Introduction
Exploring Donne’s Dynamic Comparisons
Death and disease were everywhere around Donne. In early modern England, life expectancy at birth was only 36, and more than a quarter of people died before reaching adulthood.1 When Donne was 19, his younger brother Henry died of the plague during an epidemic that left London’s ‘Theaters … fill’d with emptines’ and streets ‘lancke & thin’, as Donne wrote to a friend.2 The outbreak’s severity was devastating, but also commonplace: epidemics of plague occurred in London about once every decade between 1499 and 1665, killing as many as one in five residents during each onslaught.3 Typhus, typhoid fever, and smallpox were even more common, and Donne himself nearly died of typhus in 1623.
Because illness was so pervasive in early modern England, there was widespread interest in theories about identifying and treating it. Medical language seeped into everyday conversations, widely read plague tracts, sermons, and plays. Physicians, meanwhile, started to pay closer attention to their patients’ experience of illness as they tried to find more effective remedies. Their observations contributed to an evolving understanding of the natural world that mixed empirical evidence with medieval and Classical theories.
Donne claims that the ‘new Philosophy calls all in doubt’ in his First Anniversary (l. 205). He is referring to the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’s theory that the earth orbits the sun, which Copernicus advanced in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (Nuremberg, 1543).4 That same year, Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (Padua, 1543) was published, offering innovative theories about human anatomy. These works both responded and contributed to changing views of the natural world, which had an impact on medicine.5 ‘By 1550, the attempt of learned, that is university-educated, physicians to reform English medicine was well under way, as was the printing of vernacular medical books which sought to spread medical knowledge widely amongst lay people and practitioners’, Andrew Wear argues.6 Despite the growing accessibility of these medical texts, however, Wear stresses that there was ‘little significant change in medical knowledge and practice from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century’.7 During Donne’s lifetime, classical and medieval theories continued to inform how people
understood their own physiology, as well as their bodies’ responses to illness and cures.
The main objective of this book is to reveal the multilayered ways in which medical knowledge shaped Donne’s thinking and writing. It addresses a fundamental gap in our understanding of Donne’s writing as it argues for the significance of medical metaphor in his work: for its importance relative to the other types of metaphor he featured, and its difference from the medical imagery found in contemporary texts. Donne used medical language in unexpected and striking ways that made his ideas resonate with his original audience, and that can illuminate his ideas for readers today. Examining a wide range of his texts through the lens of medical history, this study contends that Donne was both a product of his period and a remarkable exception to it. More than his literary peers, Donne used each stage of a medical process to highlight specific aspects of his experiences, resulting in comparisons that are extraordinarily precise and vivid.
This book identifies the key concerns that motivated Donne’s references to disease. He was interested in the body’s vulnerability at times of illness and used this vulnerability to raise questions about how much humans can control their fate. Only a few decades earlier, in The Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563, the Church of England had asserted that individuals cannot earn salvation, since God will award it randomly. In sermons, Donne uses medical language to respond – in disparate and sometimes contradictory ways – to his congregation’s anxieties about whether they would be saved. In other texts, he uses medical language to express the sense of powerlessness that pervades his writing, whether he is describing his attempts to identify his vocation, adopt a set of religious beliefs, elicit patronage, or support his family. From this sense of powerlessness emerged his fascination with agency – which, for Donne, was about perceived control over one’s fate as much as actual control. Medical analogies were a way for him to preside over, and make sense of, his experiences of love, religion, politics, and courtly dynamics. They also spoke to a major preoccupation of his readers and listeners. People were fascinated with emerging medical theories because they offered a new view of the world, but also – and perhaps more importantly – because they offered potential cures.
The past three decades have seen a significant rise in scholarship on early modern writing’s medical themes. Literary criticism by Pender (2003) and Guibbory (2015) examines how Donne interpreted his fever symptoms in his Devotions but does not discuss how his approaches were part of wider medical trends. Likewise, Preston’s work on Thomas Browne (2005) and Lund’s study of Robert Burton (2010) focus on one author’s responses to medicine in his literature, instead of exploring that author’s broader medical contexts. Scholarship in the modernday field of medical humanities, including texts by Brody (2003)
and Charon (2006), analyses seventeenth-century literary accounts of disease through the lens of current medical practices, and not as a way to understand early modern medical culture. Sawday (1995), Schoenfeldt (1999), and Paster (2004) trace how several seventeenthcentury authors responded to specific medical subjects, but do not analyse, as I do, the development of one author’s modes of thinking and expression.
John Donne’s Language of Disease: Eloquent Blood opens new lines of dialogue between literary and medical history. It is the first study to explore the medical contexts of Donne’s entire body of work, and to argue for the primacy of his medical metaphors relative to the other types of metaphor he used in his writing. Each chapter begins with a case study: a representative example of how Donne builds a metaphor with a particular medical theory. I explore his claims that ethical behaviour is similar to regulating bodily fluids; that flattering verse resembles alchemical cures; that finding comfort after plague epidemics is like applying medicinal balms. The focus of each chapter then expands to address Donne’s contexts, tracing the medical theory’s origins and the role it played in contemporary culture.
Donne acquired his medical knowledge from diverse sources, ranging from public dissections to highly specialised textbooks. Many of the theories he invokes are the type that appeared in widely read pamphlets, shaping how people understood and responded to disease. Even if the medical theories were commonplace, Donne’s use of them was not. After establishing a theory’s source and contexts, each chapter provides a wideranging account of how, in various texts, Donne reworked the theory to suit specific genres and audiences.
