Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic: Medical Narratives on the Early Modern English Stage (review)

The greatest strength of Todd Pettigrew's monograph, the 2004 winner of the Jay L. Halio Prize in Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies, is its emphasis on the importance of narrative in shaping cultural understanding in the early modern period. Erasmus was interested in exempla and Peacham recommended paradigma to teach moral lessons, as Pettigrew notes, and he goes on to demonstrate that many medical texts were actually collections of narratives or case histories. The medical casebooks of John Hall, Shakespeare's son-in-law, for instance, comprise one example of narratives about successful cures. Pettigrew asserts that medical narratives, whether fictional or not, shape the early modern understanding of medical politics: "When Shakespeare writes about medical practitioners, he is doing so in the context of ideologies that are embodied in the instances he knows his audience members already have in their minds. By rewriting those narratives, Shakespeare . . . increases the number of possible ways [audience members] can conceive of medical politics" (25). His study argues that Shakespeare's plays, with one notable exception, contain healers who oppose "the claims of the medical establishment" (30), by which Pettigrew means chiefly the College of Physicians of London, who controlled the licensing of medical practitioners in the City.

Straightforwardly organized, Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic begins with an introduction. Each of the next five chapters focuses on one kind of early modern medical practitioner and a particular Shakespeare play where such a practitioner appears (sometimes very briefly). The chapter that discusses medical empirics features Helena and All's Well; the one dealing with physicians—while mentioning several plays—is primarily concerned with Macbeth; another discusses both apothecaries and friars and focuses on Romeo and Juliet; a fourth treats magical healers, notably Cerimon in Pericles. A chapter on surgeons, by contrast, discusses why few surgeons appear in early modern drama generally and none in the plays of Shakespeare. Pettigrew's final chapter concludes that Shakespeare "raise[s] serious questions about what constitutes authentic medical practice" (152). A very brief afterword points out that twenty-first-century society grapples with some of the same concerns Pettigrew has discussed with regard to early modern culture: "the place of women in medical practice, the reliability of medicines and those who supply them, the political dangers of poisons" (163).

While interesting and provocative, Pettigrew's study seems in places to argue not, as his introduction claims, that Shakespeare was adding to the pool of available medical narratives but rather that he was an advocate for particular medical-political positions. Pettigrew finds new ways to read the medical practitioners in the plays he examines. Sometimes this approach results in persuasive interpretations, as when he discusses Helena as female empiric, triumphantly successful in the face of the defeatism represented by the King's "'congregated college'" (34) of medical advisers. "The play stands," he writes, "simply put, as a radical case for greater tolerance in medical practice" (60). His argument is less convincing, I think, in the chapter on physicians, the practitioners whom he regards as the establishment. Pettigrew seeks to demonstrate Shakespeare's antiestablishment position and thus reads physicians—most notably, the Scottish physician who observes but refuses to treat Lady Macbeth—as derelict in duty, paralyzed by fear of entrapment in a dangerous political situation. Pettigrew argues that the doctor should have treated Lady Macbeth's melancholy (as the physician in The Two Noble Kinsmen treats the depression of the Jailer's daughter), but "to do so under the circumstances would be to risk his own life by indicting the moral character and the legal legitimacy of the reigning king and his queen" (89). Far from representing ethical and effective medical practice, Shakespeare's physicians undermine, in Pettigrew's view, the College of Physicians' claims of medical authority.

In some cases, Pettigrew rather arbitrarily assigns characters to certain categories. He declares Cerimon, for example, to...