Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic: Medical Narratives on the Early Modern English Stage

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University of Delaware Press, 2007 - 197 Seiten
By Shakespeare's time, the debate over legitimate medical practice had become vociferous and public. The powerful College of Physicians fought hard to discredit some and rein in others, but many resisted, denied, or ignored its authority. Dramatists did not fail to notice the turmoil, nor did they fail to comment on it - and no one commented more profoundly on stage than William Shakespeare. Going beyond the usual questions posed about Shakespeare and medicine, this study, which won the first Jay L. Halio Prize in Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies, explores Shakespeare's response to the early modern struggle for control of English medical practice. It does not rehearse the fundamentals of early modern medical thought such as the humoral system that have been more than adequately covered numerous times elsewhere. Instead, it undertakes a reading of popular English medical tracts in an effort to reconstruct the terms in which medical practitioners of all kinds were understood. injury were busy hearing such stories, and in a time of spectacular outbreaks of infectious disease, in a time of religious transition, and in a time of shifting modes of political power, such stories held especial fascination. Todd Pettigrew is an Associate Professor Cape Breton University.

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Inhalt

Acknowledgments
9
Cymbelines Question An Introduction
13
Art that God Allows Empirics
34
By Reason of His Place Physicians
61
Unaccustomed Drams and Unconstant Propositions Apothecaries and Beneficed Practitioners
92
Not So Base Surgeons
123
Virtue and Cunning Magical Healers
139
The Great Infamy of Physic A Conclusion
151
Bad Medicine
162
Notes
164
Bibliography
184
Index
194
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Seite 68 - tis fittest. CORDELIA. How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty? LEAR. You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave; thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like molten lead. CORDELIA. Sir, do you know me? LEAR. You are a spirit, I know; when did you die?
Seite 101 - With a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are centaurs, Though women all above: But to the girdle do the gods inherit, Beneath is all the fiends; there's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption; — Fie, fie, fie!
Seite 74 - And kill sick people groaning under walls: Sometimes I go about and poison wells; And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves, I am content to lose some of my crowns; That I may, walking in my gallery, See 'em go pinioned along by my door. Being young I studied physic, and began To practise first upon the Italian; There I enriched the priests with burials, And always kept the sexton's arms in ure With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells...
Seite 85 - Foul whisperings are abroad : unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles : infected minds To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets : More needs she the divine than the physician...
Seite 86 - Pray can I not, Though inclination be as sharp as will: My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent; And, like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first begin, And both neglect. What if this cursed hand Were thicker than itself with brother's blood, Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy But to confront the visage of offence?
Seite 89 - Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd ; Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; Raze out the written troubles of the brain ; And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuffd bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?
Seite 88 - Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart ? Doct.
Seite 49 - ... every person being the king's subject, having knowledge and experience of the nature of herbs, roots, and waters, or of the operation of the same, by speculation or practice...
Seite 124 - But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all

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