Two distinct but related arguments propel this account. The first argument is that Donne and his poetic personas think through medical language: they imagine abstract concepts in terms of medical processes. The second argument is that Donne used medical theories to construct his extended metaphors, revealing startling similarities between these theories and his experiences. Whereas the first argument addresses Donne’s thinking, the second addresses the act of crafting a comparison. Almost as a physician would approach a patient, Donne approached medical imagery with an exacting gaze, focusing on specific details to better illustrate his claims. Medical culture influenced his writing’s form as much as its content. He mirrored the experience of illness – with its jarring transformations and harrowing uncertainties – in the paradoxes and contradictions for which his work is famous.
The extent to which medical knowledge shaped how Donne perceived the world around him, and how he translated those perceptions into writing, remains underexplored in modern criticism. This book addresses this gap by revealing the full scope and significance of Donne’s engagement with medical matters, offering new insights into his work.
I Early Modern England’s Medical Culture
People in early modern England faced numerous health risks, ranging from high infant mortality rates (peaking at 30 per cent in marshy southeast England) to famine, malaria, typhus, syphilis, water-borne diseases, and gastroenteric and respiratory infections.8 But plague, with its frequent outbreaks and agonising symptoms, was especially feared. Sufferers experienced inflamed lymph nodes, called plague sores or ‘buboes’, which gave the bubonic plague its name. These buboes sometimes burst, causing intense pain. Plague also caused fever, insomnia, impaired breathing and speech, weak limbs, and vomiting.9 As the disease progressed, patients often became delirious before dying from heart failure. The process was horrific to witness – so much so that Thomas Brasbridge, a Church of England clergyman, claimed that God used the plague to ‘punisheth not so muche those, whom he taketh therby out of this life: as those that remaine aliue’.10
Why, and how, did people get sick? The period’s explanations varied widely, but the consensus was that God was behind all illnesses. He wanted diseases to punish sinners and test the devout’s faith.11 God was believed to work through secondary causes that were directly responsible for infection. In the case of the plague, as Brasbridge explains, ‘Sinne is a principal cause’, while the second cause is ‘an evill constellation’ and the third cause is ‘the corruption of the ayre’. Certain astrological configurations were thought to produce expanses of putrid air, known as miasmas, that could infect individuals. ‘The fourth cause’ was ‘the aptnesse of mans body, through evill humors’, or imbalanced bodily fluids, ‘to receive the effecte of a venomous aire’.12 Some individuals were considered more prone to disease than others, as a result of their physiology.
The bubonic plague’s actual means of infection – via fleas that have bitten infected rats – is absent from early modern accounts of the illness. A bacterial disease, it is still found in isolated cases, especially in the southwestern United States. Cases were discovered, for example, in June 2017 in New Mexico, where several people have contracted the disease in recent years.13 The disease kills 50 to 60 per cent of infected humans when not treated quickly with antibiotics. Plague was one of only two diseases – the other being ‘the pox’, or syphilis – that prompted the early modern English government to intervene with public health initiatives.14 Local authorities were responsible for implementing these, since there were no national health organisations.15 London officials imposed quarantines, fired muskets to purify the air, drained pools of putrid water, and killed stray animals thought to carry the disease.16 However, the plague’s high mortality rate – coupled with officials’ reluctance to visit areas deemed highly contagious – limited the city’s ability to carry out these health measures. Decaying bodies of plague victims were often left unburied in houses and on the streets, since
they were considered too infectious to handle.17 Hospitals existed in small numbers, but they were unable to accommodate the majority of infected individuals.18 Limited public support during epidemics meant that people tended to experience serious illnesses at home, relying on family members, friends, or themselves for treatment. Women, in particular – and regardless of social class – were responsible for serving as amateur healers.19
‘In such a setting’, Andrew Wear contends, ‘it made sense for medical knowledge to be accessible to laypeople as well as practitioners, whereas today institutions such as hospitals, the state, or professional organisations claim to assess the medical expertise and practical skill on behalf of patients’.20 Widely circulated medical tracts outlined treatments for plague and other illnesses that readers could apply themselves. These pamphlets were written in English and offered an eclectic sampling of practical advice, classical Greek theories, and religious and magical cures. Recipes for medical treatments tended to feature inexpensive herbs and spices that readers could easily obtain. In a tract published in 1578, Brasbridge distinguishes his remedies from those of ‘learned men’, who prescribe ‘many preservatives, curious, and costly: as choice of meates, and drinkes, perfumes, … purgations by pouders, pilles, and electuaries [medicinal pastes]’.21 Brasbridge’s text, by contrast, is typical of the period’s medical tracts as it claims to be designed for everyone, ‘whether thou be rich or poore’.22
People believed that they needed to care for their soul’s health – through prayer and repentance – before any other treatments could be effective. ‘Runne quickly and make an atonement: for there is wrath gone out from the Lord; the Plague is begun’, the physician Stephen Bradwell urges in the opening pages of his A watch-man for the pest (1625), published during one of London’s worst plague years.23 After a cursory discussion of God’s role in the current epidemic, Bradwell offers pragmatic guidelines for avoiding infection. He shows how the period’s tracts merged popular and learned medicine as he promises to provide advice that he has ‘collected out of the best authors’, such as Galen and Hippocrates, and ‘moulded into a new and most plaine method’.24
Some of the advice offered in tracts such as Bradwell’s ‘may have had an indirect effect’, Paul Slack argues: for example, ‘airing or burning the bedding and clothing of the infected, and burning fumigants, especially those with an arsenic or sulphur content’, might have killed infected fleas.25 Other tactics were less successful, such as Bradwell’s recommendation to stay inside the home, with the doors and windows shut.26 Since the rats carrying infected fleas often lived in the walls and beneath the floors of homes, staying inside could increase a person’s risk of infection.
