Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage

Stephanie Moss, Kaara L. Peterson

• Contents: Introduction; Part I Performance and the Practitioner: Performing arts: hysterical disease, exorcism, and Shakespeare's theater, Kaara L. Peterson; 'No faith in physic': masquerades of medicine onstage and off, Tanya Pollard; 'Note her a little farther': doctors and healers in the drama of Shakespeare, Barbara Howard Traister. Part II Race, Nationhood, And Discourses Of Medicine: Hot blood: estranging Mediterranean bodies in Early Modern medical and dramatic texts, Carol Thomas Neely; 'Some love that drew him oft from home': syphilis and international commerce in The Comedy of Errors, Jonathan Gil Harris; Elizabethan racial medical psychology, popular drama, and the social programming of the Late-Tudor black: sketching an exploratory postcolonial hypothesis, Imtiaz Habib; Infectious rape, therapeutic revenge: bloodletting and the health of Rome's body, Catherine Belling. Part III Competing Discourses: The Fille Vièrge as Pharmakon: the therapeutic value of Desdemona's corpse, Louise Noble; Transformation and degeneration: the Paracelsan/Galenic body in Othello, Stephanie Moss; Cankers in Romeo and Juliet: 16th-century medicine at a figural/literal cusp, Lynette Hunter. Works cited; Index.

'This stimulating collection of essays... makes a welcome addition to a growing bibliography; and, collectively, it also makes clear how much the playwrights of this period strove not only to represent the corporeal obsessions of their culture, but to imagine them anew.' Renaissance Quarterly ’Imtiaz Habib's theorized focus on the politics of Elizabethan mental health in relation to race and discourses of nationhood yields some fascinating observations about 'racial psychoanalysis'... Louise Noble's exploration of 'mummy' and the therapeutic value of Desdemona's corpse produces some remarkable insights, while Lynette Hunter's knowledgeable study of figural/literal 'cankers' in Romeo and Juliet is equally innovative and thought-provoking... Ashgate's bold foray into the widely uncharted territory of the 'Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity' is to be recommended - I, for one, eagerly await more titles in this series.’ Medical History ’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.’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine