Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry

Eve Salisbury is Professor of English, Emerita, at Western Michigan University, USA. She has edited four volumes for the Middle English Texts Series, authored numerous essays on medieval marriage and institutionally sanctioned violence and written a monograph on the representation of the child in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer (Chaucer and the Child). She is the co-founder of The Gower Project, co-editor of Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media, consulting editor of Comparative Drama, and member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations


Introduction
The Making of a Medical Discourse
Narrative Medicine and Medical Humanities
Microcosmic Bodies
Chapter Overview
Chapter 1
Honoring the Stories of Illness in Chaucer
Physician, Heal Thyself
Charting “Pestilence”
The Wounded Child
Diagnosing the Summoner and the Friar
Diagnosing the Pardoner: “This” Pestilence
Wounded Knight / Wounded Storyteller
Medicinal Barnyard
Medicinal Gardens and the Hortus Conclusus
Toward a Healing Philosophy
Chapter 2
Therapeutic Dialogue and Intersubjective Medicine in Gower and Langland
Pestilence and Penitence
Confession and the Seven Deadly Sins
Medical Consciousness and the Psychophysiological Body
Practitioner and Priest
Reading the Cardiocentric Body: Langland
Reading the Cardiocentric Body: Gower
Gower’s “Physique” and the “Parfit Practisour”
Health in an Unhealthy World: Langland
Health in an Unhealthy World: Gower
Diagnosing the Storyteller’s Illness
Chapter 3
Lydgate and Hoccleve: Dietetic Medicine and the Medicalization of Madness
“A Doctrine and Diet for the Pestilence”
“How the Plague was Ceased in Rome”
“Fabula Duorum Mercatorum”
Death and its Dance
Death and the Physician: A Dialogue
Lydgate Meets Hoccleve Virtually
Knock, Knock, Who’s There?
Learning to Die
Fables from the Gesta Romanorum
Reading the Fables Allegorically
Go Little Book, Go!
Chapter 4
Inscribing Medicine: Thornton Household Remedies
John of Burgundy’s De Epidemia and Thornton’s “Medcynes for the Pestilence”
From Pestilence to Wounds
From the Literal to the Literary: Wounding
Reading for Dis-ease
The Healing Power of Blood
Fever
Toothache
Childbirth
Narrating Medicine in Thornton Household Recipes
Chapter 5
Women Healers, Life Writing, and Therapeutic Reading
Women Healers and Communal Medicine
Pestilence and Household Healing
Chronicling the Pestilence
Passion to Compassion
Heart and Soul
Therapeutic Reading for Women
Medicine for Dis-ease
Therapeutic Reading and the Vertu of Women’s Healing
Two Virtuous Women of Romance
Bad Medicine: The Vilification of Women Healers
Narrating Medicine for Women
Chapter 6
Afterword: A Prognosis
Illness Narratives vs. Plague Narratives
Looking Back
Looking Ahead


Bibliography