To meet the needs of those treating illnesses at home, there was an expanding medical marketplace open to men and women across society. ‘There was no medical profession in seventeenth-century England’, Lucinda McCray Beier argues, but rather an ‘open market’ where ‘providers of medical services, licensed and unlicensed, competed’.27 Only
three types of provider were licensed: physicians, who were certified by bishops, universities, and London’s College of Physicians; surgeons, who were approved by bishops and universities; and midwives, who were licensed by bishops.28 Physicians served only an elite clientele, while surgeons and midwives were more numerous and offered more affordable services. The Barber-surgeons’ Company of London – which regulated the city’s surgical practice – also hosted public dissections, making anatomical knowledge accessible to a wider audience.29
Unlicensed medical providers far outnumbered licensed ones in early modern England. These unlicensed providers ranged from universityeducated healers to charlatans, to ‘empirics’, who claimed that their first-hand experience of treating patients was more valuable than any university training.30 Village charmers were also in high demand. ‘Charming is in as great request as physic, and charmers more sought unto than physicians in time of need’, the Church of England clergyman William Perkins observed in a 1608 treatise.31 Charmers were known as ‘magi’, or wise men, in a reference to the Magi who attended Christ’s birth. Magical and spiritual healing methods were often linked, with religious language believed to possess mystical healing powers. Incantations featured Latin text borrowed from Catholic prayers, as well as language describing dubious religious episodes.32
Alongside charmers, practitioners of alchemy, a precursor to modern chemistry, competed for clients. These alchemists claimed to be able to turn base metals into a magical elixir that could cure the sick and offer immortality. Although many, including Donne, were sceptical of alchemists’ claims, Elizabeth I was intrigued enough to feature alchemy in her court’s Christmas celebrations of 1594.33 In addition, some members of London’s College of Physicians – a society founded in 1518 to regulate medical practice within London and its environs – endorsed the alchemy taught by Paracelsus (c. 1493–1541), a prominent Swiss physician and philosopher. But the College condemned the form of alchemy promoted by self-styled ‘chymical physicians’ in London’s street markets. These vendors attempted to sell gullible customers a range of fake ‘pills, powders, and waters promising universal, immediate, and gentle effects’.34
By contrast, the College – which was led at one stage by Donne’s stepfather, John Syminges – endorsed humanist medicine, based on the theories of Galen, Aristotle, and Hippocrates.35 Its founder and first president, Thomas Linacre (c. 1460–1524), translated key Galenic texts from Greek into Latin in the early sixteenth century, reviving interest in classical medicine.36 Linacre was aiming not to educate the general public, but rather to make classical texts accessible to other physicians, so they could maintain their prestige and authority within London’s medical culture. His translations reached a wider audience than he had intended, however, as physicians such as Sir Thomas Elyot, who had studied with Linacre, summarised key Galenic theories in vernacular texts aimed at a general readership.37 Elyot’s hugely influential The Castel of Health (1539) was
responsible for making Galen’s concept of the humours – the four bodily fluids thought to determine appearance, behaviour, and health – ‘a basic part of the intellectual make-up of Renaissance Britain’.38
Although physicians cared for primarily wealthy clients, no ‘separate spheres’ affected the medical treatment of rich and poor, Margaret Pelling argues. ‘Social barriers remained intact’, she writes, ‘but networks of information about cures and practitioners ramified across divisions of gender, age, and class’.39 Whereas medieval medicine had offered general accounts of disease, emerging theories – based on classical texts and the writings of Paracelsus, among others – proposed that monitoring a patient’s symptoms could yield more accurate assessments of illness. Paracelsus’s emphasis on empiricism ‘had something to offer all levels of practitioner’, from privileged to impoverished.40 It empowered people, regardless of their medical background, to rely on their own observations to identify diseases and gauge the effectiveness of remedies. Casebooks, medical tracts, letters, diaries, and literary texts show that the growing interest in recording and interpreting symptoms was changing how people made sense of disease.41 The emerging focus on empiricism also reinforced the period’s general fascination with theories about disease, which Donne took for granted when writing for various audiences.
II Donne’s Medical Metaphors
Donne’s medical metaphors are dynamic. The theories he invokes shape how we view a text’s themes, even as those themes inform how we see the medical theories. Some of this dynamism might be inevitable. ‘Any society’s understanding and management of its sick bodies is constituted within a network of competing beliefs and interests’, Margaret Healy writes, noting that ‘this is a two-way process, and perceptions of sick bodies can influence the way we imagine and order social structures too’.42 The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetics goes further, suggesting that the ‘two-way process’ Healy describes is not limited to metaphors about disease. Any metaphor’s ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’ – the thing being compared and the thing to which it is compared, according to I.A. Richards’s terminology – can be seen as ‘invok[ing] a transaction between words and things, after which the words, things, and thoughts are not quite the same’.43
Donne was particularly alert to his metaphors’ verbal transactions. ‘In Donne’s lyric poetry, which argues through images’, Achsah Guibbory writes, ‘the vehicle of the metaphor is important. It is never discarded or diminished but leads to and is in turn illuminated by the tenor of the figure’.44 Donne’s comparisons support Aristotle’s claim, in his Rhetoric, that metaphors can expand knowledge and ‘give names to things that have none’.45 At the same time, Donne’s analogies are often ‘far-fetched’ –something Aristotle explicitly discourages – in the sense that they compare
seemingly disparate things.46 This tendency prompted Samuel Johnson to call Donne’s poetry ‘metaphysical’, a derogative term referring to how ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’ in his work.47
Donne was not, of course, the only writer in early modern England making ‘far-fetched’ comparisons. ‘Menne counte it a poynte of witte to passe ouer suche wordes as are at hande, and to vse suche as are farre fetcht and translated’, Thomas Wilson writes in The Arte of Rhetorique (1553).48 The period’s rhetorical manuals offer a range of views on the function of metaphors, in particular. The term ‘metaphor’, which derives from the Greek words ‘meta’ (beyond, over) and ‘pherein’ (to carry), refers literally to transporting or translating words from one context to another.49 It ‘is a kinde of wresting of a single word from his owne right signification’, George Puttenham writes in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), ‘to another not so natural, but yet of some affinitie or conueniencie with it, … it is called by metaphore, or the figure of transport’.50 The resulting comparison, made by referring to one thing as another, can be purely a ‘poynte of witte’; alternatively, it can be more expressive than a direct description. In the latter case, ‘The hearer … thinketh more by remembraunce of a word translated, then is there expreslye spoken’, as Wilson argues. Henry Peacham offers a similar distinction between the various uses of metaphors. They can ‘give light’ and be ‘well remembered’, ‘move affections’ and ‘perswade’, or merely be ‘pleasant’.51
