Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early, and: Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy (review)

Hillary M. Nunn. Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy. Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005. x + 231 pp. Ill. $89.95 (0-7546-3399-3).

The volumes under review both examine intersections between medicine and literature—primarily drama—in early modern England. Stephanie Moss and Kaara Peterson's edited volume offers up a set of useful and engaging essays that explore the historical and literary significance of various medical references and representations in the work of English dramatists. Peterson's essay argues that the disease known as hysterica passio must be distinguished from the later assessments of psychological hysteria by Charcot and Freud. Early modern hysterica passio was an organic disease of the dysfunctional womb, which induced symptomatic odd behaviors in its victims as well as seeming death; such behavior was to be distinguished from the duplicitous performances of those who were faking demonic possession. Peterson bases her argument on Edward Jorden's reading of the Mary Glover possession case of 1602: Jorden contended that the young girl's bodily contortions were a consequence of hysterica passio rather than actual or dissimulated possession. Peterson claims that Shakespeare and Middleton employed references to hysterica passio in contradistinction to exorcism in several plays.

Tanya Pollard takes on Ben Jonson's representations of medical remedies and poisons in his drama. That medical remedies also had poisonous potential was commonplace knowledge in the early modern period. Pollard points out that antitheatrical critics of the period associated the theater with the poisoning of the morals and minds of its audience; hence, the references to and representations of drugs and poisons in early modern drama had both ambivalent and metatheatrical import, reflecting upon the beneficence or maleficence of theater itself.

Barbara Traister's essay offers explanations for the fact that Shakespeare's plays before 1603 contain few physicians, and these are comic and medically incompetent characters, whereas physicians or healers appear in seven of the fifteen plays written after 1603 and are treated seriously as figures of authority. However, when it comes to a difficult situation requiring cure, Shakespeare looks to nonprofessional healers to do the job—reflecting the limited power of professional medicine to cure in this period.

Carol Thomas Neely's essay, "Hot Blood," considers the construction of the Mediterranean humoral body—overheated by climate—as the site of pathological lovesickness: the inhabitants of warm climates possess hotter humors and thus are more liable to develop lovesickness. Othello stands out among Shakespeare's plays in resisting a simplistic humoral explanation of the Mediterranean and its inhabitants. Othello—at least until Iago spins his evil web—is represented as a man who does not naturally suffer from lovesickness or overheated desires; individual circumstance and human efforts, not humoral predestination, determine the course of events. The construction of an essential, humor-defined, and racialized other clearly postdates the Shakespearean moment.

Jonathan Gil Harris's excellent contribution explores the intersecting discourses of syphilis, medicine, and commerce in The Comedy of Errors. Harris traces the parallels between two types of causal explanation that medical and protomercantilist writings share. An internalist explanation manifests itself in medicine as traditional Galenic humoralism, which posits that disease is generated by an internal imbalance between the body's four humors; in economic writings, the internalist explanation takes the form of a belief that economic ills are due to greed and lack of moral self-regulation in economic affairs. Paracelsus heralded the externalist explanation by arguing that diseases are caused by external "seeds" that invade and infect that body; Harris argues that in the economic arena...