! Medicine in Shakespeare’s time
Above:The body of a plague victim is dissected. Right: Cupping. (Images courtesy of Wellcome Library, London)
Blisters
Many practitioners thought that raising blisters on the skin was a good way of drawing out unwanted humours and therefore disease. An anonymous treatise from a 1577 book recommended the notoriously dangerous green flies known as cantharides (actually not flies at all, but small iridescent beetles) which, we’re told, were easily available from the local apothecary shop. These were placed in a mortar with vinegar and some breadcrumbs to make a paste, which was applied to “the sore place, that is, where the most grief is” for around seven hours. Once dry, it had to be teased off with the tip of a knife. After the skin blistered it had to be burst and, as the author explained, “with your finger thrust out the water softly”. The problem with blisters was that while the “the pain of the disease is gone”, the patient then had to heal from the new sore.
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shakespeare magazine
Bloodletting
Imagine if you felt poorly and your doctor prescribed cutting open a vein in your arm or ankle, with a lance and no anaesthetic, to remove some of your “excess” blood. The amount of blood removed was dependent on the condition. Because blood was considered to be a “hot” humour, phlebotomy was often used to take heat from the body in the case of fevers. It wasn’t recommended to be used on children, fortunately, since all their blood was needed to help them grow. Doctors didn’t let blood willy-nilly. As one sixteenthcentury physician (who published a book as ‘A. T’ in 1596) instructed, before letting blood you must consider “the age of the patient, the complexion, the time of the year, the region, the custom, the strength, and the vehemence of the disease”. Not all bloodletting was done by cutting into the body. As many people know, an alternative was to apply leeches to the skin.