Essay
Shakespeare's world of medicine
William Shakespeare's faculty of delving deep into the labyrinthine and tortuous intricacies of the human mind has amazed readers as well as theatergoers for more than four hundred years and will do so for many more centuries to come. His portraits of Hamlet, King Lear, Cleopatra, Portia, Othello, and Macbeth all attest to his genius for reaching into the depths of the soul and emerge with its quintessence for all to analyse. But Shakespeare also excelled at identifying and describing the afflictions of the body, such as scurvy, gout, epilepsy, rheumatism, and venereal disease. Each of these afflictionsand scores moresicken the kings and commoners of his plays; they are like the Furies of the Greek Myths reincarnated to torment Medieval and Renaissance England. In Shakespeare's time , all matter was believed to consist of one of four humours or elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. In the human body, for example, it was believed that Air took the form of Blood, Earth was represented by Black Bile, Water by Phlegm and Fire by Yellow Bile. In his time, it was believed that sadness, anger, gaiety and envy emanated from Spleen while Liver was thought to be the source of blood formation and connected with courage and cowardice. Shakespeare, endowed with knowledge of both physical and mental illness, was able to enlighten audiences about the soma and psyche of a character. He sings with overtones for humanity but the undertone incessantly goes on ringing in his entire works: "Death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all, all shall die." He does not disregard the role of doctors or medicine in delaying death, but he notes that all souls, be they "Kings and the mightiest potentates", must eventually travel to "The undiscovered country" to encounter "the end of human misery." Imogen in Cymbeline, very wittily summarizes this, "By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death /Will seize the doctor too." Shakespeare makes interesting use of medical issues in his works. According to him, Julius Caesar was deaf in his left ear although no historian records this defect. Shakespeare has Caesar tell Mark Antony that he is deaf in his left ear. Julius Caesar is also described by Cassius as having "the falling sickness" (epilepsy) and suffers a seizure during the course of the play. Shakespeare portrays his doctors as doctors except Doctor Caius in Merry Wives of Windsor, whom he holds up to ridicule, and Doctor Cerimon whom he calls a wise and noble doctor and scientist in Pericles. Falstaff does not spare the prince or Lord Chief Justice or even his doctor from being derided. We may note his comment on his doctor: "A rascally yea-forsooth knave" (Henry IV, Part2, 1.2.36).However, the only historical doctor to appear in one of Shakespeare's plays was Doctor William Butts, physician to Henry VIII. In All's Well That Ends Well, we find that a king who is dying of a "fistula" at the beginning of the play and disappointed by so many supposed medicines despairs of recovery. The following lines will acquaint us with panacea which doctors will not even dream of: " I have seen a medicine/That's able to breathe life into a stone / Quicken a rock and make you dance canary." Now the old Lord Lafew tells the king that the play's heroine- Helena can cure the king. And she does. King Lear whimsically decides to keep his title of king but distributes his entire kingdom among his three daughters according to their degrees of flattery. Kent senses the catastrophe and tries hard to dissuade the king from committing the blunder of depriving Cordelia of her portion of the kingdom over her not praising him in superfluous terms, with 'glib tongue', as her two sisters Goneril and Regan have. Kent is castigated and finally banished for arguing with him. He equates this unreasonable action to killing one's doctor and putting a fee on the disease itself: "Kill thy physician, and thy fee bestow/ Upon the foul disease". King Lear, after being hoodwinked by his two brutal daughters, develops a frenzied emotional state and manifests mental disorder with emotional outbursts and fits of hysteria, at one stage claiming that he suffers from "hysterica passio." He utters the following terribly vicious curse in medical terms against his daughter Goneril: "Into her womb convey sterility /Dry up in her the organs of increase." In his traumatic battle against his own wild nature on the one hand and injustice of his two "Pelican daughters" on the other, Lear feels exhausted, rather critically injured when he cries out for doctors to operate on him, "Let me have surgeons /I am cut to the brains." Lady Macbeth displays unusual courage at the beginning of the play and persuades Macbeth to murder King Duncan. The murder adversely affects her mind and generates psychosomatic disorder. Two doctors, we continually find in the course of the play, try to cure her but in vain. A doctor tells a Gentleman about Lady Macbeth's affliction, "The disease is beyond my practice." Later, while Macbeth's doctor attempts to treat his illness, he reacts violently: "Throw physic to the dogs; I'll none of it." The infant Shakespeare survived an epidemic of plague that swept Stratford in the summer and fall of 1564, killing about one-eighth of its inhabitants. When plague ravaged the city between 1592 and 1603, Shakespeare's dramatic career was jeopardized and he had to move out of the capital for sometime to perform in other cities as group theatre. In Romeo and Juliet, the tragic consequences at the end of the play result from an outbreak of plague which prevents Friar John from delivering Friar Lawrence's letter to Romeo. In addition to doctors, illnesses and medicine, Shakespeare alludes to medical procedure. In Othello, as the evil Iago watches Cassio and Desdemona engaged in polite and affectionate conversation, he says, "Yet again your fingers to your lips? Would they were clyster-pipes for your sake" --- referring to the medical procedure of administering enemas. Another common affliction in Shakespeare's time was venereal disease, in particular syphilis. Shakespeare's pessimistic gem Timon of Athens contains the most references to syphilis. One of the many names of the disease, "the Neapolitan bone-ache" comes in Troilus and Cressida. In Henry V, the husband of Mistress Quickly reports that she died of "the malady of France", referring to another name for syphilis. Shakespeare refers to diseases and doctors with his usual artistic virtuosity and suits them to his artistic designs while other authors make it drab or mechanical. He uses disease like a simile of destruction in Hamlet when Claudius refers to the malady of Denmark, "Like the owner of a foul disease / To keep it from divulging, let it feed / Even on the pith of life." Later Claudius intends to purge the nation of "a foul disease", using the image of a sick person needing invasive operation: "Diseases desperate grown / By desperate appliance are relieved / Or not at all." Philosophers in general and Stoic philosophers in particular are known to face any physical malady or pain and pleasure with defiance. No antiquarian tells us whether Shakespeare suffered from dental illness, but he makes it the most acutely painful disease when Leonato tells Antonio, "There was never yet philosopher / That could endure the toothache patiently" in Much Ado About Nothing. In another incident, according to Iago in Othello, the malady of toothache keeps him awake the night he alleges that Cassio declared his love for Desdemona in sleep. Here he lies to Othello that he was kept awake by a "raging tooth". Tuberculosis or scrofula of lymphatic glands, especially of the neck, was known in Shakespeare's time as "the king's evil" because it was believed to be cured by the touch of a king (referred to in Macbeth [4.3.146]). Malvolio in Twelfth Night is bound and placed in a dark room--- a common remedy for those in Shakespeare's time who were thought to be insane and in this case also as a practical joke. The afflictions in Shakespeare's plays not only help to drive the plots and motivate the characters, but also educate modern audiences and historians about health in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.
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