Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Alanna Skuse

   Pages 1-19Open Access

3. What Was Cancer? Definition, Diagnosis and Cause

   • Alanna Skuse

   Pages 20-39Open Access

4. Cancer and the Gendered Body

   • Alanna Skuse

   Pages 40-60Open Access

5. ‘It Is, Say Some, of a Ravenous Nature’: Zoomorphic Images of Cancer

   • Alanna Skuse

   Pages 61-73Open Access

6. Cancerous Growth and Malignancy

   • Alanna Skuse

   Pages 74-93Open Access

7. Wolves’ Tongues and Mercury: Pharmaceutical Cures for Cancer

   • Alanna Skuse

   Pages 94-120Open Access

8. ‘Cannot You Use a Loving Violence?’: Cancer Surgery

   • Alanna Skuse

   Pages 121-153Open Access

9. Conclusion: ‘Death Is Only Their Desire’

   • Alanna Skuse

   Pages 154-158Open Access

10. Back Matter

    Pages 159-219

    PDF

This book is open access under a CC-BY licence.

Cancer is perhaps the modern world's most feared disease. Yet, we know relatively little about this malady's history before the nineteenth century. This book provides the first in-depth examination of perceptions of cancerous disease in early modern England. Looking to drama, poetry and polemic as well as medical texts and personal accounts, it contends that early modern people possessed an understanding of cancer which remains recognizable to us today. Many of the ways in which medical practitioners and lay people imagined cancer – as a 'woman's disease' or a 'beast' inside the body – remain strikingly familiar, and they helped to make this disease a byword for treachery and cruelty in discussions of religion, culture and politics. Equally, cancer treatments were among the era's most radical medical and surgical procedures. From buttered frog ointments to agonizing and dangerous surgeries, they raised abiding questions about the nature of disease and the proper role of the medical practitioner.

• Cancer
• early modern medicine
• early surgery
• mastectomy
• canker
• canker-worm
• cancer-worm
• cancer wolf
• cancer
• diagnosis
• early modern period
• England
• English literature
• growth
• history
• surgery
• British and Irish Literature

• Folger Shakespeare Library, USA

  Alanna Skuse

Alanna Skuse is a scholar of early modern literature and history, who has lectured at the Universities of Bristol and Exeter, UK. She has previously published on early modern treatments for cancer and on the uses of 'canker' in Shakespeare's Sonnets.