Shakespeare's Medical Language: A Dictionary

Sujata Iyengar

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472557506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Physicians, readers and scholars have long been fascinated by Shakespeare's medical language and the presence of healers, wise women and surgeons in his work. This dictionary includes entries about ailments, medical concepts, cures and, taking into account recent critical work on the early modern body, bodily functions, parts, and pathologies in Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Medical Language will provide a comprehensive guide for those needing to understand specific references in the plays, in particular, archaic diagnoses or therapies ('choleric', 'tub-fast') and words that have changed their meanings ('phlegmatic', 'urinal'); those who want to learn more about early modern medical concepts ('elements', 'humors'); and those who might have questions about the embodied experience of living in Shakespeare's England. Entries reveal what terms and concepts might mean in the context of Shakespeare's plays, and the significance that a particular disease, body part or function has in individual plays and the Shakespearean corpus at large.

A

Abhorson [abortion] (A) As in present-day medical language, abortion or, in the more common early modern spelling, abhorsion, refers both to the spontaneous or involuntary loss of pregnancy and to the deliberate termination of a pregnancy through artificial means. Women might suffer miscarriages, especially in the first trimester, by vomiting after eating spoiled or too-spicy food, breathing bad air, or drinking impure water; by any kind of violent accident or agitation, such as falling downstairs, or riding in coaches or wagons; by lifting a heavy weight; by experiencing a strong passion or emotion, such as fear at exposure to loud thunder or gunfire; by engaging in excessive sexual intercourse; or by taking strong medicines or laxatives. Alternatively, if the child were unable to draw enough nourishment from the mother, if the child were too large or the mother too small, too fat, too lean, or too full of the watery humors associated with women, the child might be born dead before its time. In such cases, the mother was often counseled to take bed-rest and to remain cheerful, with the aid of opiates if necessary. Many lay-people, and certainly wise-women, physicians, and apothecaries, knew about herbal abortifacients (such as rue or pennyroyal), or emmenagogues (such as rosemary), which brought on menstrual periods, or prolactin reducers (such as sage), which decreased milk supply.

(B) Mario DiGangi argues convincingly that the name of the character Abhorson in Measure for Measure is a homonym for “abortion,” the culmination of a series of references to abortion throughout the play, and that the dish of “stewed prunes” in the window of Mistress Overdone’s house signals that she is not only a procuress or but also an abortionist. Prunes were both an aphrodisiac and a laxative, and thus particularly dangerous for the heavily pregnant Mistress Elbow.

(C) Guillemeau (C1v–D1v, 1612) cautions women and their midwives about the delicate nature of an early pregnancy. He distinguishes between a “shift” occurring as a “flow” before the fetus had taken shape, and an abortment or abhorsion, occurring with “violent expulsion” after the fortieth day, or after the fetus was recognizable (Guillemeau 1612, I3v). Rüff (1637, E6r–E7r) imagines young women using several different means to end an unwanted pregnancy: lacing themselves tightly, then visiting a “witch” to drink a potion, visiting apothecaries to procure strong herbs, washing their feet and legs in a decoction, and finally opening the veins in the feet, a strategy used to induce menstruation by drawing the retained humors downwards, as Fissell points out (2004, 69). On abortion in MM, see DiGangi (1993); for speculation on “Ophelia’s Herbal” as known abortifacients, see Newman (1979). Dobranski (1998) reads ADO as haunted by the ghosts of miscarried or dead children. Riddle (1992) and McLaren (1984) find evidence that herbal contraceptives and abortifacients were widely available in the early modern period. On women’s vernacular knowledge of abortifacients, see also Fissell (2004).

abortive See also Abhorson [abortion], deformed, hare-lip, legs forward, mole (A) Abortive fetuses, ideas, and plans are untimely, brought forth before they are ready. Abortive acts and offspring are simultaneously incomplete, and monstrous or deformed, a reflection of the belief that untimely births and birth defects were God’s punishment vested on a community of sinners, or, from the seventeenth century onwards, the result of monstrous sicknesses engendered in the womb. Infants with birth defects were often called monsters or “prodigies,” the first from the belief that they demonstrated an unholy mixture (of genders or species), the second for their imagined worth as spectacular omens. In general, monsters were infants born with variations such as extra limbs, marks, scars, swellings, and so on, and prodigies were creatures unrecognizable as human (for example, dogs or snakes born to women).

