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This chapter offers a historical sketch of the state of practical and theoretical medicine in the 1790s. It starts by considering the range of practitioners offering medical treatments during the eighteenth century and goes on to describe some important but often overlooked differences between our medicine and the medicine of Coleridge's time. It also discusses some of the ramifications of the main theoretical controversies in eighteenth-century medicine: the slow decline of the humoral pathology and rise of the view that disease – possibly all disease – is caused by disturbances in the nervous system; the materialist challenge to vitalism; and the attempt to refound medicine along essentialist philosophical lines.

This chapter introduces the book as an account of the transcultural love story imagined by Protestants that historicizes the meanings of love and friendship in a colonial context. While historians have looked at greed and power in colonialism, this book examines Protestants’ belief systems as another historical motivation, one shaped by events at Fort Caroline. As an introduction, this chapter states the thesis, sets the scene, introduces the science of humoralism, defines categories and labels used for groups discussed, and identifies historiographic contexts for the book.

According to early European understandings of the body and identity, love could cause a fundamental transformation: a personality change or a change of cultural, spiritual, and political allegiance. With a change in hygienic customs, the human body would change form, color, and even gender. This chapter explains the larger framework of health and identity common to all early modern Europeans, humoralism (or Galenic medicine), an ancient science that defined human bodies as mutable and expected to change with the environment, diet, behavior, and emotion. Seemingly ethnographic descriptions of Indigenous people applied this framework in order to anticipate and prevent the transformation of Christians by Indigenous people and the environments of the Atlantic world and Florida.

This chapter discusses popular notions of health, with a focus on perceptions of how different drugs are digested and on the humoral balance between the “hot” belly and the “cool” mind. The first principle of Bengali body concepts is that the belly is the somatic center of good health. For Bengalis, health depends on the proper alignment between the belly and the mind. In this alignment, the belly is a “hot” source of energy that needs to be controlled by the “cool” sovereignty of the mind. The opposition between “cool” mind and “hot” belly is based on a humoral worldview. Indian Ayurvedic humoralism is based not on four but on three humors (tridosha) called vata, pitta, and kapha. Pitta tends to be hot and kapha to be cold, while vata is in-between.

This chapter explores Islamic humoralism on the Malay Peninsula. Although Islam was successfully implanted in Malaya, and Islamic concepts are used by Malays to interpret and reinterpret empirical realities, the pre-Islamic aboriginal view of the workings of the cosmos, and the positive valence of coolness in the universe and its human microcosm, still fundamental to Malay thought, have radically altered the received theories of Islamic humoralism. Malaya proved a remarkably receptive soil for Islamic religion and medical theories. Their humoral theory provided Islamicized Malays with a new grammar with which to organize ideas about humanity and the universe. Medieval Greek-Arabic humoral theories concerning foods, medicines, and diseases whose etiology stems from the natural world appear in simplified but otherwise virtually unchanged form in contemporary rural Malaysia.

Extremes of emotion correlate with extremes of temperature. And within these extremes, the doctrine of female coldness imposes itself as a behavioral norm—an ostensible natural limit—governing the appropriateness of affectivity in female characters not only under a given set of dramatic or social circumstances but as a matter of overall obedience to the thermal paradigms of nature. Thus, the social intention deeply, if obscurely, imbricated in the thermal economy not only grants affective privilege to men over women, but it also works to dampen the emotional expressiveness and claim to individuality theoretically granted to women as a whole. This chapter explores how such bodily phenomena as humor, spirit, and temper become performative of versions of femaleness even in contexts where, to us, discourses of sexual difference and the body itself seem barely to be in play. This chapter shows the discourse of female humoralism at work by contrasting selected representations of female melancholy and female rage, mostly, but not exclusively, in three of William Shakespeare's plays: As You Like It, Othello, and The Taming of the Shrew.

This chapter argues that in spite of the dominance of the dynamic, humoral theory of the body for thousands of years scholars still have little understanding of what role humoralism plays in the invention of the homo/hetero binary. To this end, this chapter reads across a range of sexological writing encompassing Richard Burton’s climate-based Sotadic Zone, Havelock Ellis’s observation of a “special proclivity” for homosexuality in the “hotter regions of the globe,” and Victor Segalen’s claim that there is “not much Arctic Eroticism” to explore climate as the aspect of the permeable, humoral body with the longest afterlife. It argues that an examination of what Iwan Bloch calls “Anthropologia Sexualis” will highlight the meanings of the shift from the humoral body to a germ theory of the body for the construction of sexuality. Reading Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) as a text that roots homosexuality in the competing epidemiological regimes of anthropologia sexualis’s humoralism and scientia sexualis’s germ theory, this chapter reads Mann’s novella as providing a key switch point for understanding the divestment of sexuality in humoralism. Moreover, this chapter suggests that Mann's text provides rich models for theorizing sexuality as simultaneously climatic and microbial.