How ‘farre fetcht’ can comparisons be before they become ostentatious – or ‘conceited in more ways than one’, as Katrin Ettenhuber puns –rather than expressive?52 Rhetorical manuals distinguish sharply between illustrative and merely showy types of comparison. When there is a ‘just correspondence’ between the things being compared, Puttenham notes, ‘The Greekes call it Analogie or a conuenient proportion’, and it is ‘that which the Latines call decorum’.53 This type of trope is ‘lovely’, revealing the inherent ‘comelynesse’ of the comparison.54 While Puttenham frames this ideal in the language of good taste and propriety, Peacham’s own description focuses on purity. ‘The similitude [must] be not farre fetched, as from strange things vnkowne to the hearer’, he writes, echoing Wilson; additionally, it must not be ‘uncleane or unchaste’.55
Donne exploits ‘uncleane’ images in his writing, selecting those – such as dropsy – that will shock and disgust his readers, so he can advance a particular moral or pastoral message. Such metaphors are still acceptable to Quintilian, who contends that a trope is ‘improper’ only when ineffective: when it is not necessary, or when it fails to express a meaning better than non-metaphoric language.56 Quintilian argues, like Aristotle, that metaphor used properly can ‘supply its [language’s] deficiencies, and (hardest task of all) it ensures that nothing goes without a name’.57 Donne is particularly adept at supplying language’s deficiencies when it comes to illustrating processes. He focuses in analogies on the mechanism of
medical concepts: on how different elements work together to achieve a certain outcome.
Illness lends itself to the type of metaphoric thinking in which Donne specialises. Against society’s tendency to view disease through analogies, Susan Sontag stresses ‘that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness – and the healthiest way of being ill – is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking’.58 Donne’s writing demonstrates, however, that metaphors about disease are not necessarily reductive. He draws attention to how figurative language can open up new ways of viewing both society and illness. ‘It is but a homely Metaphor, but it is a wholesome, and a usefull one’, he writes in his sermon on Psalm 32:5 – which I discuss in Chapter 5 – as he introduces the idea that confession is like a type of medicinal vomiting.59 He is fascinated by methods: by the method of crafting comparisons, and of reading and interpreting them. Both reflect his interest in trying to order and make sense of what he observes and experiences.
Donne was aware that his analogies’ medical ideas could elicit strong emotional responses. Sontag argues that, when she was writing in the 1970s, people viewed cancer as ‘obscene’, while ‘cardiac disease implies a weakness, trouble, failure that is mechanical; there is no disgrace, nothing of the taboo that once surrounded peoples afflicted with TB and still surrounds those who have cancer’.60 Early modern readers were equally sensitive to medical conditions’ cultural connotations. They would have associated dropsy with drunkenness, good hygiene with responsible conduct, and contagion with corruption, to name a few of the multilayered responses to such conditions. Donne was aware also that medical theories could express differing attitudes towards human agency. A purge – which requires that a person wait patiently while the medicine takes its course –imbues that person with less agency than, for example, a medical regimen requiring constant vigilance. Finally, Donne was aware of how the individual reader participates in a metaphor’s ‘transaction[s]’.61 He tailors his medical imagery to his audience, offering more sophisticated theories for more learned readers.
The various relationships that Donne’s metaphors express – between a text’s themes and specific medical ideas, cultural connotations, attitudes, and readers – do not lend themselves to paraphrasing. Rather than making explicit how a text’s subject matter interacts with a medical theory, Donne shows us the details so we can draw out the complex interactions between them, through the process of reading.
III Donne, Robert Burton, and Thomas Browne
This book is part of a larger shift towards reading literary and medical history alongside each other. In recent years, critics have sought to trace the intersections of literary and medical language in early modern England. Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (2011) look closely at early modern
medical diagnoses and treatment prescriptions, noting how physicians relied on non-medical language to describe a patient’s ailments.62 David Shuttleton (2012) argues similarly that in the early modern period, ‘professional medical commentators often employed self-consciously poetic language’.63 The overlapping of medical and poetic vocabularies points to the ‘intimate link between poetics and therapeutics’, which were ‘not distinct categories of knowledge’ but rather a ‘continuum of explanation’ for comprehending the horrific, everyday reality of epidemics and pandemics.64 Early modern physicians were often poets, Shuttleton observes. Rhetoric, too, played a role in the period’s medical language. Even Thomas Sprat’s ‘supposedly “anti-rhetorical”, “anti-poetic” ’ History of the Royal Society (1667) relies, inevitably, on rhetorical devices, such as the simile he uses to compare his depiction of science to how ‘the noblest Buildings are first wont to be represented in a few Shadows, or small Models’.65
The exchange went the other way, also, with literary writers such as Milton, Shakespeare, and Margaret Cavendish using scientific analogies in their work. Recent criticism has addressed this trend, as well. Joad Raymond (2010) notes that ‘critics have debated Milton’s familiarity with seventeenth-century natural philosophy and astronomy, suggesting, for example, that Paradise Lost articulates sympathy for the “old” – or medieval – “science” ’.66 Roberta Mullini (2013) focuses on Shakespeare’s ‘skill in transforming – rather than inventing – old popular [medical] terms’.67 Shakespeare’s medical terms could fill a book, as Sujata Iyengar (2011) has shown with her dictionary dedicated to them. Recent work by Bronwen Price (1996) and Elizabeth A. Spiller (2000; 2004) traces how Margaret Cavendish’s interest in contemporary science informed her writing as much as her thinking.68
But Donne’s approach to forming medical analogies differs from that of his contemporaries. The brief case study that follows will compare his writing with that of Robert Burton and Thomas Browne. Burton, the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), was Donne’s contemporary; Browne came slightly later, with a pirated version of his first major work, Religio Medici, published in 1642. Critics have observed how the period’s medical knowledge informed both authors’ literary styles and themes.69 More than either, however, Donne is interested in featuring each stage of a medical process in his analogies. Rather than making a quick comparison and moving on, he tends to deepen his medical metaphors, drawing out the various ways that tenor and vehicle can shed light on each other.
