Abstract
Early modern patients diagnosed with cancer were positioned at the centre of debates about gender, the nature of disease, anatomy and the humours. More practically, they also found themselves with a malady that was often painful and disfiguring and had the potential to end their lives. Confronted with such an illness, what was to be done? The following two chapters examine how cancer sufferers, and the medical practitioners who attended to them, attempted to stem or reverse the effects of this disease. I will argue that, in their most potent forms, cancer treatments continued the conceptual separation of patient from disease which was visible in zoomorphic and anthropomorphic descriptions of cancer’s character. In so doing, they diminished the patient’s role in their own cure, while foregrounding an adversarial relationship between medical practitioners and ‘rebellious’ cancerous tumours. Throughout the early modern period, cancer treatments provoked fierce debate over both the nature of disease and the proper limits of medical intervention.
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Notes
Marjo Kaartinen, Breast Cancer in the Eighteenth Century (London; Vermont: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), especially pp. 27–35.
Wendy D. Churchill, Female Patients in Early Modern Britain: Gender, Diagnosis, and Treatment (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 128–30. See also: Michael Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 135–9; Alasdair B. MacGregor, ‘The Search for a Chemical Cure for Cancer’, Medical History 10 (1966), 375.
Luke Demaitre, ‘Medieval Notions of Cancer: Malignancy and Metaphor’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72:4 (1998), 631. On the Dreckapotheke, see Markham Judah Geller, Volume 7: Renal and Rectal Disease Texts from the series Die Babylonisch-Assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen (ed. Robert Biggs) (Germany: De Gruyter, 2005), p. 7.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (London: Scribner, 2010), p. 50.
See Kevin P. Siena, Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor: London’s ‘Foul Wards’, 1600–1800 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004), especially pp. 22–7; Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson and Roger French, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1997), especially pp. 139–88.
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; Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially Chapter 10, ‘Changes and Continuities’, pp. 434–73.
Jan Purnis, ‘The Stomach and Early Modern Emotion’, University of Toronto Quarterly 79:2 (2010), 807. See also Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially pp. 20–30.
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: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 58–9.
Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), in particular Chapter 8, ‘Medicine and Cuisine’, pp. 241–83. See also Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions, 1500–1760 (London: Continuum, 2009).
Elizabeth A. Williams, ‘Sciences of Appetite in the Enlightenment, 1750–1800’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2012), 402.
Sarah Toulalan, ‘“To[o] Much Eating Stifles the Child”: Fat Bodies and Reproduction in Early Modern England’, Historical Research 87:235 (2014), 67–93. See also: Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), especially pp. 65–85.
On phlebotomy bringing about miscarriage, see Cathy McClive, ‘The Hidden Truths of the Belly: The Uncertainties of Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe’, Social History of Medicine 15:2 (2002), 224–5.
See in particular Eve Keller, ‘“That Sublimest Juyce in our Body”: Bloodletting and Ideas of the Individual in Early Modern England’, Philological Quarterly 86:1/2 (2007), 97–123.
Michael B. Shimkin, Contrary to Nature: Being an Illustrated Commentary on Some Persons and Events of Historical Importance in the Development of Knowledge Concerning Cancer (Washington, 1977), p. 32; A. Kaprozilos and N. Pavlidis, ‘The Treatment of Cancer in Greek Antiquity’, European Journal of Cancer 40 (2004), 2033–40.
Harold J. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 68.
Theodoric Borgognoni, The Surgery of Theodoric (c.1267) (trans. Eldridge Campbell) (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1955), quoted in Shimkin, Contrary to Nature, p. 42.
Ruth Kleinmann, ‘Facing Cancer in the Seventeenth Century: The Last Illness of Anne of Austria, 1644–1666’, Advances in Thanatology 4 (1978), 43.
See Sujata Iyengar, Shakespeare’s Medical Language: A Dictionary (London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 286–7.
Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: The Art of Pain Management in Early Modern England’, in Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and Karl A.E. Enenkel (eds), The Sense of Suffering; Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2009), pp. 19–38.
David N. Harley, ‘Medical Metaphors in English Moral Theology’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 48 (1993), 396–435. See also David Harley, ‘Spiritual Physic, Providence and English Medicine, 1560–1640’, in Peter Ole Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds), Medicine and the Reformation (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993), pp. 101–17; and Andrew Wear, ‘Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 54–99.
Henry More, ‘Letter from Henry More to Lady Conway, Sept 17, 1674’, in Anne Conway, Henry More et al., The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their Friends, 1642–1684, ed. Marjorie Hope Nicolson. Revised by Sarah Hutton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1930]), p. 392.
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Skuse, A. (2015). Wolves’ Tongues and Mercury: Pharmaceutical Cures for 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_6
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