Shakespeare's Wife (31 page)

For people sniffing for the spoor of Shakespeare ‘Hall Croft' morphs easily into Hall's Croft. We can probably dismiss the idea of John and Susanna Hall's living in any such place. Hall did not need to grow his own simples, and would have been ill advised to sully his gentlemanly hands by doing anything of the kind. He did not after all supply the actual remedies to his patients—that was the jealously guarded province of the apothecaries. Every morning herb-women would have come into Stratford, bringing plant material they had gathered from cottage gardens, woodland, fields and hedgerows to sell to the townswomen who would use them in cooking and preserving, and in treating the everyday ailments of their families. If a Stratford apothecary had received a prescription from Hall that demanded fresh
botanical material, and if he hadn't bought it fresh that day from a herb-wife, he would simply have sent an errand boy to the market to buy the necessary handfuls or off into the hedgerows and woodlands to collect it. The idea of Hall digging in his own version of the Chelsea Physic Garden is merely fanciful.

On 12 December 1607 William Hall called his lawyers, made his will and promptly died. On 24 December, in London, John Hall proved the will and came into possession of Butlers, his father's house in Acton. Though he kept the house, he did not choose to take over his father's practice. His father left him all his ‘books of physic' his assistant, Matthew Morris inherited all his ‘books of astronomy and astrology' with instructions to teach John if he should ‘intend and purpose to labour study and endeavour in the said art', and his books of alchemy.
²⁰
Morris, who had Stratford connections, eventually settled in Stratford and married a local girl.

Hall's original intention may have been to live as a gentleman, pursuing his medical studies as Cerimon does in
Pericles
, which was entered in the Stationers' Register on 20 May 1608:

 

'Tis known I ever

Have studied physic, through which secret art,

By turning over authorities, I have,

Together with my practice, made familiar

To me and to my aid the blest infusions

That dwells in vegetatives, in metals, stones,

And so can speak of the disturbances

That nature works, and of her cures, which doth give me

A more content and cause of true delight

Than to be thirsty after tottering honour,

Or tie my pleasure up in silken bags

To glad the fool and death. (III. ii. 31–42)

 

Stratford boasted a number of barber—surgeons, who amputated limbs, let blood, set broken bones and lanced boils upon occasion, while a proliferating array of pills and potions was supplied to patients who could pay their huge prices by a number of local apothecaries. Otherwise it was the duty of women to care for the health of all
members of the household, and for any dependent poor. Experienced women like Ann Shakespeare attended childbeds and deathbeds and gave primary treatment and preliminary diagnoses of illnesses and accidents. Most people had to make do with unprofessional care, because doctors' fees were astronomical. When John Hall began calling himself ‘doctor' Hall and riding all over the county and beyond to visit patients, he did it for money. In ‘The Preface to the Reader' in his edition of his translation of Hall's casebooks, James Cooke provides an insight into how the matter was handled:

Their Honours [the Greville family of Beauchamp Court], when Physicians were with them, were always ready to engage them to be helpful to their sick Neighbours, the advices for such being for most part entrusted in my hands. I hope what is made public can be no wrong to any of those physicians, having for their pains, prescriptions and directions, received generous pay and noble entertainment.
²¹

In Act V scene iii of
Macbeth
, the doctor, who is silent until Macbeth interrogates him about his wife's health, can say little but that she is ‘troubled with thick-coming fancies'. ‘Cure her of that,' snaps Macbeth, and taunts him with a mock demand for a ‘sweet oblivious antidote' to ‘cleanse the fraught bosom'. The doctor replies, a little smugly, that the patient will have to do that for herself, and gets a response that many would have cheered: ‘Throw physic to the dogs. I'll none of it.' Obliged to remain until he is dismissed, the poor doctor has to endure more of Macbeth's sneering at his profession, unable as he is to ‘cast the water' (examine the urine) of Scotland or remove the English by resort to ‘rhubarb, cyme or purgative drug'. As he slinks off-stage, the doctor tells us:

 

Were I from Dunsinane away and clear

Profit again should hardly draw me here. (V. iii. 39–64)

 

As an outgrowth of bardolatry, Hall's image as a country doctor has been sentimentalised; we are told that he would travel many miles to see his patients, that he treated puritan and papist alike and that he occasionally treated poor people. In fact Hall had to ride such long
distances because he treated the far-flung gentry rather than the needy townsfolk. His surviving case-notes reveal that he rarely treated poor people (and never, I suspect, without a fee) and when he did he prescribed much cheaper medications than he did for well-heeled clients. He certainly treated papists, but he never failed to mark them in his casebook as such.