Both Burton and Donne were scholars and self-described melancholics – two things that often went hand in hand, as Burton would argue – living in London in the 1620s.70 Both were dedicated, also, to the pastoral responsibilities of their respective careers as medical writer and preacher.71 They were talented prose writers: although Burton’s Anatomy is partly a ‘self-help’ book offering practical medical
advice, it is also an accomplished literary text, as Mary Ann Lund argues.72 Unlike Browne, a physician trained in medicine into his late twenties, neither Donne nor Burton received a formal medical education.73 When writing his Anatomy, Burton relied on ‘the wide-ranging, though not well-organised, course of reading which he states he had followed’, on the basis of which he ‘was competing for recognition as a serious scholar’.74 However, Burton and Donne were addressing different types of audience in the 1620s. As Dean of St Paul’s, Donne tailored his sermons to a diverse congregation with ranging levels of education. Burton was interested in appealing to a more specialised, learned readership. He claims – perhaps apocryphally, as Lund notes – that he would have written his Anatomy in Latin instead of English, had he found a publisher for the Latin version.75
In terms of this book’s focus, Burton and Donne diverge most significantly in their respective approaches to medical analogies. In a chapter on cures for despair in his Anatomy, Burton introduces the familiar idea that repentance is a cure for sinning:
Repentance is a sovereign remedy for all sins, a spiritual wing to erear us, a charm for our miseries, a protecting amulet to expel sin’s venom, an attractive loadstone to draw God’s mercy and graces upon us.76
Burton offers a list to describe repentance, merging religious, medical, magical, and metallurgical imagery. Repentance is ‘sovereign’, or Godsent;77 it is also a medical ‘remedy’, an ‘amulet’ worn as a magical charm against evil,78 and a ‘loadstone’ made of the magnetic oxide of iron.79 Rather than developing any one of these ideas, Burton mentions each only briefly, perhaps in an attempt to convey the magnitude of his subject. Sophie Read – writing about the method of describing a scent by listing its attributes – notes that ‘the illusion of comprehensiveness generated by the list fast gives way to a sense of its terminal incompleteness’.80 That might be part of Burton’s goal here. In offering a range of metaphors, he highlights the impossibility of conveying the complex relationship between repentance and God’s mercy. For readers, however, it means that his analogy does not particularly elucidate any one part of that relationship.
Donne takes a different approach in the following passage from his first sermon on 1 Corinthians 15:29, which he delivered soon after London’s 1625 plague epidemic. He offers a more extended metaphor for repentance:
So the Lord of heaven, … may have smelt from us the savour of medicinall hearbes, of Remorse, and Repentance, and Contrition, and Detestation of former sins, And the savour of odoriferous, and fragrant, and aromaticall hearbes, works worthy of Repentance, amendment of life, edification of others, and zeale to his glory, …81
Donne views repentance, and the imagery that figures it, as relational –‘the Lord … smelt from us’ – whereas Burton depicts it as essentially a private process. The remedies Burton lists are designed to ‘draw God’s mercy and graces upon us’, but God remains distant as we apply them. In Donne’s analogy, by contrast, God monitors the process of repenting, diagnosing the state of our spiritual health. I will discuss Donne’s quotation in detail in Chapter 6, which explores his imagery of smells and smelling in his post-epidemic sermons. I present it here to highlight a characteristic feature of his writing: his tendency to break down a medical concept into its constituent parts, to consider how each operates.
Donne alludes in this passage to the contemporary belief that the fragrance of spices could fill the nasal passages, preventing contagion from entering the body through the nostrils. His analogy first breaks down these fragrances into two types: medicinal and sweet. He next uses these two types to distinguish between acts of repentance and acts ‘worthy’ of repentance. The former is merely curative, while the latter signals a more profound change: an ‘amendment of life’. Moreover, its pleasing fragrance can draw others to piety, in a metaphor for ‘edification’. Donne uses medical language to make the concept of repentance as vivid as the various scents – of spiced pomanders and decaying corpses – associated with a plague epidemic.
