Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London. Simon Forman: Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (review)

Simon Forman was a colorful, largely self-educated and self-promoting practitioner in the medical marketplace of Shakespeare's London. Forman came from humble beginnings and was briefly enrolled as a poor scholar at Oxford before forging a career as an astrologer-physician, magician, alchemist, and diviner. He read widely, borrowed freely, and wrote extensively, keeping prolific case records, writing and rewriting the story of his life, and constructing several manuscripts on astrological, alchemical, and magical practice, leaving over 15,000 pages as evidence of his ambitions. Despite this, he failed to articulate his learning or convince medical authorities of his mastery of astrology or medicine, warranting repeated censure by the London College of Physicians, which made him the stereotypical quack in later histories of the College.

Kassell objects to the way historians have characterized Forman as a quack and located him within the decline of astrology in the West. No matter his quackery, she writes, his casebooks attest to his popularity as a healer and "the dynamic between him and his patients and clients" (127). Labeling him a quack "does an injustice to his career, to those who sought his services, and to the medical world in which he worked" (228). Nevertheless, we ought not wholly dismiss the views of his more learned peers.

From Forman's autobiographical sketches and notebooks, Kassell concludes that he had already begun to practice astrological medicine in the 1570s and by the mid-1580s was engaged in alchemical work. By 1587 he was distilling medicine and claimed to have begun to summon angels, although Kassell concedes that Forman left no actual records of his divinization and conjuring. She defines his practice as magical, comprising four kinds of magic: spiritual, angelic, astral, and pharmaceutical. About one-tenth of the roughly 300 recipes in his manuscript "Of appoticarie druges" are at least partly magical. In the Renaissance tradition of Ficino, he harnessed astral powers by making wax seals and talismans inscribed at elect times with images or words, sometimes soaked in potions, sometimes including incantations. Few of the magical operations in this manuscript called for divination, and details of his spiritual and angelic magic are sparse.

Astrology was central to Forman's practice. He drew up charts to answer questions of all sorts, including diagnosing patients' diseases. Forman's use of astrology apparently differed from standard late medieval practices, which depended heavily on the placement of the moon and other planets in the twelve houses of the patient's chart. Forman considered the planets, too, but Kassell claims that the key to his astrology was his understanding of the three outermost spheres, the eighth, ninth, and tenth ones. In the usual reckoning of the geocentric cosmos, the moon, sun, and other planets are carried around by the first seven spheres, leaving the outer spheres to account for the daily motion of the fixed stars, the precession of the equinoxes, and the stationary limits of the cosmos. Kassell's analysis suggests that Forman used the relative motions of these three outer spheres as the basis of his secret method for finding longitude at sea and also to decide the appropriate times to make images, seals, and other magical items. Unfortunately, she offers no account of how he might possibly have reckoned these motions or computed meaningful differences. Given that the motion of the eighth sphere is regular, that the motion of the ninth, if precessional, is very slow, and that the motion of the tenth is zero, it is hard to see how his system could have yielded any useful data.

Forman was interested mainly in projecting his image as a magical healer, and may not actually have employed any systematic natural philosophy and medicine, according to contemporary standards. Kassell raises the interesting possibility that Forman's commitment to astrology for deciding the crucial time to apply remedies was based on his empirical observation that the same recipe may work at one...