Solo singing is associated with the expression of passions. During the first half of the 17^th century, Rome saw an unparalleled production of cantatas, performed for exclusive audiences. This article focuses on the ambivalent play on gender and eroticism, when cantatas were sung by women as well as castrati, both perceived as highly erotic and also at times, threatening. A juxtaposition of contemporary testimonies of these performances with the medical theory of the humors shows that both are based on the idea of a perfect male body, a less perfect and womanish body of the castrato, and an even worse female body. Poems were written mostly by men and reflect the conventional tropes of the male gaze: the lover oscillates between hot and cold; he is consumed by the fire of passion and frozen by the unwavering and icy cruelty of his beloved. While we rightly read such changes of temperature as standardized extravagances of poetics, they are also deeply rooted in Early Modern scientific theories of the gendered body. Thus, the performance of cantatas toys with an ambivalent game of erotic expression of the affects, where the audience does not want to expose women publicly and yet wants to see them singing; where a woman might embody a male lover singing his lovesickness, and a castrato might embody a wretched female lamenting her fate. Performance was one part of sophisticated entertainments along with readings or improvisation of poetry, discourses on love, games of eloquence, and music.

Gil argues that the classical discourse of the humors is a mistaken starting point for scholars who want to understand how early modern people experienced and understood their own emotional life, and that religious beliefs, and especially beliefs about post-death resurrection, provide a better starting point for historical phenomenology. Beliefs about resurrection provided a context for how people experienced their emotions by endowing them with sociological meaningfulness. Belief in resurrection led people to theorize how (and to what extent) their embodied self is embedded in a contingent social world that affects and conditions all corporeal experiences (even seemingly spontaneous or ‘natural’ experience) and how (and to what extent) the embodied self could be imagined as separable from the contingent social world that it inhabits.

Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an extraordinary proliferation of theoretical ideas about the nature and meaning of emotion, and this introduction offers a survey of the sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, intellectual and aesthetic traditions that helped shape this debate. It responds to previous work in the field that has focused primarily on medical humoralism and makes a case for a more pluralistic view of emotion in the period. Renaissance literary texts provide compelling evidence that emotions were not a passive phenomenon, acting upon people’s bodies, but an active, imaginative and philosophical process. Characters in early modern texts often express dissatisfaction with a purely medical understanding of emotion, looking instead to other complex systems of knowledge – including religion and philosophy, rhetorical and language theory, and drama and performance – to articulate and reflect upon their emotional experiences. The introduction thus proposes a rereading of emotional texts from this period with a more pluralistic model of affective experience in mind, paying greater attention to how individuals in this period interrogated, cultivated and performed emotional experience in active and often self-defining ways.

A potential danger with the humoral psychology of the Renaissance, which bears a rough analogy to physical-reductionist pictures of humanity today, is that it downplays the role of agency in human life, since one no more chooses one’s basic humour than one does one’s neurophysiology. The formidable influence and explanatory and rhetorical power of such physical accounts of humanity is not to be doubted. But we must hope to find other ways of talking about ourselves perhaps in religion, art, philosophy, perhaps in writers like Shakespeare? These would be ways of talking that enabled us to believe in and act upon our own collective and individual sense of agency.

The book demonstrates that health maintenance occupied a neglected but important place in late Renaissance domestic culture. Contrary to ingrained assumptions this was also a highly dynamic set of ideas: the hierarchy of the key six spheres of life (Non-Naturals) was redefined over the period and so were the recommendations concerning their management; moreover, the increasingly differentiated advice was articulated through a language that largely transcended the basic principles of humoral physiology. The study also moves away from a dyadic representation of the power relationship between patients and practitioners: change in health advice was largely socially driven and its dissemination provided patients with a sense of enhanced control over their health but reinforced at the same time the authority of physicians. The latter not only extended their advisory role from therapies to health management, but by introducing a plethora of increasingly complex distinctions in their recommendations they became the final arbiters of ‘healthiness’.

Torn as they were between trying to control their own destinies and letting God shape their actions, the Elizabethan and Jacobean subjects still looked for answers in the skies while they were also anxious to fashion their own lives in more coherent or rational ways than before. This Introduction gives clear definitions of the concepts used in the book (‘climate’, ‘weather’, ‘environment’) and presents the various approaches to weather and climate that prevailed at the turn of the seventeenth century. It also explains how early modern writers capitalised on both traditional and innovative views of the sky and emphasises both the influence of classical thought and the harsh realities of what is now known as the ‘Little Ice Age’. It finally introduces weather issues in connection with early modern drama and shows that the Shakespearean skies, in particular, are much more than a mere reservoir of metaphors.

