Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage

by Peterson,Kaara L.

• ISBN13: 9780754637912
• ISBN10: 0754637913
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-08-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This collection of essays makes an important contribution to scholarship by examining how the myths and practices of medical knowledge were interwoven into popular entertainment on the early modern stage. It reconsiders typical ways of viewing medical theory and practice while individual essays focus on gender and ethnicity, theatrical impersonation, medical counterfeit and malfeasance, and medicine as it appears in the form of various political metaphors.

Author Biography

Catherine Belling is Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine and Associate Director of the Institute for Medicine in Contemporary Society at Stony Brook University School of Medicine Imtiaz Habib is an Associate Professor of English at Old Dominion University, in Norfolk, Virginia Jonathan Gil Harris is Professor of English at The George Washington University Lynette Hunter is Professor of the History of Rhetoric at the University of Leeds and Professor of the History of Rhetoric and Performance at University of California, Davis Stephanie Moss, teaches Renaissance Literature, Popular Culture, and Literature and the Occult at the University of South Florida Carol Thomas Neely is Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Louise Noble is Lecturer in English, specializing in early modern English literature and culture at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia Kaara L. Peterson, is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University of Ohio as of fall 2004 Tanya Pollard is an Assistant Professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey Barbara Howard Traister is a Professor of English at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Table of Contents

List of Contributors	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	xi
PART I: PERFORMANCE AND THE PRACTITIONER	1	(52)
Performing Arts: Hysterical Disease, Exorcism, and Shakespeare's Theater	3	(26)
Kaara L. Peterson
``No Faith in Physic'': Masquerades of Medicine Onstage and Off	29	(14)
Tanya Pollard
``Note Her a Little Farther'': Doctors and Healers in the Drama of Shakespeare	43	(10)
Barbara Howard Traister
PART II: RACE, NATIONHOOD, AND DISCOURSES OF MEDICINE	53	(80)
Hot Blood: Estranging Mediterranean Bodies in Early Modern Medical and Dramatic Texts	55	(14)
Carol Thomas Neely
``Some love that drew him oft from home'': Syphilis and International Commerce in The Comedy of Errors	69	(24)
Jonathan Gil Harris
Elizabethan Racial Medical Psychology, Popular Drama, and the Social Programming of the Late-Tudor Black: Sketching an Exploratory Postcolonial Hypothesis	93	(20)
Imtiaz Habib
Infectious Rape, Therapeutic Revenge: Bloodletting and the Health of Rome's Body	113	(20)
Catherine Belling
PART III: COMPETING DISCOURSES	133	(52)
The Fille Vierge as Pharmakon: The Therapeutic Value of Desdemona's Corpse	135	(16)
Louise Noble
Transformation and Degeneration: The Paracelsan/Galenic Body in Othello	151	(20)
Stephanie Moss
Cankers in Romeo and Juliet: Sixteenth-Century Medicine at a Figural/Literal Cusp	171	(14)
Lynette Hunter
Works Cited	185	(18)
Index	203