Abstract
Published in 1721, Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary demonstrates the complexity of early modern perceptions of, and terms for, cancerous disease. In Bailey’s definitions, cancer slips between identification by its prognosis, origins and stage. Not everything that looks like a cancer is a cancer — ‘Carcinodes’ merely imitates that disease — but it is unclear on what basis one can differentiate between ‘real’ and false cancers, or spot a cancer in the first place. Moreover, Bailey’s dictionary only scratched the surface of the variance seen in texts discussing cancer, which included differences in terminology and definition almost as numerous as those who wrote them down. The project of this chapter, therefore, is to determine how we should understand early modern cancer(s). Can we treat ‘cancer’ as a single disease, with a single name? What made this disease different from others with similar symptoms? By what other terms might it have been recognised, and how was it identified in early modern medical practice?
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Notes
See Daniel De Moulin, A Short History of Breast Cancer (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), p. 20; George H. Sakorafas and Michael Safioleas, ‘Breast Cancer Surgery: An Historical Narrative. Part I. From Prehistoric Times to Renaissance’, European Journal of Cancer Care 18:6 (November 2009), 540.
Marjo Kaartinen, Breast Cancer in the Eighteenth Century (London; Vermont: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), pp. 2–7.
Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘“The Canker of England’s Commonwealth”: Gerard Malynes and the Origins of Economic Pathology’, Textual Practice 13:2 (1999), 311–28.
Lynette Hunter, ‘Cankers in Romeo and Juliet: Sixteenth-Century Medicine at a Figural/Literal Cusp’, in Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson (eds), Disease, Diagnosis and Cure on the Early Modern Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 171.
Sujata Iyengar, Shakespeare’s Medical Language: A Dictionary (London; New York: Continuum, 2011), p. 52.
Pauline Thompson, ‘The Disease That We Call Cancer’, in S. Campbell, B. Hall and D. Klausner (eds), Health, Disease and Healing in Medieval Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), p. 2.
Luke Demaitre, ‘Medieval Notions of Cancer: Malignancy and Metaphor’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72:4 (1998), 623.
Luke Demaitre, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 91.
R.W. McConchie, Lexicography and Physicke: the Record of Sixteenth-Century English Medical Terminology (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 204 (author’s emphases).
Pierre Dionis, A Course of Chirurgical Operations, Demonstrated in the Royal Garden at Paris [London: 1710 (French edition 1707)], pp. 247–8. See also John Browne, The Surgeons Assistant (London: 1703), p. 84; Giovannida Vigo, The Most Excellent Workes of Chirurgerie [London: 1571 (1543)], p. xliv; John Smith, A Compleat Practice of Physic (London: 1656), p. 52.
See Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 2; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: 1621), p. 21.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 188–9.
Gail Kern Paster, ‘Melancholy Cats, Lugged Bears, and Early Modern Cosmology: Reading Shakespeare’s Psychological Materialism Across the Species Barrier’, in Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 118.
Katharine A. Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 57; Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 51.
Jennifer Radden, The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 63.
See, for example, Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially Chapter 8, ‘Conflict and Revolution in Medicine — the Helmontians’, pp. 353–98; Peter Elmer, ‘Chemical Medicine and the Challenge to Galenism: The Legacy of Paracelsus, 1560–1700’, in Peter Elmer (ed.), The Healing Arts: Health, Disease and Society in Europe, 1500–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 108–35.
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Skuse, A. (2015). What Was Cancer? Definition, Diagnosis and Cause. In: Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487537_2
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