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This book is open access under a CC-BY licence. Cancer is perhaps
the modern world's most feared disease. Yet, we know relatively
little about this malady's history before the nineteenth century.
This book provides the first in-depth examination of perceptions of
cancerous disease in early modern England. Looking to drama, poetry
and polemic as well as medical texts and personal accounts, it
contends that early modern people possessed an understanding of
cancer which remains recognizable to us today. Many of the ways in
which medical practitioners and lay people imagined cancer - as a
'woman's disease' or a 'beast' inside the body - remain strikingly
familiar, and they helped to make this disease a byword for
treachery and cruelty in discussions of religion, culture and
politics. Equally, cancer treatments were among the era's most
radical medical and surgical procedures. From buttered frog
ointments to agonizing and dangerous surgeries, they raised abiding
questions about the nature of disease and the proper role of the
medical practitioner.
Offering an innovative perspective on early modern debates
concerning embodiment, Alanna Skuse examines diverse kinds of
surgical alteration, from mastectomy to castration, and amputation
to facial reconstruction. Body-altering surgeries had profound
socio-economic and philosophical consequences. They reached beyond
the physical self, and prompted early modern authors to develop
searching questions about the nature of body integrity and its
relationship to the soul: was the body a part of one's identity, or
a mere 'prison' for the mind? How was the body connected to
personal morality? What happened to the altered body after death?
Drawing on a wide variety of texts including medical treatises,
plays, poems, newspaper reports and travel writings, this volume
will argue the answers to these questions were flexible, divergent
and often surprising, and helped to shape early modern thoughts on
philosophy, literature, and the natural sciences. This title is
also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This book is open access under a CC-BY licence. Cancer is perhaps
the modern world's most feared disease. Yet, we know relatively
little about this malady's history before the nineteenth century.
This book provides the first in-depth examination of perceptions of
cancerous disease in early modern England. Looking to drama, poetry
and polemic as well as medical texts and personal accounts, it
contends that early modern people possessed an understanding of
cancer which remains recognizable to us today. Many of the ways in
which medical practitioners and lay people imagined cancer - as a
'woman's disease' or a 'beast' inside the body - remain strikingly
familiar, and they helped to make this disease a byword for
treachery and cruelty in discussions of religion, culture and
politics. Equally, cancer treatments were among the era's most
radical medical and surgical procedures. From buttered frog
ointments to agonizing and dangerous surgeries, they raised abiding
questions about the nature of disease and the proper role of the
medical practitioner.
Offering an innovative perspective on early modern debates
concerning embodiment, Alanna Skuse examines diverse kinds of
surgical alteration, from mastectomy to castration, and amputation
to facial reconstruction. Body-altering surgeries had profound
socio-economic and philosophical consequences. They reached beyond
the physical self, and prompted early modern authors to develop
searching questions about the nature of body integrity and its
relationship to the soul: was the body a part of one's identity, or
a mere 'prison' for the mind? How was the body connected to
personal morality? What happened to the altered body after death?
Drawing on a wide variety of texts including medical treatises,
plays, poems, newspaper reports and travel writings, this volume
will argue the answers to these questions were flexible, divergent
and often surprising, and helped to shape early modern thoughts on
philosophy, literature, and the natural sciences. This title is
also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
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