Hall's own case-notes reveal him to have been typical in that he prescribed a bewildering array of infusions, decoctions, juleps, linctuses, electuaries, fumes, plasters, purges, emetics, stomachics, stimulants, expectorants, poultices and sudorifics, made of ingredients drawn from all over the known world.

The
Pharmacopoeia Londinensis
of 1618 in its
Catalogus Simplicium
listed 1,190 simples or crude drugs, a collection supported by centuries of medical tradition, superstition and credulity. They were arranged under the headings: roots, barks, woods, leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, gums, juices, plant excrements (for example, tree fungi), whole animals, animal parts and excrements, marina (things belonging to the sea) and salts, metals and minerals (which included precious stones). In practice the range of drugs prescribed by the physicians and stocked by the apothecaries tended to be smaller in number than the pharmacopoeial lists. John Hall…used just under 300 vegetable drugs, thirty-nine animal drugs and thirty-eight mineral items.
²²

Hall made notes in Latin on all his cases; in 1644 Warwickshire physician James Cooke visited New Place and bought two manuscript books of Latin case-notes from Susanna Hall; one of these he translated and published in 1657 as
Select Observations
, with a second and third edition in 1679 and 1683. The second edition states on the title-page that the collection features ‘Eminent Persons in Desperate Diseases' the earliest of these cases dates from 1611, which suggests that Hall's rise to eminence as the physician preferred by the local gentry was fairly slow. He seems to have conformed to the stereotype of the physician as rendered by Sir John Davies.

 

I study to uphold the slippery life of man,

Who dies when I have done the best and all I can.

From practice and from books I draw my skill,

Not from the known receipts or pothecary's bill.

The earth my faults does hide; the world my cures doth see;

What youth and time effects is oft ascribed to me.
²³

 

Certainly, there is little in Hall's own account of his practice that seems likely to have been effective. The treatments he ordered, especially for the wealthiest patients, could contain anything from pills of amber, resins from the East Indies, powdered pearls and crushed coral, gold leaf, shavings of ivory, sassafras from north America, camphor from China, mechoacan from Mexico, an array of gums from the Middle East, powdered mummy, benzoin, grains of paradise, galingale, bezoar stone (found in the stomachs of Persian goats), bole from Armenia, and so forth. If any of these worked it must have been as shock treatment or aversion therapy, derived from the sheer complexity of the preparation and administration, together with the drama of cupping and purging, fasting and sweating, not to mention the enormous cost.

Throughout Hall's practice there runs a vein of something more practical, treatments that availed themselves of herbs to be found in every hedgerow. Even the Countess of Northampton was given a fancy version of Hall's humble ‘Scorbutic Beer':

[Take] scurvy-grass [four handfuls], watercress, brooklime, each, [2 handfuls], wormwood, fumitory and germander, each [one handful], roots of fennel, borage, succory, each [an ounce], root of elecampane [half an ounce], licorice [an ounce], flowers of borage, bugloss, rosemary, each [two pinches]. Boil them all in five gallons of beer till one be wasted. After having the following ingredients in a bag, viz., sarsaparilla, Calamus aromaticus, cinnamon, mace, seeds of anise and fennel, each half an ounce, juniper berries eight. Let them be infused in the hot liquor, well covered till it be cold, after put it up, hanging the bag in it. After fifteen days she drank of it, using no other; this she drank in April.
²⁴

The fact that
Cochlearia officinalis
is known as scurvy—grass is a pretty good indication that herb-women knew of its usefulness in treating
scurvy long before Hall began to write out Latin prescriptions for it. Scurvy-grass was cried every day in the streets of every town in England. Among the many responsibilities of the goodwife was that of caring for the health of her household, treating any injuries and preparing remedies for what might ail them. Gerard published his
Herbal
in 1597 for the use of ‘virtuous gentlewomen'.