(B) Shakespeare uses the term abortive in both its literal and figurative senses. Figuratively, suggests Cardinal Panulph, the people shall interpret bad weather as “Abortives, presages and tongues of heaven” calling down vengeance upon wicked King John for his foul intent to murder Arthur (JN 3.4.158). Biron sarcastically calls the King’s plan to abjure the company of women a “barren task” and questions what we might now call a “half-baked” plan: “Why should I joy in any abortive birth?” (LLL 1.1.104).

The figurative and literal meanings of abortive, as both “untimely” and as “deformed,” culminate in the “abortive, rooting hog” that is Richard III, in the first tetralogy (R3 1.1.227). Suffolk describes the usurpers’ “abortive” pride (2H6 4.1.60), as part of a sustained metaphor of birth (“coming forth” and “voiding”) within his speech. Anne curses Richard over her husband’s corpse with words that come back to haunt her and that reflect the accounts of Richard’s own birth:

If ever he have child, abortive be it,

Prodigious, and untimely brought to light,

Whose ugly and unnatural aspect

May fright the hopeful mother at the view.

(R3 1.2.21–4)

“Unnatural” and “untimely” describe at once Richard’s seizing the crown and his impudent wooing of Anne over Henry’s bier. The frightened mother predicts the Duchess of York’s spoken regret over having borne and nourished Richard, himself born abortively or too early, and with “prodigious” or direful omens such as his being “born with teeth” and presenting as a breech (“legs forward”) birth (3H6 5.6.75).

(C) Fissell (2004) identifies a dramatic change in vernacular attitudes toward the womb, and toward monstrous or miscarried births, beginning in the early seventeenth century, a transformed vision of the womb from a healthy, even miraculous generative space into a dangerous pit of disorder and disease. The terror of mothers on seeing their deformed offspring appears frequently in the literature (Fissell 65–7). Paré’s account of “Monsters and Prodigies” participates in this shift from wonder to disgust (1634); Daston and Park’s Wonders and the Orders of Nature meticulously examines the aesthetic, cultural, and social meanings of awe and the natural world (of which abortive or monstrous births formed a part) in early modern and Enlightenment Europe (1998).

ache See also bone-ache, tooth-ache (A) Aches proceeded from any number of ailments within the body: old age, wounds, the great pox, fatigue. Heart-aches and headaches might indicate emotional distress. Headaches came from evil fumes from incorrectly digested food, an excess of heat or of cold or of moisture or of aridity, drunkenness, fevers, too much choler or phlegm, and could also indicate a diagnosis of melancholy, often caused by too much study, or an imminent epileptic attack. Headaches should be treated by allopathic means: those caused by heat required cooling medicines such as rose-water, those caused by cold required hot materials such as pepper, those caused by dryness required a moist diet including, say, egg yolks, and those caused by an excess of moisture, desiccants and placement in cold, dry air. Some sufferers succumbed to headaches from the heat of the sun, especially those who were young, healthy, hot-complexioned, and who took “overmuch businesse in hand” (Barrough 1583, A4r). A headache caused by too much blood or plethora (such as a migraine) required evacuation or purging, including bloodletting from the arm vein on the side of the migraine. External remedies included chafing the forehead, with a linen cloth or with the fingers, until the skin was red and hot, ideally before the attack had reached its climax.

(B) Shakespeare’s characters ache in their bones, their heads, their teeth, shoulders, and their wounds, but only Hamlet’s heart aches (HAM 3.1.61). They ache from exposure and fatigue, like Juliet’s Nurse, who complains of her throbbing brows, “Lord, how my head aches! What a head have I! It beats as it would fall in twenty pieces” (ROM 2.5.48–9). They ache from fighting, like Alicibiades, whose “wounds ache” (TIM 3.5.95) from injury, and as a man threatens the Porter in H8, “I’ll make your head ache” (5.3.88), presumably by hitting him. Hamlet argues that physical pain is an essential part of being human and embodied, much as Claudio does when he imagines life after death not as eternal Paradise but potentially worse than life’s ills, “age, ache, penury and imprisonment” (MM 3.1.129). Desdemona compares Othello’s jealousy to the nagging ache in a finger, which consumes the entire body even though the suffering part is small (OTH 3.4.146–8); compare also Leonato’s figure for impossibility, “to charm ache with air,” which attests to the often hopeless nature of the ailment (ADO 5.1.26).

