Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage

Stephanie Moss, Kaara L. Peterson

Contents: Introduction; Part I Performance and the Practitioner: 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. Part II Race, Nationhood, And Discourses Of Medicine: 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. Part III Competing Discourses: 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: 16th-century medicine at a figural/literal cusp, Lynette Hunter. Works cited; Index.