Women, Medicine and Theatre, 1500-1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks (review)

This book has an important message for historians of theatre, medicine, and women. On one hand, it draws attention to the importance of itinerant troupes, so far largely neglected in theatre studies, and to the significant involvement of women performers on their stages. On the other hand, it demonstrates the considerable overlap between performers and itinerant sellers of medicinal remedies. In the three European areas on which the study focuses—the German lands, England, and Italy—performance and healing were closely associated in quack practice. Spectacle helped the mountebanks to sell medicines, and their nostrums attracted an audience for the performers. Licenses indicate that in some German towns, more than 50 percent of medical quacks operating in the public marketplace combined the selling of health services and remedies with musical and theatrical entertainment. Itinerant troupes were usually mixed gender, when not family based, and women had a significant role to play in the business as healers as well as actresses, singers, music players, and acrobats. The world of the quack, therefore, offered women an unofficial way into medicine and theatre, fields from which they were usually excluded.

This is the core of M. A. Katritzky's argument. Through vivid examples and the analysis of an impressive iconographic apparatus (including over fifty images), she reconstructs the visual impact and performance techniques employed by itinerant quacks (Part 2), taking into account their stages and costumes and the recurrent elements in their performances: from the display of real or feigned exotic animals to the exhibition of monstrous fetuses or joined twins, from spectacular demonstrations of self-wounding to the ingestion of poison or dangerous chemicals. In Parts 1, 5, and 6, she examines the rise of the actress, tracing women's involvement with the stage back to the medieval religious play and then illustrating their role in the Italian commedia dell'arte and in the German and English traveling troupes. Noteworthy, too, are the new sources for the study of itinerant practitioners brought to light by this work, in particular the neglected friendship albums of university students studying abroad, packed with visual representations of quacks' scenes and the texts of plays that parodied mountebanks' practices.

The medical role of itinerant women is more specifically addressed in Part 3 and, marginally, in Part 4, which is dedicated to dental care. Katritzky stresses the differentiation of products and services offered by quacks and the fact that this was based on complementary male and female roles. Distancing herself from the perceived image of the charlatan as a purely medicinal seller, Katritzky shows how varied were his wares. These featured hygienic, perfuming, and household cleaning products; remedies to kill parasites; and a variety of toiletries and cosmetic treatments for skin, hair, and teeth. Numerous also were the objects on sale connected with the care of appearance. Cosmetics was an expanding market, and this provided women in mountebank troupes with a terrain where they could deploy their gendered expertise, dispensing cosmetic advice to female customers and even beauty services "in what were in effect mobile beauty salons" (p. 166). Advice about women's health was the other area in which itinerant female healers played a specific role, complementing that of their male quack partners through the offer of one-to-one consultations with female patients.

These are valuable suggestions about the role of married women and family businesses in medicine and about the link between cosmetics and healthcare, and this reader would have liked to have seen them developed further. The analytical perspective is, however, very limited in this book, which is packed with stimulating observations but rarely deals with an issue in great depth or fully articulates its arguments. The overabundance of frequently repetitive detail, combined with a largely narrative style of exposition, often makes the key points hard to detect and the reading wearying. The wealth of material presented is simultaneously...