Donne’s characteristic interest in the mechanism of medical theories can be seen also in the following comparison between his writing and Browne’s. The prose styles of Donne and Browne are similar enough that critics have sought to distinguish them. Coleridge argues that Religio Medici should be ‘considered as in a dramatic & not a metaphysical View’, arguing that Browne is interested more in adopting various dramatic personae than in crafting Donne’s type of extended analogy.82 Subsequent readers have recognised more similarities in the two authors’ writing styles. Browne ‘shares with Donne the tendency surprisingly to juxtapose heterogeneous ideas’, C.A. Patrides writes, although he notes that ‘Browne is manifestly not Donne’. Still, he adds, ‘Browne is like Donne – as Donne is like Milton and Marvell – exceedingly partial to dramatic literature which, they all judged, best externalises not positive truth but truth in its several concurrent manifestations internal to one and the same mind’.83 Preston observes likewise that, in Browne’s Religio Medici, ‘there is more than a little of the self-dramatising’, ‘like Donne’s various poses in undone lover’s laces or winding-sheet, or Burton’s vocal antics and histrionic attitudes’.84
The excerpt that follows, from Religio Medici, shows Browne using medical imagery similar to that of a Donne sermon. Browne fears that, unlike poisons, the corruption within him – original sin – contains no antidote:
I ground upon experience, that poysons containe within themselves their owne Antidote, and that which preserves them from the
venom of themselves; without which they were not deletorious to others onely, but to themselves also. But it is the corruption that I feare within me, not the contagion of commerce without me. ’Tis that unruly regiment within me that will destroy me, ’tis I that doe infect my selfe, … I feele that originall canker corrode and devoure me, ... .85
Browne offers a dynamic comparison: he refers to society’s ‘contagion’ and to the body’s ‘corruption’, using medical language to describe a social phenomenon and vice versa. In a sermon on Psalm 32.5 that he delivered in early 1626 at St Paul’s, Donne draws a similar distinction between the external and internal ailments as he discusses original sin:
Depart from me, O Lord, for I am sinfull inough to infect thee; … Depart, in withholding thy Sacrament, for I am leprous inough to taint thy flesh, and to make the balme of thy blood, poyson to my soule; … I must not be alone with my selfe; for I am as apt to take, as to give infection; I am a reciprocall plague; passively and actively contagious; I breath corruption, and breath it upon my selfe; … . 86
The two excerpts’ similarities are striking. Both Donne and Browne highlight poison’s mutability: Browne notes that it can contain something curative, while Donne argues that a healing treatment – a ‘balme’ – can become poisonous. Both present, as well, the idea that spiritual sickness can be transferred, contagion-like, between individuals, and that the speaker is infecting himself. The two passages even have similar parallel syntax (for example, ‘within me, … without me’ in Browne’s case, and ‘for I am sinfull inough … for I am leprous inough’ in Donne’s).
Donne is more precise than Browne, however, in describing the mechanism of the medical theory he invokes. He uses the idea that humans inhale contagion to discuss how he both catches and transmits his soul’s infection. In Chapter 5 of this book – which will discuss Donne’s quotation above more fully – I argue that he is interested in the process by which the soul becomes corrupted, and not just the fact of its corruption. To that end, his analogies tend to focus on one medical theme or theory, rather than several. In the passage above, for example, each medical image –of leprosy, poison, corruption, infection, plague – relates to the theme of contagious disease.87 Even the healing treatment Donne mentions, a balm, is the type suited to treating the sores left by a contagious disease, such as leprosy or the plague. Browne, meanwhile, introduces the idea that poisons contain antidotes before moving quickly to the fact that he is infected with original sin, and finishing with a reference to cankers, a type of chronic, non-healing ulcer.88 If Donne had started with the same premise, he might have proposed that the soul, too, has an innate remedy. He does this, in fact, in his sermon on Psalm 6:2-3, a text I discuss in Chapter 6.89
This example of Browne’s medical imagery is not necessarily representative. Preston argues that Religio Medici is a somewhat experimental work, trying out different styles and tones.90 Even so, the excerpt highlights a key element of Donne’s medical imagery: his fascination with the details of medical theories, and with how those details might reveal the soul’s operations. This is a recurring feature of his sermons, but it predates his preaching career. It is something that runs through his entire body of writing, as I will argue in this book.
IV Reading Donne’s Medical Language
Most scholarly discussions of Donne’s medical contexts have centred on his Devotions (1624). These studies tend to focus on the text’s religious and political implications, rather than on Donne’s medical language as he describes his experience of typhus. Murray Arndt reads the Devotions as ‘an instructive paradigm of his [Donne’s] lifelong failure to resolve some wrenching inner pain’, building on John Carey’s argument that Donne’s ‘betrayed’ Catholicism defined his works.91 Other critics seek in the Devotions proof of either Jesuit or Anglican influences on Donne’s personal theology. Mary Arshagouni Papazian argues, for example, that Donne presents the speaker in the Devotions as ‘elect from the beginning’, rather than ‘an Everyman who undergoes an experience common to all mankind’. Recognising the speaker’s special status sheds light on ‘the overall focus and movement of the work, the unusual open-ended conclusion, and the nature of Donne’s self-presentation’.92
An exception to this tendency to focus on the religious implications of Donne’s Devotions is Stephen Pender’s chapter in David Colclough’s John Donne’s Professional Lives (2003). ‘Rarely has the Devotions been examined for Donne’s attitudes towards medical thought’, Pender argues.93 For Donne, medical thought ‘encompassed clinical practice, therapeutics, anatomy, surgery, and hygiene’, and each of these categories offered a distinctive way to ‘read’ the body and its ailments. However, Pender’s analysis addresses only the Devotions. Medical readings of Donne rarely examine his other texts, except in multiple-author contexts, such as Jonathan Sawday’s study of literary responses to medical dissections.94 This is true of most of the period’s writers: there remain few sustained studies of a single author’s contributions to literary-medical writing.
