Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance

Book excerpt: Unlike enthusiastic treatments by doctors of Shakespeare's knowledge of medicine, it is the work of a scholar specializing in Elizabethan drama who, guided by medical historians, has ventured into an interdisciplinary field. Several chapters describe the background of various theoretical and practical aspects of medicine with which Shakespeare's educated contemporaries were familiar. How did they think about the body with its physiological processes and their relation to mind and soul? How were health and various diseases understood? How were the sick treated, where, and by what kinds of people? What were the chief methods of treatment and what was the rationale for them? What kinds of literature provided ordinary literate Elizabethan men and women with useful medical information? How much controversy was there in medical thought and practice? Yet the book's central focus remains on Shakespeare.