Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England

by Jonathan Gil Harris

• ISBN13: 9780521594059
• ISBN10: 0521594057
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-05-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Jonathan Gil Harris examines the origins of modern discourses of social pathology in Elizabethan and Jacobean medical and political writing. Plays, pamphlets and political treatises of this period display an increasingly xenophobic tendency to attribute England's ills to 'foreign bodies' such as Jews, Catholics and witches, as well as treat their allegedly 'poisonous' features for the health of the body politic. Harris argues that this tendency resonates with two of the distinctive paradigms of Paracelsus' pharmacy which also includes the notion that poison has a medicinal power. The emergence of these paradigms in early modern English political thought signals a decisive shift from Galenic humoral tradition towards twentieth-century politico-medical discourses of 'infection' and 'containment', which, like their early modern predecessors, make mysterious the domestic origins of social conflict and the operations of political authority.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	viii	(1)
Acknowledgments	ix	(2)
Note on the text	xi
1 Introduction: functionalist organicism and the origins of social pathology	1	(18)
Part one: pathologizing the body politic	19	(60)
2 "Enter at the least pore": early modern medicine and bodily infiltration	19	(29)
3 "Ev'ry poison good for some use": the poisonous political pharmacy and its discontents	48	(31)
Part two: handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?	79	(62)
4 Public enemas: the disjunctions of the excremental Jewish pharmakon	79	(28)
5 "To stop her mouth with Truths authority": the poisonous tongue of the which and the word of God	107	(34)
Conclusion: the persistence of the pathological body politic	141	(6)
Notes	147	(29)
Bibliography	176	(16)
Index	192