Donne’s work calls for this type of study. As I explore his medical imagery, I consider his reasons for using it, its meaning for contemporary readers, and its originality. His passages featuring scientific language are notable for their eloquence as much as their arguments. As Schoenfeldt observes of Donne’s verse, ‘Other writers of the time were of course exposed to the same physiological embodiment of intellect and emotion, but with far less spectacular aesthetic results, so it cannot be the physiology alone that produces Donne’s remarkable regeneration of English verse’.95
This book’s chapters are grouped into two parts, organised by genre and chronology. The first part focuses on Donne’s verse letters and holy sonnets that he wrote between the early 1590s and mid-1610s.96 Medical language instructs patrons and illustrates speakers’ dilemmas in these works, in ways that anticipate his sermons’ longer medical analogies. The second half of the book focuses on texts Donne wrote soon after his critical illness in 1624 and London’s outbreak of plague in 1625. Comparing these texts with Donne’s earlier writing, this section argues that Donne’s medical language evolved during the mid-1620s, becoming more detailed and more graphic in response to his own sickness and his congregation’s suffering. In these texts, Donne embraces his role as ‘minister’ to his congregation, a term he uses in a medical sense as much as a religious one.97 He tells his congregation that, as Dean of St Paul’s, his role is to administer God’s spiritual cures.98 His sermons use precise medical terms to demonstrate how his listeners can improve their souls’ health, offering an inclusive and reassuring message of salvation.99
Both parts of the book return often to the love poems Donne wrote in the 1590s and 1600s, which were published posthumously in 1633. Many of his recurring medical images – of contagious odours, dropsical swelling, and alchemical cures – make their first appearance in these poems, playfully proving his speakers’ claims. These images tend to be fleeting, in contrast with the more systematic analogies of his later works. Still, reading Donne’s early verse in conversation with his later texts reveals how these poems identified themes and questions that he would revisit later, in more extended comparisons. Achsah Guibbory’s recent article on Donne’s ‘relatively understudied libertine amatory poems’ argues that these poems ‘defined problems of religious freedom – the difficulty of faith, skepticism about religious institutions and dogma, the search for true religion – that would trouble Donne throughout his life, even as his situation and the English church changed’.100 To illustrate these problems, Donne draws on medical images and concepts that highlight humans’ limited ability to control their fate.
Notes
1 Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge, 2000), 12.
2 R.C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford, 1970), 58; Donne, ‘To Mr E. G.’, ll. 8, 9.
3 Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985), 14–16.
4 Donne also refers to ‘the new philosophy’ in a verse letter to his patron Lucy Russell (‘T’have written then’, l. 37) and in five sermons that Robin Robbins identifies in his edition of Donne’s poetry (707 n).
5 Wear notes that Thomas Geminus’s shortened version of Vesalius’s text was printed in London in 1545, with a reprinting in 1552; see Wear, 41.
6 Wear, 4–5.
7 Wear, 4.
8 Wear, 13–5.
9 Thomas Brasbridge, The poore mans jewel, that is to say, A treatise of the pestilence (London, 1578), sig. C4r-v.
10 Brasbridge, sig. A5r.
11 David Harley, ‘Spiritual Physic, Providence and English Medicine, 1560–1640’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Medicine and the Reformation (London, 1993), 101.
12 Brasbridge, sig. A5r.
13 Liam Stack, ‘Plague is Found in New Mexico. Again’ in The New York Times (pubd 27 June 2017) https://nyti.ms/2ti9aOy accessed 8 September 2017.
14 Wear, 16–7.
15 Wear, 25.
16 Stephen Bradwell, A watch-man for the pest (London, 1625), sig. B4r-v.
17 Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore, 2011), 97.
18 Slack, 152.
19 Lucinda McCray Beier, Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1987), 5.
20 Wear, 25.
21 Brasbridge, sig. C3r.
22 Brasbridge, sig. A3v.
23 Bradwell, sig. A4r.
24 Bradwell, sig. A1r.
25 Slack, 35.
26 Bradwell, sig. B3v.
27 Beier, 4–5.
28 Beier, 8–9.
29 Beier, 14.
30 Beier, 19.
31 William Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (Cambridge, 1608), 153.
32 For a discussion of the role of religious language in healing charms, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, 1971).
33 Margaret Healy, Shakespeare, Alchemy, and the Creative Imagination (Cambridge, 2011), 49.
34 Lauren Kassell, ‘Magic, Alchemy and the Medical Economy in Early Modern England: The Case of Robert Fludd’s Magnetical Medicine’, in Mark S.R. Jenner and Patrick Wallis (eds.), Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850 (New York, 2007), 90.
35 Bald, 37.
36 Vivian Nutton, ‘Linacre, Thomas (c.1460–1524)’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography www.oxforddnb.com accessed 6 October 2017.
37 Stanford Lehmberg, ‘Elyot, Sir Thomas (c.1490–1546)’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography www.oxforddnb.com accessed 5 October 2017.
38 Ibid.
39 Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (New York, 2013), 1.
40 Pelling, 34.
41 Nancy Siraisi, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor, 2007), 5–7.
42 Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2001), 3.
43 Alex Preminger and Terry Brogan (eds.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, 1993), 761.
44 Achsah Guibbory, Returning to John Donne (Farnham, 2015), 10.
45 Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, tr. John Henry Freese (London, 1959), 359.
46 ‘Metaphors must not be far-fetched’, Aristotle writes (ibid.).
47 Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets: A Selection, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford, 2009), 16. This quote is hugely famous but poorly understood, as Katrin Ettenhuber notes; see Ettenhuber, ‘ “Comparisons Are Odious”? Revisiting the Metaphysical Conceit in Donne’, RES, 62 (2010), 398.
48 Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1553), sig. Z3r.
49 ‘metaphor’, n., in OED Online www.oed.com accessed 29 September 2014.
50 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), 148.
51 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, 2nd ed. (London, 1593), sig. D3r.
52 Ettenhuber, ‘Revisiting the Metaphysical Conceit’, 395.
53 Puttenham, 219–20.
54 Ibid.
55 Peacham, sig. D4v.
56 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, tr. Donald A Russell (London, 2001), Book 8.6, 427–9.
57 Quintilian, Book 8.6, 426. Brian Cummings notes that Quintilian is open ‘to ways in which “proper” and “non-proper” forms of meaning are hard to distinguish’; see Cummings, ‘Metalepsis: the boundaries of metaphor’ in Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (eds.), Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge, 2008), 226.
58 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (London, 2002), 3.
