Abstract
Saint Agatha, an early Christian martyr, was popularly believed to have had her breasts removed as a method of torture. The young Christian, living in ancient Sicily around 231 AD, had caught the eye of the ‘idolatrous’ governor Quintianus, who, angered by her rejection of his sexual advances, had her arrested for her faith and imprisoned in the house of Aphrodisia, a prostitute who attempted to persuade Agatha to welcome Quintianus’s attentions.2 Finding that she remained unmoved, Quintianus ordered Agatha to be tortured by having her breasts mutilated and cut off. Then, infuriated by the composure with which Agatha bore this punishment, he had her thrown into a dungeon and left to die. Quintianus’s final revenge, however, was futile, since Saint Peter appeared to the stricken Christian and restored her breasts. She died after later being rolled on hot coals, an avowed martyr of the faith.
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Notes
Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Selections (selected and trans. Christopher Stace, with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Hamer) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 78.
Edward F. Lewison, ‘Saint Agatha, the Patron Saint of Diseases of the Breast, in Legend and Art’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 24 (1950), 409–20.
Liana de Girolama Cheney, ‘The Cult of St. Agatha’, Women’s Art Journal 17:1 (1996), 4–5.
See George T. Pack, ‘St Peregrine, O.S.M. — The Patron Saint of Cancer Patients’, CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 17 (1967), 183–4.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (London: Scribner, 2010), pp. 39–41; James S. Olson, Bathsheba’s Breast: Women, Cancer and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 10; William L. Donegan, ‘An Introduction to the History of Breast Cancer’, in William L. Donegan and John Stricklin Spratt (eds), Cancer of the Breast (Philadelphia; London: Elsevier Science, 2002), p. 2; 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. 22. See also Harold Ellis, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Surgery (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 165–9, which provides a basic timeline of the long-term development of cancer surgery.
Luke Demaitre, ‘Medieval Notions of Cancer: Malignancy and Metaphor’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72:4 (1998), 631–2.
Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages (trans. Rosemary Morris) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 72.
Marjo Kaartinen, Breast Cancer in the Eighteenth Century (London; Vermont: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), pp. 41–54. See also Wendy D. Churchill, Female Patients in Early Modern Britain: Gender, Diagnosis, and Treatment (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 130–8.
Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter, In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience 1650–1850 (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), p. 106.
Lynda Ellen Stephenson Payne, With Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), in particular Chapter 5, ‘Surgery: The Hand Work of Medicine’, pp. 210–74; Philip K. Wilson, Surgery, Skin and Syphilis Daniel Turner’s London (1677–1741) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999).
See in particular Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), especially pp. 45–50; Roger French, Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance (Aldershot; Vermont: Ashgate, 1999), especially pp. 2–7; Florike Egmond, ‘Execution, Dissection, Pain and Infamy — A Morphological Investigation’, in Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (eds), Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 92–126; Richard Sugg, Murder after Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).
Richard Sugg, Murder after Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 164.
Andrew Wear, ‘Medical Ethics in Early Modern England’, in Andrew Wear, Johanna Geyer-Kordesch and Roger French (eds), Doctors and Ethics: The Earlier Historical Setting of Professional Ethics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), pp. 98–130; Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery, p. 76. See also: Seth Stein LeJacq, ‘The Bounds of Domestic Healing: Medical Recipes, Storytelling and Surgery in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine 26:3 (2013), 451–68.
John Donne, ‘Elegy 14: The Comparison’, from John Donne: The Major Works, ed. John Carey (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 62–3.
Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900 (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), p. 222.
Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 53.
Ellen Leopold, A Darker Ribbon: Breast Cancer, Women, and Their Doctors in the Twentieth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), especially pp. 5 and 48–70; Barron H. Lerner, The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Bridget L. Goodbody, ‘“The Present Opprobrium of Surgery”: “The Agnew Clinic” and Nineteenth-Century Representations of Cancerous Female Breasts’, American Art 8:1 (1994), 48.
E David Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), p. 104.
See: Roger Lund, ‘Infectious Wit: Metaphor, Atheism and the Plague in Eighteenth-Century London’, Literature and Medicine 22:1 (2003), 45–64; 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; Donald Beecher, ‘An Afterword on Contagion’, in Claire L. Carlin (ed.), Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 243–60; Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson and Roger French, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 245–7.
Eric Langley, ‘Plagued by Kindness: Contagious Sympathy in Shakespearean Drama’, Medical Humanities 37 (2011), 104.
Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001), p. 2.
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Skuse, A. (2015). ‘Cannot You Use a Loving Violence?’: Cancer Surgery. In: Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487537_7
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