I send this jewel unto you women of all sorts, especially to such as cure and help the poor and impotent of your country without reward. But unto the beggarly rabble of witches, charmers and such-like cozeners, that regard more to get money than to help for charity, I wish these few medicines far from their understanding, and from those deceivers whom I wish to be ignorant therein.
²⁵

For all we know to the contrary, Hall may have learnt a good deal from women like Ann Shakespeare before beginning his practice. He may have acquired the recipe for his scorbutic beer from the wise women of Stratford, perhaps even from Ann. The resulting liquor was rich in the Vitamin C necessary to fend off scurvy.

In 1585 William Clowes inveighs against quacks, people who daily rush into Physic and Surgery:

And some of them be painters, some glaziers, some tailors, some weavers, some joiners, some cutlers, some cooks, some bakers, and some chandlers, etc. Yea, nowadays it is too apparent to see how tinkers, tooth-drawers, idiots, apple-squires, broom-men, bawds, witches, conjurers, soothsayers and sow-gelders, rogues, rat-catchers, runagates and proctors of Spittlehouses, with such other like rotten weeds do in town and country, without order, honesty or skill, daily abuse both physic and surgery…
²⁶

John Cotta, a Warwickshire MD (Cambridge) who practised in Northampton, was particularly irritated by roving amateurs like John Hall, who certainly trespassed on his preserves in Northamptonshire.
²⁷
Though Hall's calling may seem exalted to us now, it was regarded by many of Shakespeare's contemporaries with deep suspicion. Master Caius ‘that calls himself doctor of physic', in
The Merry
Wives of Windsor
, lists all the local nobility and gentry, ‘the earl, the knight, the lords, the gentlemen', among his patients. Dr Caius may be a caricature of the lumpen Paracelsian practitioners of Europe, who had had no education in the liberal arts and could not read or write Latin or defend themselves in terms recognised by the medical establishment. As they were often Huguenots they also suffered religious persecution; we might expect Hall, as a dedicated protestant, to have come under the influence of the Paracelsians in Basel or Geneva, perhaps, or in any of a number of German and French cities. ‘Paracelsian ideas, often of a debased kind, spread among herbalists and apothecaries and were adopted by unlicensed physicians.'
²⁸

However, there is no sign in Hall's account of his own practice in
Select Observations
of any receptivity to the radical doctrines of Paracelsus, who had come to medicine after serving as an army doctor, and actually dosed his patients and operated on them himself. Hall makes no use of ‘chemical medicine' or of Paracelsian specifics such as antimony. Nevertheless, the fact that his practice is profoundly conservative need not exclude the possibility that he had returned to England aflame with the new ideas and spent years studying how best to put them into practice, before giving way to the expectations of his patients. Though his recorded practice begins in 1611, the year in which the renowned Paracelsian Theodore de Mayerne arrived in London to be welcomed by the universities and the Royal College of Physicians and favourably received by the king who made him his personal physician, it seems that Hall did not begin to write up his cases until 1622, when Paracelsianism was both out of fashion and out of favour.

If Dr Caius in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
is not a Paracelsian it is difficult to discern what the point is of making him French in the first place. He makes reference to simples in his closet that he would not for the world leave behind, which suggests that he is conflating the traditionally separate roles of physician and apothecary and, like many Paracelsians, he cannot read Latin. According to Parson Evans, who is admittedly a hostile witness, Caius ‘hath no more knowledge in Hibocrates and Galen' than a mess of porridge (III. i. 61–2). Mine host of the Garter Inn joins in the ridicule of Caius' professional pretensions, calling him ‘Euscalapius', ‘Galen' and a ‘Castalian-king-urinal'.
Testing of urine, holding it up to the light to judge transparency, viscosity and colour, as well as smelling and tasting it, was one of the few diagnostic techniques available to the early-seventeenth-century physician.