by Richard Sugg
114 The Method of Physic (1583), 32. As well as pointing out that this book went through seven editions to 1652, K.A. James in the new DNB also notes that ‘Barrow’s is an empirical medicine, one in which practice – and practical knowledge – serve to extend the boundaries of the art of medicine. "Arte", argues Barrow, "is weake without practise"’. Part of Barrow’s treatment for epilepsy, which uses two red-hot frying pans held over the patient’s head (ibid.), is nothing if not ingeniously empirical.
115 The Whole Course of Chirurgery (1597), Ii3r–v. As well as having founded the Glasgow Faculty of Physicans and Surgeons, Lowe was surgeon to Henri IV while in France, and Helen M. Dingwall thinks that he may also have ‘become a master surgeon (academic, or "gown-surgeon") of the College of St Côme’ (DNB).
116 Jewel House, 57–96.
117 Jewel House, 61.
118 Indeed, it is also possible that such remedies were personally employed by Clowes and Baker, who at one point fell to blows (Harkness, Jewel House, 84). On the far more common tendency to settle arguments by violence in this period, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 77–78. For individual cases see also, Leonardo Fioravanti, A Short Discourse (1580), 30r; Lucinda Beier, ‘Seventeenth-century English Surgery: the Casebook of Joseph Binns’, in Medical Theory, Surgical Practice: Studies in the History of Surgery, ed. Christopher Lawrence (London: Routledge, 1992), 48–84, 50–51, 58, 59; Arthur Ponsonby, More English Diaries (London: Methuen, 1927), 66; Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal, 23 October 1736.
119 Thorndike, History, V, 224. All information on Russwurin from Harkness, Jewel House, 78–79; see also ibid., 56–96, and 81, for the opinion of the Paraclesian John Hester, who thought Russwurin ‘"a wise alchemist"’.
120 Charles Goodall, The Royal College of Physicians of London … [with] an historical account of the College’s proceedings against empirics and unlicensed practisers (1684), 351–52. F.V. White in new DNB states that Anthony was brought before the College six times; that he narrowly escaped prison in the last instance; and that he ultimately became rich, perhaps partly because of the patronage of James I. For more on Plat (or Platt), see article in new DNB (Sidney Lee, rev. Anita McConnell).
121 Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 214. On the rather different status of itinerant, unofficial practitioners in Italy, see: David Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
122 Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem, 2nd edn (1594), Works of Thomas Nashe, II, 184.
123 It is also worth noting that, in The Unfortunate Traveller, in 1594, Nashe’s description of the Jewish physician Zachary tells how, ‘out of bones, after the meat was eaten off, he would alchemize an oil that he sold for a shilling a dram’. This may or may not signal Nashe’s awareness of medicines distilled from human bones; but the fact that Zachary uses animal bones does not rule out the possibility (Unfortunate Traveller (1594), M2v).
124 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 5.3, 16–18.
125 Book of Falconry, 78.
126 The early modern term for this would probably have been ‘imagination’ or ‘fancy’ (cf. for example Robert Boyle, Of the Reconcileableness of Specific Medicines to the Corpuscular Philosophy (1685), 126–27).
127 Book of Falconry, Biir.
128 Book of Falconry, 215–16. ‘Castings’ in this context refers to the OED’s sense 3c: in Falconry, ‘anything given to a hawk to cleanse and purge her gorge, whether it be flannel, thrummes, feathers, or such like’ (Latham, Falconry (1615)).
129 Book of Falconry, 218, 255.
130 On diet, see ibid., 280–81.
131 We should note, however, that the prefatory poem was Turberville’s own work.
132 Book of Falconry, 280–81, 343.
133 Book of Falconry, 280.
134 Given that it seems to be Turberville himself speaking when he says that ‘this is a very good receipt [of Cornarus], but not so good as this’ of Manoli, it is possible that he himself had some practical experience when he wrote.
135 Ornithology (1678), 400, 431.
136 The Gentleman’s Recreation in Four Parts, viz. hunting, hawking, fowling, fishing (1686), 81, 84. Although Turberville is not credited at these points, phrasing is almost identical to that of 1575. For citations of Turberville, see 7, 111, 123. Cf., also, 50.
137 The author adds sharply that ‘such manner of feeding of them is stark naught, and maketh their flesh unsavoury in eating, and very prejudicial unto health’ but does not seem to doubt that the practice occurs (Maison Rustique, trans. Richard Surphlet (1616), 646). Estienne’s work first appeared in Latin as Praedium Rusticum in 1554. A French version, translated by Estienne’s son-in-law Jean Liébault, was published as Maison Rustique in 1564.
