Abstract
Early modern writers on cancer variously framed the disease as a humoral imbalance, a monstrous progeny or an invading worm. On one thing, however, they were universally agreed. Cancer was characterised, even defined, by malignancy. Moreover, as this definition from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) indicates, ‘malignancy’ was in this period a term with religious, social and political significance, of which the biological phenomenon of uncontrolled growth was only one part. In this chapter, I shall examine how cancer was constructed as malignant in medical, political and cultural discourses. Early modern medical practitioners were, I argue, keenly aware of cancer’s malignancy in what we might call a clinical sense; that is, the ability of cancerous tumours to grow and metastasise. To explain this disturbing ability, some writers tried to understand cancer using existing models of poisoning and contagion, attempting to rid the disease of its mystery. In early modern parlance, however, cancer’s ability to spread was commonly viewed as a facet of its malignant nature, not the sum thereof. In the interchange between medical and politic or polemic texts, malignancy was constructed in more diffuse terms, as the cruel and evil driving force which impelled cancers to overspread both natural and politic ‘bodies’.
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Notes
See for some examples: Kevin P. Siena, ‘Pollution, Promiscuity, and the Pox: English Venereology and the Early Modern Discourse on Social and Sexual Danger’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 8:4 (1998), 553–74; Louis F. Qualtiere and William W.E. Slights, ‘Contagion and Blame in Early Modern England: The Case of the French Pox’, Literature and Medicine 22:1 (2003), 1–24; Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in Literature from More to Milton (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 2005); Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); Vivian Nutton, ‘The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance’, Medical History 27 (1983), 1–34.
Donald Beecher, ‘An Afterword on Contagion’, in Claire L. Carlin (ed.), Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 244.
Sarah Covington, Wounds, Flesh and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Colin Milburn, ‘Syphilis in Faerie Land: Edmund Spenser and the Syphilography of Elizabethan England’, Criticism 46:4 (2004), 597–632; David Harley, ‘Medical Metaphors in English Moral Theology’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 48 (1993), 396–435.
See Erwin H. Ackernecht, ‘Historical Notes on Cancer’, Medical History 2:2 (1958), 115–16.
Miranda Wilson, ‘Watching Flesh: Poison and the Fantasy of Temporal Control in Renaissance England’, Renaissance Studies 27:1 (2013), 97–113.
Marjo Kaartinen, Breast Cancer in the Eighteenth Century (London; Vermont: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), p. 20.
See Marie E. McAllister, ‘Stories of the Origin of Syphilis in Eighteenth-Century England: Science, Myth, and Prejudice’, Eighteenth-Century Life 24:1 (2000), 22.
See Kevin P. Siena, Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor: London’s ‘Foul Wards’, 1600–1800 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004), pp. 65–6.
Luke Demaitre, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 191.
See Vivian Nutton, ‘The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance’, Medical History 27 (1983), 1–34; Lucinda Cole, ‘Of Mice and Moisture: Rats, Witches, Miasma, and Early Modern Theories of Contagion’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10:2 (2010), 65–84.
Karen Edwards, ‘Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary A-C’, Milton Quarterly 39:4 (2005), 249.
Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 27.
See Kaartinen, Breast Cancer in the Eighteenth Century, especially pp. 7–8; Daniel De Moulin, ‘Historical Notes on Breast Cancer, With Emphasis on the Netherlands: II. Pathophysiological Concepts, Diagnosis and Therapy in the 18th Century’, The Netherlands Journal of Surgery 33:4 (1981), 206–16.
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Skuse, A. (2015). Cancerous Growth and Malignancy. In: Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487537_5
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