The Science of Shakespeare (41 page)

Fig. 11.2
In his
Mysterium Cosmigraphicum
(
The Cosmographic Mystery
), published in 1596, Johannes Kepler imagined the sizes of the planetary orbits as having the same relative proportions as the five “platonic solids” of Euclidean geometry.
Bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, NY

And yet Kepler, in spite of being one of the greatest scientists of his age, produced a body of work in which we see the physical and the mystical fully integrated. The planets were held in their orbits by magnetic forces, but the rotation of the Earth (and the sun, for that matter) was best explained by an animistic or “soul principle.” (For example, Kepler believed that the existence of sunspots demonstrated the presence of a soul within the sun.) His scientific writings were coupled with endless speculations on metaphysics, history, and religion. Allen Debus is quite right to describe Kepler as “a Renaissance scientific paradox—the superb mathematician whose inspiration derived from his belief in the mystical harmonies of the universe.” His subtle mixture of mathematics and mysticism “is far removed from modern science,” Debus notes, “but it formed an essential ingredient of its birth.” Cohen adds that, in spite of Kepler's scientific genius, “we could easily assemble a whole volume of his writings that would show how unscientific his thinking and his science were.”

We might note that Kepler was a practicing astrologer, and that he cast horoscopes for the German nobility. It's not clear, however, how much faith he put in the power of the stars to influence our lives. He once referred to astrology as the “foolish little daughter of the respectable, reasonable mother astronomy”; on the other hand, he published a pamphlet titled
The Sure Fundamentals of Astrology
. Cohen writes that Kepler was “the last major astronomer … to be in any degree a convinced astrologer.”

Proof that Kepler was living at least partly in the medieval world can be seen in the unfortunate case of his mother, Katharina. Another woman had claimed that Katharina gave her a magic potion, and that it had made her sick; soon there were rumors that she was running an apothecary out of her home, and that her specialty was the concoction of mind-altering libations. Katharina was arrested on suspicion of witchcraft in 1615. Kepler did everything he could to help her, writing numerous letters on her behalf; but she was convicted and sent to jail. Kepler eventually left his family in Prague, traveling to join his mother at Württemberg, spending nearly a year by her side and probably saving her from torture and execution. She insisted throughout that she was innocent, saying that she would rather die than give a false confession. She was finally released—most likely because of a technicality (the prosecutors had failed to go through all the hoops required by law). One can readily imagine Katharina's fate had her famous son not been on hand to intercede.

*   *   *

For much of human history,
magic was simply
everywhere
. As J. A. Sharpe puts it, “The overwhelming impression is that the majority of the population, certainly before 1700, to a greater or lesser extent accepted magical beliefs as part of their world view.” Why did it hold such sway over people's lives and thoughts, for so many centuries? Part of the answer is that it was pragmatic: It offered, or at least appeared to offer, solutions to real problems, generally involving health or prosperity, in an era when few other solutions were at hand. Magician-scholars like Faustus were condemned for their overly curious nature—but today's scientists, too, are tireless questioners, and it sometimes seems that Marlowe's doctor is less like Prospero and more like an inquisitive graduate student in astrophysics or cosmology. As natural philosophy gained ground, certain kinds of magical thinking—“the bits that worked”—simply became absorbed into what would become “science.” Indeed, as historian of science John Henry puts it, the reason that our view of magic has changed since Shakespeare's time “is precisely because the most fundamental aspects of that tradition have now been absorbed into the scientific worldview.” Alchemy is the obvious example: As wrongheaded as the attempts to turn lead into gold may have been—at least in hindsight—there is no question that alchemy was the forerunner of modern chemistry. (At the very least, it provided the tools that chemists would come to rely on, from balances and beakers to filters and heat sources.)

As we have seen, magic and science were deeply intertwined, and it would take more than a century for chemistry and alchemy to permanently part ways. Still, when natural philosophy rose in stature toward the middle of the seventeenth century, it owed an enormous debt to the natural magic of an earlier age. Francis Bacon, like Kepler, was a figure poised between the age of magic and the age of science. He was clearly influenced by the magical tradition, but was crafty enough to try to separate the intellectual wheat from the pseudoscientific chaff. It wasn't easy. “The end of our foundation,” he wrote, “is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motion of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire to the effecting of all things possible.” Are these the words of a scientist, a magician—or both?

 

12.     “A body yet distempered…”

SHAKESPEARE AND MEDICINE

There are museums. And then there are museums built into the attics of old churches. I'm fond of the latter kind.

From street level, the brown-brick, Wren-esque Church of St. Thomas looks like any of a hundred other London churches, nestled among modern office buildings and flats, around the corner from London Bridge underground station in Southwark. To discover the building's significance, one must climb the narrow, spiral staircase located in the church's tower. A rope handrail assists the visitor up the thirty-two steps, and eventually one emerges from the dim stairway into the museum's brightly lit foyer. It soon becomes clear that St. Thomas's is not just any old church. It wasn't built to minister to the residents of the surrounding neighborhood, but rather to those affiliated with the hospital that once stood on the site. And while the church's present structure dates only from the late seventeenth century, the story of St. Thomas's Hospital goes back much further. It was named for Thomas Becket, who was murdered in 1170, and it may date back to “only” a few years after his death; but historians suspect that its roots likely go back to about 1100, which would make it the oldest hospital in the city, perhaps in all of England.

The hospital was already described as “ancient” in 1215, when a fire that started on London Bridge swept through the neighborhood. (When the flames finally died down, the Bishop of Winchester observed: “Behold at Southwark an ancient spital, built of old to entertain the poor, has been entirely reduced to cinders and ashes.”) It was rebuilt after the fire, and would flourish for another six and a half centuries. The hospital was finally closed in 1862, when a new facility was opened a couple of miles upriver in Lambeth. Most of the old structure was demolished, and what was left was virtually forgotten—even as worshippers continued to make use of the church itself, the last surviving part of the original complex. The church's garret (meaning “attic”) was rediscovered in 1956, and its historical value was finally recognized. “You don't normally get into the roof of a church,” says Kevin Flude, the director of the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret, as we gaze up at the weathered wooden beams. “It's really a remarkable and unusual building.”

