Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues, and Politics (review)

Of all bodily ailments, bubonic plague, syphilis, and gluttony received the most press and served the most cultural turns in early modern England, according to Margaret Healy's new book. Plague was recurrent throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and was used to express the elite's fears about the poor and the social reformers' attacks on rich extortioners. Syphilis, a new disease, came to symbolize deceit, moral corruption, and sexual intemperance. Gluttony, with its attendant costiveness, served to illuminate the political and economic ills that preceded the eruption of civil war.

Healy's first chapter gives a good account of Galenic humoral theory and the emergence of Paracelsianism, as well as a useful analysis of vernacular books of medical regimen. In the next two chapters she notes that English plague writings fall into two general categories: one that addresses the natural or supernatural causes of the affliction, and one that consists of eyewitness accounts of the disease's course. Chapter 2 centers on her interpretation of William Bullein's enigmatic Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence (1564) as a reformist Protestant polemic that articulates the complaints of the poor which, if not heeded, could stir up the "plague" of rebellion. Bullein blames both Catholics and hypocritical Protestants for the plague's appearance in England. Chapter 3 initially reads "plague" from the perspective of London's political and economic elite who feared the contagious swarms of urban poor, but does an about-face in turning to Thomas Dekker's plague treatises that again hold the wealthy accountable for the ravages of London's plagues.

Chapters 4 and 5 consider the ideological uses to which early moderns put syphilis. First made widely known after the French king's 1494 invasion of Italy, syphilis soon acquired a host of unsavory associations. Most commonly referred to in England as the "French Pox," the disease, which equally incommoded the rich and the impoverished, was popularly imagined as an alien invader. Because it was capable of being passed from mother to child, syphilis was often cast as hereditary or "original" sin. And because the symptoms of the disease often superficially abated, the "Pox" achieved renown as the disease of deceit. In these chapters, Healy examines the misogynistic representation of syphilis as the "Harlot's disease," and the efforts by certain writers to place moral blame for the syphilitic scourge on men and women equally. She gives attention to the English theater's peculiar relation to the "Pox": both had congress with deceit, and the theaters were located in the same pox-infested suburbs that hosted London's brothels. Finally, chapter 6 considers the use by contemporary political and economic thinkers of the gluttonous, constipated body to represent the decline in the sale or "venting" of English cloth and the impecunious, gold-depleting demands of the intemperate aristocrats who surrounded their unbridled and figuratively "gluttonous" head, Charles I.

Fictions of Disease borrows its theoretical apparatus from Mary Douglas's work on the body's symbolic boundaries, Sander Gilman's on the representation of disease, and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's ideas about the workings of the embodied mind. Healy astutely interprets the ideological complexity of early modern medical, political, and literary texts, but her introduction blandly reiterates, rather than adapting, her predecessors' theoretical claims. Moreover, medical historians will wince at her contention that early modern beliefs about disease should be construed as "plausible fictions," without regard to the fact that English people of this era believed that their physicians and surgeons possessed real knowledge, not "myths," about the diseases from which they suffered. We must bear in mind that there is a distinction between deconstructing an era's social construction of knowledge and claiming that historians should regard these constructions as the good "fictions...