con artist is both dangerous and obnoxious. He is lucky sometimes, but does not understand even basic humoral theory and thus bleeds his patients excessively and purges them desperately. He performs publicly on the market day, like a bloodletting carnie. This urine-gazer’s successful cures are geographically distant and unverifiable. Ultimately, the unworthy physician is more likely to kill than to cure. If we compare the two physicians, we can see most of the contrast (other than in tone and connotation of language) in bedside manner. The worthy physician is calm and patient, the unworthy is a schmoozy fraud, a doofus, a “dizard.” It is worth noting that the word “cure” occurs only once in the context of the worthy physician, who is praised mostly for his manner and consideration—there is no allusion to his statistically significant higher rate of curing his patients.