Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (review)

Book Reviews 253 F. David Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1992. 404 pp. Clothbound, $55.00. The title, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance, gives some idea of both the scope and the problems of F. David Hoeniger's ambitious new book. Medicine and Shakespeare implies a desire to balance evenly attention to medical theories, beliefs, and practices with Shakespeare 's use of them. (The General Index includes, along with proper names, medical concepts, bodily systems and organs, and specific diseases and treatments. The Index to Shakespearean Plays and Passages cites alphabetically every passage that Hoeniger discusses.) But the title also implies some principles of historical limitation, interpretive method, and even grammatical and syntactical subordination: hence in the English Renaissance. Yet surely it is not Shakespeare who is in the English Renaissance; in this context that can be assumed. It is Medicine that is for Hoeniger in the historical period, and Shakespeare who then makes use of this knowledge. Indeed, more than four-fifths of Hoeniger's book is devoted to describing the varied and often conflicted state of medicine in lateRenaissance England: from "Part I: Medicine and Medical Practitioners in the Age of Shakespeare," to "Part II: Major Medical Philosophies and Systems," to "Part III: Physiology and Psychology: The Body and How It Functions," to "Part IV: Pathology, Diagnosis, and Therapy." For this historical mapping Hoeniger certainly deserves many thanks, since the medicine of Shakespeare's day was in most respects (to cite merely some of the most obvious, in its sense of organic functions and interrelationships , humoral theory, reproductive theory, and causality) certainly not that of our own. However, one may ask whether this mapping itself represents well the complicated state of medicine in Shakespeare's day and its importance for a practicing poet and dramatist. Here one would query Hoeniger 's accuracy and understanding as well as his sense of judgment and organization. He begins empirically, with a historical survey of the types of medical practitioners in Shakespeare's day (physicians, surgeons, midwives , and healing women), a short account of medical works and traditions Shakespeare might have known, and a brief discussion of the actual physicians characterized in Shakespeare's plays. Only then does he turn to documenting in exhaustive, uneven, and. often digressive detail the basic tenets and tensions among Galenic medicine and rival or auxiliary systems, such as Paracelsian medicine or various theories of occult or supernatural causes. 254 BOOK REVIEWS Throughout, Hoeniger's survey displays shortcomings that undermine its implicit rhetorical effect as an authoritative account of background knowledge. Unfortunately, these shortcomings will not be evident to readers without expertise in Renaissance medicine. They range from the relatively trivial—incorrect citation of facts (e.g., Jean Fernel's dates are 1497-1558, not 1506-88) and misspelling of names—to more serious errors of understanding and interpretation. Aristotle, for example , has no notion of a mammalian ovary, and to refer to one in a discussion of his notions of pneuma and generation is, at best, misleading and, at worst, symptomatic of a seriously flawed understanding (p. 92). Worse still is Hoeniger's apparently fundamental misconstrual of Aristotle 's central conception of innate heat (pp. 144-45). Other characterizations , whether of medical humanism and astrology or of final causes and disease, lack subtlety or are misleading. Together with such specific points, Hoeniger's discussion of Renaissance medicine displays simplistic explanatory schemes and all-toofamiliar caricatures of such topics as Galenism, authority, the role of experience, medical practice versus theory, and book learning. In general , Hoeniger proffers summaries of Galen's ancient medical doctrines in place of detailed examination of the variety of cultural meanings attached to medical schemes in local Renaissance contexts. For example, as a result of limiting exposition largely to Galen and a few other ancient or medieval authorities, Hoeniger's discussions of the imagination or musical therapy in Renaissance medicine fail to represent ways in which they become enmeshed in new cultural understandings often associated with Neoplatonism and occultism. Indeed, his chapter "Magical Versus Natural Causes of Certain Diseases" belies a strong Renaissance tendency to regard magic as itself...