Othello’s headache in 3.3 might be the migrainous aura that sometimes precedes an epileptic attack, especially since the therapy that Desdemona offers, chafing his temples with a linen cloth and offering to bind his brow, was standard practice in such situations. Hubert appears to suffer from what physicians called inveterate or long-lasting headache, or perhaps migraine. Arthur reminds Hubert of his gentle therapy to try to dissuade the latter from blinding him:

when your head did but ache,

I knit my handercher about your brows,

The best I had, a princess wrought it me,

And I did never ask it you again;

And with my hand at midnight held your head,

And like the watchful minutes to the hour,

Still and anon cheer’d up the heavy time,

Saying, “What lack you?” and “Where lies your grief?”

Or “What good love may I perform for you?”

Many a poor man’s son would have lien still

And ne’er have spoke a loving word to you;

But you at your sick service had a prince.

(JN 4.1.41–52)

Hubert’s headache may come from “heavy” melancholy, a disorder that King John has taxed him with before. Arthur follows the standard recommendations of binding his brows, holding his head (perhaps if he vomits from inveterate headache; it is unclear what Arthur’s “sick service” exactly means) and attempting to dispel the throbbing melancholy.

(C) Barrough (1583) offers several chapters on headache and on the categories of sufferers. He classifies different sorts of headache (from cold, from phlegm, from heat, from fatigue, from “migrime” or migraine, and so on) and recommends chafing the brow with a linen cloth for headaches proceeding from cold in particular (B1v). Gesner (1576) offers distilled remedies to be taken internally, and Batman connects headache to certain kinds of wine and to sleeplessness (1582, P2v, P4v).

aconitum The plant aconitum or aconite (monkshood or wolfsbane) is a deadly poison that “killeth out of hand” through cold and putrefaction (Dodoens 1595, 2i7v). In 2H4, the dying King urges Thomas of Clarence to bind himself to his brother Harry with a “hoop of gold” indissoluble by “the venom of suggestion,” even by suggestion “strong /As aconitum or rash gunpowder” (4.4.47–8). The King mixes his metaphors, so that Clarence is both an antidote to the poison of rumor and a structural reinforcement against explosions. For a description, see Bullein (1579); for its working, Banister (1575).

Aesculapius (A) The classical deity presiding over medicine and healing, Aesculapius or Asclepius was the son of Apollo and the nymph Coronis, and had been taught the arts of hunting and healing by the centaur Chiron. So skilled was Aesculapius that he could even revive the dead, but Zeus killed him with a thunderbolt at the height of his powers, either because he was worried that human beings would seek to live forever or because Hades coveted more dead souls for his realm. Since he was half divine, however, Zeus hearkened to Apollo’s request that the divine physician be placed among the stars. For this reason, his emblem was a staff entwined with a single serpent (often confused, however, with the caduceus of the god Hermes, which bears two twining snakes and a pair of wings at the top).

(B) Shakespeare’s characters invoke Aesculapius twice, once to comic and once to serious effect. WIV mocks Doctor Caius and his traditional tools, such as urinals, both in his characterization as a buffoon and through the comments of the Host, who teasingly compliments Caius before his duel with Sir Hugh Evans as “my Aesculapius? My Galen? . . . bully-stale?” (2.3.29–30). The play opposes the parson and the physician, “the soul-curer and body-curer” (3.1.98), but both are proven foolish. We can detect the insincerity of the Host’s extravagant comparisons of Caius to the renowned ancient physicians Aesculapius and Galen by the phrase “bully-stale” that follows it, which equates the doctor with the urine or stale that he collects and uses to diagnose ailments, sometimes without even seeing the patient who produced it. In Pericles, on the other hand, the model medical man Cerimon prays sincerely, “Aesculapius guide us!” (3.2.110), calling to the divine healer for his skill in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction
• A–Z
• Bibliography
• Index