Abstract
In Chapter 1, I described the crab as the oldest and most pervasive zoomorphic image of cancer, bound up with the disease’s etymology and diagnosis. This creature, however, was arguably the least colourful, and certainly the least frightening, of several animals which came to be associated with cancerous disease. In this chapter, I shall argue that the most extreme and culturally resonant figurations of cancer during the early modern period were to be found in the unlikely pair of the worm and the wolf. Through examining the use of these beasts as both popular and medical images, I discuss why early modern Englishmen and women came to associate these creatures with cancer, and how the cultural freight of worms and wolves shaped, and was shaped by, anxieties surrounding this disease.
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Notes
Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1983); Margaret Healy, ‘Bodily Regimen and Fear of the Beast: “Plausibility” in Renaissance Domestic Tragedy’, in Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and Susan Wiseman (eds), At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 51–73. See also Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000).
Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (eds), The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Ian MacInnes, ‘The Politic Worm: Invertebrate Life in the Early Modern English Body’, in Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (eds), The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 253–74.
Karen Edwards, ‘Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary’ series, published in instalments in Milton Quarterly 39:3 to 43:4 (2005–2009). See especially ‘Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary A-C’, Milton Quarterly 39:4 (2005), 183–292; and ‘Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary T-Z’, Milton Quarterly 43:4 (2009), 241–303.
Marta Powell Harley, ‘Last Things First in Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale: Final Judgment and the Worm of Conscience’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 91:1 (1992), 1–16; Jonathan Wright, ‘The World’s Worst Worm: Conscience and Conformity During the English Reformation’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 30:1 (1999), 113–33.
Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘“The Canker of England’s Commonwealth”: Gerard Malynes and the Origins of Economic Pathology’, Textual Practice 13:2 (1999), 311–28.
Luke Demaitre, ‘Medieval Notions of Cancer: Malignancy and Metaphor’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72:4 (1998), 616.
Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 165.
Charles Cotton, ‘Contentment: Pindarick Ode’, in John Beresford (ed.), Poems of Charles Cotton, 1630–1687 (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1923), pp. 224–8.
Matthew Cobb, The Egg and Sperm Race: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth (London: The Free Press, 2006), especially pp. 66, 84–9; MacInnes, ‘The Politic Worm’, especially pp. 255–6.
Gillian Bennet, ‘Bosom Serpents and Alimentary Amphibians: A Language for Sickness’, in Marijke Gijswit-Hofstra, Hilary Marland and Hans de Waardt (eds), Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe (London; New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 225.
Thomas R. Forbes, ‘Verbal Charms in British Folk Medicine’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 115:4 (1971), 312.
Benjamin W. Fortson, Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction (second edition) (Singapore: Blackwell, 2011), p. 30.
James T. Patterson, The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 31. See also ‘Fasting and Cancer: Starving the Beast’, The Economist (9 February 2012). Accessed via http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/02/fasting-and-cancer, 4 March 2013 (article); James Capuano, Beast: A Slightly Irreverent Tale about Cancer (and Other Assorted Anecdotes) (Wickford, RI: New Street Communications LLC, 2012); Cancer Research UK, ‘Enemy’ (advertisement) dir. Siri Bunford, 30 April 2013.
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Skuse, A. (2015). ‘It Is, Say Some, of a Ravenous Nature’: Zoomorphic Images of Cancer. In: Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487537_4
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