Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)

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. Rather than treating medicine, the theater, and literary texts separately, the contributors show how the anxieties engendered by medical socio-scientific investigations were translated from the realm of medicine to the stage by Renaissance playwrights, especially Shakespeare. As a whole, the volume 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. Performing arts : hysterical disease, exorcism, and Shakespeare's theater / Kaara L. Peterson No faith in physic : masquerades of medicine onstage and off / Tanya Pollard Note her a little farther : doctors and healers in the drama of Shakespeare / Barbara Howard Traister Hot blood : estranging Mediterranean bodies in early modern medical and dramatic texts / Carol Thomas Neely Some love that drew him oft from home : syphilis and international commerce in the comedy of errors / Jonathan Gil Harris Elizabethan racial medical psychology, popular drama, and the social programming of the late-Tudor Black : sketching an exploratory postcolonial hypothesis / Imtiaz Habib Infectious rape, therapeutic revenge : bloodletting and the health of Rome's body / Catherine Belling The fille vièrge as pharmakon : the therapeutic value of Desdemona's corpse / Louise Noble Transformation and degeneration : the paracelsan/galenic body in Othello / Stephanie Moss Cankers in Romeo and Juliet : sixteenth-century medicine at a figural/literal cusp / Lynette Hunter. "This collection of essays makes a contribution to scholarship by examining how the myths and practices of medical knowledge were interwoven into popular entertainment on the early modern stage. Rather than treating medicine, the theater, and literary texts separately, the contributors show how the anxieties engendered by medical socio-scientific investigations were translated from the realm of medicine to the stage by Renaissance playwrights, especially Shakespeare. As a whole, the volume 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."--Jacket