Medicine and Medical Practice in the Works of Thomas Middleton and His

Medicine and Medical Practice in the Works of Thomas Middleton and his Contemporaries Hannah Margaret Ridge Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English September, 2013 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2013 The University of Leeds and Hannah Margaret Ridge The right of Hannah Margaret Ridge to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Acknowledgements My thanks go to my supervisors Dr. Jane Rickard and Professor Martin Butler for their support, rigour, patience, and kindness. Their confidence in me and my work, alongside their generosity of time and good humour has been invaluable. I would also like to thank Kat Gupta, Julia Ihnatowicz, Bethany Layne, J. Novales, Dr. Jennifer Sarha, Chris Wallish and all my other friends who provided clarification and support. For your willingness to show (or feign) interest I commend you. Thank you for listening when I needed it. Thanks for listening and reiterations of belief also go to Derek Ridge. My final thanks are to Mary Slattery and Allan Leak, without whose generous moral, emotional, and financial support this thesis could never have been begun, let alone finished. I dedicate this thesis to you. Abstract This thesis considers the depiction of medical practitioners in plays and selected pamphlets by Thomas Middleton and other playwrights in the period 1603-37. It directs attention to the dramatists’ representation of characters who prescribe and dispense medicine, contending that concerns which in previous criticism were focused on the sick body can also be explored in relation to the medical practitioner. It examines how dramatists use medicine as a framework within which to stage anxieties about the meaning of professionalism, the changing urban world, access to bodies and private space, the limits of medical knowledge, and the power and authority of medical professionals. The thesis situates the drama in relation to the early modern medical marketplace, paying special attention to licensing, treatments, the professionalisation of the physician and the impact of scientific change. The following subjects are treated: the divisions of the medical marketplace and licensing and regulatory structures; the limits of medical knowledge and the conflict between medicine and religion; physicians’ knowledge of poison and tensions between professional ethics and royal authority; the position of the quacksalver in the urban medical market and anxieties about medicine as a trade; the difference between the treatment of the body and the mind and the potentially curative power of theatre. The thesis concludes that Middleton’s consistent interest in medical practitioners is particularly representative of contemporary medical anxieties, whilst recognising that he was working within a cultural context which was strongly conditioned by medical anxieties. The thesis demonstrates that Middleton’s wide-ranging depiction of practitioners deconstructs the symbolic divisions between them, questions medical power, authority, and considers anxieties about the expansion of access to medical knowledge and tensions about medicine’s status as a vocation or a trade. The thesis further concludes that drama’s potential for cure is emphasized through the staging of treatments and cures. Abbreviations ELH English Literary History ELR English Literary Renaissance OED Oxford English Dictionary SEL, 1500-1900 Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 The Collected Works Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, gen. eds, Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) Where good modern editions are available to me I have used them for quotations, but I have retained the orthography when quoting from early modern sources. In early modern texts, abbreviations have been silently expanded where necessary and the long ‘s’ has been transcribed as a modern ‘s’. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Medical World of Seventeenth-Century London 16 The Combination, Licensing and Regulation of Medical Practice 17 Changes in Medical Theory 32 Practising on the Margins: Quacksalvers 41 Self-Regulation: Advice for Physicians 47 Household Remedies and Advice 52 Conclusion 59 Chapter Two: “Cease vexing heaven, and cease to die”: Middleton and Dekker’s Plague Pamphlets, 1603-1604 62 The Plague Orders and Advice, Household Medicine and Religious Discourse 68 Thomas Dekker’s Martial Plague in The Wonderful Year 80 Healing the Nation in News From Gravesend 84 Battling Plague in The Meeting of Gallants 95 Conclusion 107 Chapter Three: “The movers of a languishing death”: Licensed Physicians in Tragedy and Tragicomedy 111 Constructing Medical Morality 115 Transgressing Boundaries in The Patient Man and the Honest Whore and Match Me in London 121 Restoring the Body Politic in Cymbeline and Macbeth 132 Violent Physic in The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi 143 Conclusion 151 Chapter Four: “Shaming the college”: Quacksalvers, Mountebanks and Empirics in City Comedy 155 Entering the Bedroom in A Mad World, My Masters and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside 159 Places of Business and Trickery: The Widow and The Family of Love 175 Dangerous Practice in A Fair Quarrel and Anything For A Quiet Life 183 Conclusion 196 Chapter Five: “The mind’s disease”: Exploring the Treatment of Lunacy on the Stage 200 Contemporary Discourses of Madness 205 Diagnosis, Division, and Violent Treatment in The Patient Man and the Honest Whore, The Changeling, and The Duchess of Malfi 212 Theatrical Therapy in The Lover’s Melancholy and The Antipodes 223 Conclusion 239 Conclusion 243 Bibliography 248 1 Introduction This thesis examines the presentation of medical professionals in plays and selected pamphlets by Thomas Middleton and several of his contemporaries. Alongside Thomas Dekker, John Webster, John Ford, and William Shakespeare, Middleton stages a wide variety of medical practitioners. I argue that in doing so the playwrights dramatised cultural anxieties surrounding medicine and medical professionals. The thesis asks how did theatre, in a world where the maintenance of health was paramount, become so important as a way of exploring concerns about medicine and its practitioners. By examining theatrical responses to plague, the power of poison, the phenomenon of quacksalving and the evolution of potential cures for mental disturbance, I argue that the figure of the medical professional allowed key questions to be asked about the limits of professional knowledge and the organisational structure of early modern medicine. I examine contemporary vernacular medical texts alongside the dramatic works in order to interrogate the intellectual problematic of increased access to medical knowledge, and the dramatic potential of medical characters and practice. There has been a considerable amount of scholarly work done by historians on the evolution of early modern medicine and medical science. One very searching critique has been expressed by Mary Lindemann, who argues that we should resist seeing such developments solely as ‘a story of progress’.1 There certainly were narratives of progression in the period, such as the increasing acceptance of 1 Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 3. Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1500-1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) both present explorations of knowledge developments and which portions of society could reasonably be expected to learn of them, alongside clear discussions of the importance, and impact, of these discoveries and evolutions in medical thought. 2 Paracelsian medical theory, which has frequently been represented as a more drastic change than it actually was. I argue that the ambivalent positions displayed by the plays towards developments in medical theory are symptomatic of the complex history of change found in medical practice in the period. The thesis engages with how seemingly disparate theories and kinds of practice were synthesised by medical writers and professionals, and how this synthesis is represented dramatically. I argue that the plays form part of the social process by which changes within medical provision were understood and responded to, and that they demonstrate how developments in theory filtered down into the social consciousness. Much of the literary scholarship relating to the field of early modern medicine has focused upon the depiction of the sick body in literature, in particular to the body’s openness to outside influence. The internal balance of the humours was affected by external factors, such as the changing of the seasons, and this provoked questions about how illness should be treated. I argue that the texts are attuned to this debate, and divert attention towards how far social ailments must be cured before individual, physical, ones can be addressed. For example, when considering the practice of medicine in the city comedies, I shall contend

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