138 See: César de Rochefort, The History of the Caribby-Islands (1666), 305; Gervase Markham, The Husbandman’s Jewel (1695), 35; Pomet, Complete History of Drugs (1694), 229. De Rochefort’s book was first published anonymously in Rotterdam in 1658.
139 S. Mendyk’s new DNB article on Blome states: ‘Blome has been accused of lack of originality and of employing hack writers for a pittance … He acted more as compiler or editor than as author of his best-known work outside of the cartographic field, The Gentleman’s Recreation (1686) … More credit for this work has been given to Nicholas Coxe and to prominent engravers employed in its production’.
140 The Gentleman’s Recreation in Two Parts (1686), 191. For another recipe, see Gervase Markham, The Husbandman’s Jewel (1695), 35.
141 Sermons, IV, 326–27, Whitehall, Lent, 1622/3.
142 Sermons, IV, 333.
143 Gentleman’s Recreation, 182.
144 Cf. ‘white great maggots … to be fed with sheeps tallow, and beasts’ livers cut small’ (ibid., 182). The Belgian chemist Jean Baptiste van Helmont also claimed to have cured the wounds of horses using mummy (albeit in his own distinctive way; see A Ternary of Paradoxes, trans. Walter Charleton (1650), 55).
145 Mystical Bedlam (1615), 51.
146 John Keogh, Zoologia Medicinalis Hibernica (Dublin, 1739), 102. For a satirical glance at this problem, see also: John Webster, The Tragedy of the Duchess of Malfi (1623), D1v.
147 For Donne’s belief in witches, see: Sermons, IX, 96. Rather differently, even the commendably sceptical Reginald Scot believed that ‘to bring apparitions and spirits they make a strange fume of a man’s gall, and the eyes of a black cat’ – taking this as one of ‘many natural compositions, which have very stupendous effects of themselves’ (Discovery of Witchcraft (1665), 69, 68, italic mine; this book first appeared in 1584).
148 The Works of Benjamin Jonson (1616), 951. The performance of 1609, including the queen, occurred at Whitehall on 2 February. Cf., also, a note keyed to the same work at 946. On use of infants’ fat by witches, see also: Macbeth, 4.1, 23; William Foster, Hoplocrisma-spongus: or, A Sponge to Wipe Away the Weapon-salve (1631), 7–8; Heywood, The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (1635), 606 (on use of this and adult fat, as well as bone, to render them impervious to pain); John Banks, Cyrus the Great (1696), 5. For a male magician’s imagined use of the fat of strangled infants to feed his familiar spirit, see: John Crown, The History of Charles the Eighth of France (1672), 61.
149 Cf., however, the famous reference to ‘witches’ mummy’ in Macbeth (4.1, 24).
150 On the legendary associations between the earliest Christians and cannibalism, (as cited by Tertullian (c.150–220 AD)), see: Ellis, ‘De Legendis Urbis’, 201–3.
151 Featley, The Grand Sacrilege of the Church of Rome (1630), 293–94.
152 Grand Sacrilege, 268–69.
153 Transubstantiation Exploded (1638), 83–85.
154 Maison Rustique (1616), 457.
155 As well as English, the work was translated into German, Dutch, Italian and Scandinavian languages.
15
6 Maison Rustique, 206, 42.
157 Joan Lane, John Hall and his Patients: The Medical Practice of Shakespeare’s Son-in-Law (Stratford: Alan Sutton, 1996), 53–55. I am grateful to Margaret Pelling for alerting me to this reference.
158 Sylva Sylvarum (1627), 261.
159 Sylva Sylvarum, 265.
160 Poems, 65, 384. For this latter view, cf. also: Donne, Sermons, VII, 257; and the variant of John Oldham: ‘Vilest of that viler sex, who damn’d us all! … / … Mummy by some dev’l inhabited’ (‘A Satire upon a Woman … ’, Works (1684), 142). For another possible echo, see Cyrano de Bergerac, on woman as ‘that precious mummy’ (Satyrical Characters …, trans. ‘a person of honour’ (1658), 60).
161 ‘Donne and Paracelsus: An Essay in Interpretation’, Review of English Studies 25.98 (1949): 115–23, 115–16, 117–18. Donne’s reference to a ‘cold quicksilver sweat’ may also be relevant here (‘The Apparition’, Poems, 43).
