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  • The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England.
Raymond A. Anselment. The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1995. 316 pp. $47.50.

Anselment’s book purports to shed new light on the relations between literature and medicine in seventeenth-century England by looking at these two cultural “realms” (both relegated to Apollo) as human practices that produce material and emotional transfo rmations. However, even a cursory reading of the text makes clear that this book is not a thesis-driven enterprise; rather, it is a compendium of references culled from seventeenth-century medical and social treatises, letters, diaries, poems, plays, and so forth. It is organized to demonstrate how, and with what intent, seventeenth-century English writers expressed their spiritual, social, and intellectual attitudes—not to mention their emotions—toward four major contemporary medical crises: infant mor tality, plague, venereal disease, and smallpox. Anselment’s work will prove useful to those scholars who are embarking on a study of any of these medical crises and are looking for literary and other source materials to give an extramedical dimension to t heir research.

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