When historians poked around in the garret in the 1950s, they found the heads of dried opium plants in the rafters, which hinted at the building's remarkable history. The garret had been used for storing, and perhaps growing, medicinal herbs and plants; it would have been relatively dry, making it better suited for the purpose than other rooms in the church or the adjacent hospital. The luckiest find was the rediscovery of what had been a surgical operating theater. Located at the far end of the attic, it dates from 1822 and has now been lovingly refurbished. The word “theater” is appropriate: This was a place for learning, and the operating table was overlooked by a series of concentric wooden stalls, from which students could peer down at the operation. A sign at the front of the room reads
MISERATIONE NON MERCEDE
—“For Compassion, Not Gain.” But compassion could only get the patient so far. One look at the surgical instruments, including an amputation saw, is enough to make any twenty-first-century visitor very glad
not
to be living in a previous age. What's frightening is not the collection of instruments itself, but the fact that, before the invention of anesthetics in the 1840s, surgery of any kind was akin to torture:
You were awake for everything
. Alcohol and various opiates could dull the pain slightly, but that was about it. Surgery was thus a last resort, with many patients simply choosing death over the inevitable, excruciating pain of an invasive procedure.

Other display cases in the museum are less horrifying. There are human skeletons and plaster skulls; rows of glass jars and metal tins that once contained various medicines; bowls of herbs, roots, and seeds; and arrays of glass beakers, pipettes, and syringes. A set of emerald-green bottles sparkles under the incandescent lighting; they have cryptic labels such as
TR. HYOSCY
,
EXT. ERGOT. LIQ.
, and
TINCT: HAMAMEL
. The items on display are all from well after Shakespeare's time, although the hospital was certainly a fixture of the neighborhood in the playwright's day. In fact, St. Thomas's wasn't far from the Globe Theatre or the bear-baiting halls, being located just a few hundred yards to the east, and was just a stone's throw from Southwark Cathedral. Not that the playwright would have set foot in this, or any other, hospital: They generally catered to the poor and downtrodden, and Shakespeare, a man of some means, could probably have afforded to have a physician call on him, if needed. “Middle-class people would tend to be treated in their own home,” Flude explains. “They certainly wouldn't come to this hospital.”

PHYSICIANS, SURGEONS, APOTHECARIES, AND MIDWIVES

Today there is little ambiguity to the term “doctor,” other than distinguishing a medical doctor (with an MD) from a researcher or scientist (with a PhD)—and those in the latter group don't generally introduce themselves as doctors anyway, which helps minimize confusion. In Shakespeare's time, it was a bit more complicated. There were at least three distinct classes of medical practitioners, with physicians at the top, surgeons in the middle, and apothecaries and midwives at the bottom. Physicians were licensed, and were called “doctors” because they had studied at either Oxford or Cambridge. They had spent many years in school, learning from the Latin texts of Galen and Hippocrates. Physicians could diagnose ailments and prescribe treatments, but they did not perform surgery. A twelfth-century Church edict had prohibited doctors from shedding blood—thus anything that involved cutting a patient was left to another group of medical practitioners, the surgeons. Physicians made house calls, but their services were expensive; most ordinary people would never have consulted one. However, there were shortcuts for those on a tight budget. One could always send one's urine to the doctor for inspection, rather than ask for a personal consultation. Much could be gleaned, it was imagined, from the color and texture of the urine (and, if needed, the stool). Shakespeare has some fun with this practice, at Falstaff's expense, in
Henry IV, Part 2
:

FALSTAFF

Sirrah, you giant, what says the doctor to my water?
*

PAGE

He said, sir, the water itself was a good healthy water, but, for the party that owed it, he might have more diseases than he knew for.

(1.2.1–5)

A similar reference in Marlowe's
Tamburlaine the Great, Part 2
, has Tamburlaine asking his doctor, “Tell me, what think you of my sickness now?” To which the doctor replies,

I viewed your urine, and the hypostasis

Thick and obscure, doth make your danger great;

Your veins are full of accidental heat,

Whereby the moisture of your blood is dried.

(5.3.82–85)

And the doctor continues in this vein (pardon the pun) for another fourteen lines, all of it more or less Galenic. Incidentally, although there is no reason to imagine that Falstaff attended university, he was certainly familiar with Galen, whom he mentions later in the same scene (one of five references to Galen in Shakespeare's writing). Even with a personal consultation, however, there was only so much the physician could do. Without the benefit of diagnostic tools such as X-rays, and treatments like antibiotics—or even an understanding of the circulatory system—the physician was limited to educated guesswork.

Surgeons were considered to be of a lower class than physicians. They did not attend university; rather, they trained as apprentices under a master, just like artists and craftsmen. As a profession, surgery was allied with barbering, since both involved cutting and the use of sharp metal tools; and they were licensed by the same body, the Barber-Surgeons Company. (When Shakespeare was living in London's Cripplegate neighborhood, he would have been just a couple of blocks away from Barber-Surgeons' Hall on Monkwell Street, headquarters for the Company of Barbers and Surgeons.
*
) Surgeons could stitch up wounds, remove “stones” from internal organs, and, in the case of a head injury, relieve pressure by boring into the skull (a process known as trepanning). But opening up the body in this way was always a last resort. Of course, a diseased limb might have to be amputated—but without anaesthetic, it would have been a terrifying experience for the patient (and probably not much fun for anyone else within earshot).