162 Letters, I, 178, to Sir H[enry] G[oodyer], n.d.
163 Anatomy, l.57, Poems, 272.
164 Fifty Sermons (1649), 214, Whitehall. Cf. Donne’s poetical version of this in his verse letter to the Countess of Bedford, ‘Reason is our soul’s left hand’ (Poems, 225).
165 Sermons, II, 81, n.d. For a close parallel with this, cf. Walter Pagel on ‘"Balsam"’ or ‘"Mummy"’, the terms which Paracelsus used to describe ‘the natural healing power of the tissues [in] counteracting putrefaction’ (Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (New York and Basle: S. Karger, 1958), 101). In his recent book on Paracelsus, Charles Webster seems to separate ‘mumia’ and ‘balsam’ in a way that neither Donne nor Murray do: ‘the status of mumia was high, but it was not as elevated as balsam. The former gave resilience to the body, but the latter reached over to the world of the immortal spirit’. He does, however, also note that ‘balsam was intrinsic to physical bodies while at the same time belonging to the spiritual realm’, and one can see that such a substance would have strong appeal for Donne (Paracelsus: An Introduction, 151). Webster’s sense of balsam is arguably evident when Paracelsus states that ‘the life, then, is … a certain astral balsam, a balsamic impression, a celestial and invisible fire, an included air’ and that ‘the spirit is in very truth the life and balsam of all corporeal things’ (Paracelsus: Essential Readings, trans. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Crucible, 1990), 179).
166 Cf. John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), 149–50.
167 For poetry, see Anatomy, 159–60, Poems, 274.
168 Ignatius His Conclave, ed. T.S. Healy, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 19–25. Where, for example, Paracelsus takes a conveniently ‘devilish’ attitude to the pox in Ignatius (23–24), his attitude to syphilis in Biathanatos (written in 1608) is notably pious (Biathanatos (1644), 215). It is also telling that, even as Ignatius derides Paracelsus, he displays Donne’s precise awareness of one of Paracelsus’ key followers: ‘Neither doth Paracelsus truly deserve the name of an innovator, whose doctrine, Severinus and his other followers do refer to the most ancient times’ (Ignatius, 25).
169 Letters, I, 175. As Ramie Targoff notes, while this letter was assigned to Sir Thomas Lucy in the 1651 edition of the Letters, ‘there is strong reason to believe it was written to Goodyer. According to Roger E. Bennett, it is "one of several of Donne’s efforts to encourage Goodyer to be constant in his religion" … M. Thomas Hester, one of the editors of the forthcoming edition of Donne’s letters, agrees with this conclusion’ (John Donne: Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 187n25, citing Bennett, ‘Donne’s Letters from the Continent in 1611–12’, Philological Quarterly 19 (1940): 66–78, 65 n40.)
170 Sermons, II, 76–77, Lincolns Inn, n.d.
171 See Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne, 4th edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 273, L135. He also refers specifically, in another sermon, not just to balsamum, but to balsamum as applied by a medical ‘plaster’ (Fifty Sermons, 139, Lincoln’s Inn). For other, evidently positive, references to Paracelsus, see: Essayes in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 11; Biathanatos (1644), 172. Biathantaos was written in 1608. When Donne refers to dew as ‘Coeli sudor, a sweaty excrement of the heavens, and siderum saliva, the spittle, the phlegm of the stars’ (Sermons, III, 233, April 1621) he is evidently drawing on Pliny (rendered, in Philemon Holland’s translation, as ‘a certain sweat of the sky, or some unctuous jelly proceeding from the stars’ (Holland, I, 315)). But Paracelsus’ reference to celestial emanations as the ‘"smell, smoke, or sweat" of the stars’ is surely worth noting (Paracelsus, Paramirum, I, viii, Der Bucher und Schrifften (Basle, 1589–90), I, 15; quoted by Gardner in The Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 186).
172 See: Kate Frost, ‘Prescription and Devotion: the Reverend Doctor Donne and the Learned Doctor Mayerne: Two Seventeenth-century Records of Epidemic Typhus Fever’, Medical History 22.4 (1978): 408–16, 409; Anthony Raspa, in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 144.
173 ‘Precription and Devotion’, 409.
174 Both Moffett and Mayerne were influential figures (on Moffett, see Frances Dawbarn, ‘New Light on Dr Thomas Moffet: The Triple Roles of an Early Modern Patronage Broker’, Medical History 47 (2003): 3–22, 6; Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: Fontana Press, 1999), 205–6). But the role of Moffett has been seen as problematic by Dawbarn (‘New Light’, 15–22).