This concluding chapter returns to “mind food,” showing how psychiatrists are both trying to counter nonbiomedical notions of drug effects and the biomedical model of short-term targeted action itself. “Mind food” after all echoes the popular centrality of digestion, so likening psychopharmaceuticals to food makes these drugs seem innocuous. These biomedical prescribers explain the action of psychopharmaceuticals as “mind food” and that they compare ill moods to a nutritional imbalance is deeply ironical if the paradigmatic opposition between specific etiology and humoralism in the history of medicine is considered. Calcutta doctors tend to evade explaining diagnoses and therapies when this causes resistance from patients, and there is no regulation that stands in their way. The chapter goes on to elaborate on the medical and ethical implications of these issues, highlighting the ongoing public anxieties regarding mind medications.

Chapter 9 opens with the triumph of this generation of medical intellectuals in setting some of the key terms and promises of integrationist medicine, then follows a complicated line of thinking that emerged in medical individualism which led to radical reappraisals of the doctor-patient relationship restated in socio-political and social-moral terms. Whereas a turn in the conceptualization of the human body as an integrated whole, able to respond to threats and sources of disequilibrium, might otherwise suggest a positive medical humanism, one variant was to treat medicine and the welfare state designed to support it as threats to the healing power of nature and “natural” ways of life. Thus some physicians and psychiatrists—often in conversation with other varieties of holism—pursued this rethinking of norms and the normal by attending to the doctor-patient relationship at the expense of broader forms of care, setting unreachable goals, or resorting to antipsychiatric, antimedical approaches to demonstrate the ostensible failure of medicine tout court. We explore the contest of therapeutics, medical systems, both allopathic and new age (as in Georg Groddeck, René Dubos, or Ivan Illich’s work), and the popularization of the concept of homeostasis as “stress” in the endocrinology of Hans Selye.

This chapter opens with an overview of how ordinary sufferers understood their bodies, explained illness onset, and approached treatment in early modern England. The remainder of the chapter links patients and practitioners in an exploration of medical cases. While seventeenth-century medical writing provides abundant information about diagnoses, symptoms, and cures, it offers few insights into the social practices of treatment. Using over 40 medical texts, the discussion eases open the door to the sickroom to recover the exchanges between patients and practitioners and the extent to which gender shaped those interactions. The chapter offers two ways to recover this information. First, a close study of healers’ intentions and writing practices reveals how patients’ words could be critical to defining treatment and yet concealed and distorted by healers’ own concerns about authority. Second, patients’ bodily behaviors could communicate important information, thereby offering another path to recovering the influences of gender on patient-healer interactions. Such behavioral exchanges exist in the negative spaces of healers’ writings, in the background to aspects of the encounter that practitioners were eager to highlight.

Disaffected from the court and shaken out of conventional assumptions about human nature by the Ghost’s revelations, Hamlet begins to think of comparisons with non-human life, beginning with his father as ‘old mole’ (1.5.170). Later he turns to worms, and his attention suggests a willed strategy of existential and ecological discovery, since worms occupied a place diametrically opposite to humans in the traditional hierarchy of life. Renaissance Humanists often used the perceived inferiority of worms and other animals to define human uniqueness. Their gradations of being, by extension, justified human mastery of the earth represented in Hamlet by Claudius’s modernizing transformation of Denmark into a military-industrial state. Adopting a worm-oriented perspective (wryly imagined by conservation ecologist André Voisin in my epigraph), Hamlet begins to question his own conventional Humanist reflexes, such as those on display in his opening soliloquy (e.g. ‘O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason /Would have mourned longer’ [1.2.150–51]). Recent critics have shown how analogies between social behaviour and animals in Hamlet and other Shakespeare plays reflect the rediscovery of classical scepticism towards human superiority by Humanists such as Michel de Montaigne, before René Descartes and other Enlightenment philosophers elevated mind and soul into essential qualities of human nature. As in other areas of ecology and environmentalism discussed in this book, early modern reflections such as Hamlet’s look forward to today’s post-Cartesian and post-human enquiries into human, animal, and cyborgian crossovers. In this chapter I want to align these pre-modern and present-day horizons with the scientific revolution that links them: evolutionary biology’s tracing of human origins to the shared creaturely and genetic life of the planet. Worms will be my trope for Hamlet’s attention to what Giorgio Agamben calls a ‘zone of indeterminacy’ between human and animal life, and what Andreas Höfele identifies as the complex doubleness of similarity and difference that runs through all of Shakespeare’s animal–human relations, beginning with the comic dialogues of Crab and Lance in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.