59 Sermons, 9, 304.
60 Sontag, 9.
61 Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 761.
62 Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (eds), Medical Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2011).
63 David Shuttleton, Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660–1820 (Cambridge, 2012), 14.
64 Shuttleton, 12.
65 Sprat claimed to prefer ‘Mathematical plainness’ and ‘naked speech’; see Juliet Cummins and David Burchell (eds.), Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2007), 106. For Sprat’s simile, see Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London (London, 1667), 2.
66 Joad Raymond, Milton’s Angels: The Early-Modern Imagination (Oxford, 2010), 278.
67 Roberta Mullini, ‘Shakespeare and the Words of Early Modern Physic: Between Academic and Popular Medicine’, Journal of Early Modern Studies, 2 (2013), 63.
68 See Bronwen Price, ‘Feminine Modes of Knowing and Scientific Enquiry: Margaret Cavendish’s Poetry as Case Study’, in Helen Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700 (Cambridge, 1996), 17–139;
Elizabeth A. Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670 (Cambridge, 2004); and Spiller, ‘Reading through Galileo’s Telescope: Margaret Cavendish and the Experience of Reading’, Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000), 192–221.
69 Mary Ann Lund, Melancholy, Medicine, and Religion in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010), 86; Claire Preston, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2005), 2.
70 In his Anatomy, Burton presents himself as a ‘melancholic amongst melancholics’, Lund writes (150). Donne notes in his Devotions (1624) that his physicians have blamed his disease in part on his melancholy: ‘They tell me it is my Melancholy: Did I infuse, did I drinke in Melancholly into my selfe? It is my thoughtfulnesse; was I not made to thinke? It is my study; doth not my Calling call for that?’ (63).
71 Lund, 150; Janel Mueller (ed.), Donne’s Prebend Sermons (Cambridge, 1971), 2.
72 Lund, 96.
73 Preston, 43.
74 John Bamborough, ‘Burton, Robert (1577–1640)’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography www.oxforddnb.com accessed 30 June 2015.
75 Lund writes, ‘Burton is deliberately following a tradition of vernacular medical publication while at the same time aligning himself with the professional physicians who publish only in Latin. Burton does not wish to divulge “secreta Minervae” (I, 16), whereas writers like [Sir Thomas] Elyot pride themselves on their openness, suggesting that medicine is wrongly kept inaccessible through the use of the classical languages’ (89).
76 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York, 2001), 413.
77 ‘sovereign’, n., A.1.a., in OED Online www.oed.com accessed 30 June 2015.
78 ‘amulet’, n., 1, in OED Online www.oed.com accessed 27 June 2015.
79 ‘loadstone | lodestone’, n., 1, in OED Online www.oed.com accessed 27 June 2015.
80 Sophie Read, ‘Ambergris and Early Modern Languages of Scent’, The Seventeenth Century, 28 (2013), 225.
81 Sermons, 7, 109–110.
82 Preston, 47.
83 Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, ed. C.A. Patrides (London, 2006), 48.
84 Preston, 47.
85 Browne: The Major Works, 152.
86 Sermons, 9, 310–11.
87 Poison was a common term for contagion in the period’s medical tracts; see, for example, Thomas Lodge, A treatise of the plague (London, 1603), sig. B2V.
88 ‘canker’, n., in OED Online www.oed.com accessed 29 June 2015.
89 Sermons, 5, 348–9. Browne also mentions the Paracelsian notion of ‘balsamum’ in the passage I cite above, but he does not develop it in such detail; see Browne: The Major Works, 151–2.
90 Preston, 2.
91 Murray Arndt, ‘Distance on the Look of Death’, Literature and Medicine, 9 (1990), 38–49.
92 Mary Arshagouni Papazian, ‘Donne, Election, and the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions’, in Huntington Library Quarterly, 55 (1992), 603–19. By contrast, Gerald H. Cox suggests that the three-part sequence of meditation in the Devotions ‘is an example of what ‘Louis Martz considers characteristic of a “formal meditation” used by writers outside the Jesuit order’, which Donne has ‘reshaped … to serve his own strategic intention’. Reinhard Friederich claims that the Devotions is marked by ‘vivid immediacy and a closely circumscribed sense of place’, and this claustrophobia is more central to the work than Jesuit influences. The speaker in the Devotions generalises, ‘but what happens does happen to him alone’, and ‘the forced intimacy with himself makes him discover his bewildering separation from others’.
93 Pender, ‘Essaying the Body’, 217–8. Pender’s doctoral dissertation explores more of Donne’s work, focusing on Donne’s hermeneutics. Pender argues that ‘medical thought provides Donne with a ground on which to build an understanding of textual interpretation’. I will discuss this idea in more depth in Chapter 4. See Pender, Somiotics: Rhetoric, Medicine, and Hermeneutics in John Donne (unpublished doctoral dissertation; Toronto, 2000), ii.
94 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London, 1995).
95 Schoenfeldt, 149.
96 I rely on Robbins’s dating for these texts.
97 ‘minister’, v., 8, 2b., in OED Online www.oed.com accessed 30 June 2015.
98 Sermons, 5, 350.
99 Critics including Achsah Guibbory, Peter McCullough, and David Colclough have attributed these later sermons’ inclusive message of salvation to various factors, ranging from Donne’s illness to his pastoral role as Dean of St Paul’s, to his increasingly anti-Calvinist theology. For an overview of these critical views, see Guibbory, ‘Reconsidering Donne: From Libertine Poetry to Arminian Sermons’, Studies in Philology, 114 (2017), 586–7. I will argue in Chapters 5 and 6 that London’s 1625 plague epidemic played a key role in shaping both Donne’s inclusive message and the language he uses to express this message.
100 Guibbory, ‘Reconsidering Donne: From Libertine Poetry to Arminian Sermons’, 564; 561.