175 Cf. a royal proclamation of the same year, which commanded ‘all apothecaries of this realm, to follow the dispensatory lately compiled by the College of Physicians of London’ (By the King. A Proclamation Commanding all Apothecaries … (1618), t–p).
176 Mummy is an ingredient in various plasters in the edition of 17 December 1618 (see 166, 172, 176). For Moffet’s hostility, see Health’s Improvement (1655), 139–40. Whatever Moffet’s influence on English Paracelsianism, his effect on the Pharmacopeia was necessarily slighter than that of Mayerne, as he died in 1604. For Moffett’s links to continental ideas, and involvement with the relatively neglected ‘Lime Street naturalists’ of Elizabethan London, see Harkness, Jewel House, 27, 33, 44–45. Harkness also notes (85–86) that the initial 1585 committee on the possibility of an English Pharmacopeia arose out of struggles to secure space in London’s medical marketplace. Another possible influence is the apothecary and herbalist John Parkinson. Parkinson, notes Juanita Burnby, ‘became so well respected in his profession that he was one of the five apothecaries who were consulted by the College of Physicians during the compilation of the first Pharmacopoeia Londinensis’ (new DNB). As Thorndike points out, Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum (1640) lists mumia along with bezoar stone and amber (History, VIII, 62–63).
177 See: Hugh Trevor-Roper, Europe’s Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 4; ‘Precription and Devotion’, 409.
178 Europe’s Physician, 270.
179 Europe’s Physician, 269. Brian Nance argues that, as well as possibly encouraging James ‘to look out for his health’, this letter would, ‘should some serious illness befall the king … show Mayerne to be vigilant and careful, and the king to be reckless and unrestrained’ (Turquet de Mayerne as Baroque Physician: The Art of Medical Portraiture, Clio Medica 65 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 183). On Mayerne’s excellent clinical records, see also: Elizabeth Lane Furdell, The Royal Doctors 1485–1714: Medical Personnel at the Tudor and Stuart Courts (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2001), 103.
180 For more on James’s routine health problems, see Furdell, Royal Doctors, 103–4.
181 Europe’s Physician, 275.
182 Ferdinand, in Duchess of Malfi (1623), L3r.
183 Treatise of the Gout, trans. Thomas Shirley (1676), 48, 59–60.
184 Opera Medica (1703), 95, 139, 64, 99–10
0; Medicinal Counsels, trans. Thomas Shirley (1677), 127.
185 See: John Aikin, Biographical Memoirs of Medicine (1780), 262–63.
186 Even Raspa, in a notably meticulous commentary, fails to offer any gloss of the mummy reference in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.
187 ‘Prescription and Devotion’, 408.
188 ‘Prescription and Devotion’, 415, 412. For other memorable therapeutic ingredients, see also Furdell, Royal Doctors, 104.
189 ‘Prescription and Devotion’, 409.
190 ‘Prescription and Devotion’, 412. Frost also notes (413) that Mayerne used a theriac (or treacle) containing a large and variable number of ingredients. Although the theriacs in the 1618 Pharmacopeia do not include mummy, we should recall that the ‘Galenic treacle’ cited by Bullein did.
191 Cf., for example, the anti-spasmodic opiate for epilepsy of Lazare Riverius, published in 1640 and containing coral, pearl, bezoar stone and human skull (cited in Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 163).
192 ‘Prescription and Devotion’, 411–12.
193 We get some broad sense that this may have mattered to Donne when, in Meditation 9, he writes: ‘where there is room for consultation, things are not desperate. They consult; so there is nothing rashly, inconsiderately done; and then they prescribe, they write, so there is nothing covertly, disguisedly, unavowedly done’ (Devotions (1624), 207).
194 On Donne and Foxe, see: R.C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); 452; Raspa, in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 28.
Corpse Medicine from the Civil War to the Eighteenth Century Notes
1 Patrick Curry in new DNB. Last quotation from: L. Fioravanti, Three Exact Pieces, 1652, preface.
2 Cf. especially Curry on the way ‘Culpeper continued to criticize the self-interest of the college physicians, whom he had already classed with priests and lawyers: "The one deceives men in matters belonging to their soul, the other in matters belonging to their bodies, and the third in matters belonging to their estates"’ (A Physical Directory, 1649, ‘To the reader’).