'Worse than a physician': Shakespeare and early modern medical practice

The first chapter explores the way in which scholars have conceptualized the connection between Shakespeare and early modern medicine. It divides the criticism into two main traditions: those studies that explore early modern medical belief as displayed in the plays, and those that provide ahistorical overviews of medical practitioners in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.;The second chapter examines Helena, the female empiric in All's Well that Ends Well and argues that the play adapts well-known narratives about female medical practice to develop the healing plot. I further suggest that the king's initial rejection of Helena is not merely a matter of medical propriety or straightforward patriarchal oppression, but rather an instance of the complex interweaving of gender and class that was part of early modern practice. The chapter continues the study of female medical practice in Shakespeare by contrasting Helena with Paulina in The Winter's Tale. Paulina, as a member of the nobility, would have been largely shielded from conventional attacks on female healers. She uses this privilege---or rather the fact that these privileges were well-known---to gain a rhetorical advantage in her efforts to save Hermione and restore the kingdom to health.;The third chapter considers those practitioners who did not have the status of physicians, but made some claim to legitimate practice. Impostors, men who derived a feigned authority by claiming to be physicians, were widely denounced. The thesis suggests that Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor is such an impostor---a supposition that would explain his perplexing name. The chapter further considers the role of apothecaries in early modern medicine and traces anxieties over poisoning through to the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet. The chapter also includes a consideration of surgeons in Shakespeare; it asks why there are none. The chapter also notes how the apparent criticism of the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet is ideologically at odds with the support of the empiric in All's Well. The former provides an implied critique of the "congregated college" while the latter supports its very position. I suggest that this seeming contradiction is best explained by suggesting that Shakespeare creates medical plots and characters with the aim of furthering the dramatic needs of the play, and that the ideological effects, though significant, are, nevertheless, a side-effect, a by-product of the play's original intent.;The next two chapters explore the implications of this ad hoc progression of ideology. Friar Francis (Much Ado About Nothing ) and Friar Laurence (Romeo and Juliet) are the focus of the first part of Chapter 4 which looks at the relationship between medical practice and the use of the supernatural. Along the same lines, I consider the magical healing of Prospero (The Tempest) and Cerimon (Pericles). Chapter 5 considers the physicians in Macbeth and King Lear and outlines the difficult position of the royal physician who must attend to a patient in crisis. Here, I argue that the shadow of the executed Doctor Roderigo Lopez still loomed over the court physician in the early seventeenth century. For the early modern audience, Lopez represented the danger one faced in ceding control of his or her body to another; for the physician, Lopez was reminder of the danger in being caught up in political plotting. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).