Social History of Medicine Vol. 27, No. 4 pp. 632–648
Wombs, Worms and Wolves: Constructing Cancer
in Early Modern England
Alanna Skuse*
Keywords: cancer; malignancy; caustics; surgery; Galen; zoomorphism; canker
In 1714, Daniel Turner, a London physician, published his only work exclusively on diseases
of the skin: De Morbis Cutanels. Turner discussed rashes, carbuncles, warts and
imposthumes of many varieties, but most striking was his account of an extraordinary
story from a ‘villainous Empiric’ who claimed to have cured a woman with a cancerous ulcer:
Such an [tall tale] I was not long since inform’d of, by a Woman who vow’d, that in Time
of Dressing, one of these Ulcers, by a villainous Empiric (a famous Cancer Doctor) when
they held a Piece of raw Flesh at a Distance from the Sore, the Wolf peeps out, discovering his Head, and gaping to receive it.1
What motivated a ‘famous’ doctor to make such a claim, and a gentleman-physician such as
Turner to repeat it? Why should a wolf be discovered in a cancerous ulcer, and how was ‘raw
Flesh’ supposed to remedy the situation? This essay examines the neglected topic of cancer
in the early modern period, and argues that this is a malady which demonstrates, perhaps
more clearly than any other, the contemporary reciprocity between imaginative constructions of disease and the pragmatic experience thereof. Cancer was a disease which terrified
*Department of English and Film, University of Exeter, Room 221, Queen’s Building, Queen’s Drive, Exeter EX4 4QH,
UK. Email: As283@ex.ac.uk
Alanna Skuse is a Wellcome Trust scholar based in the Department of English at the University of Exeter. Her doctoral
thesis, ‘Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England, 1580–1720’, completed in 2013, examined constructions
of cancerous disease in the early modern period, and she has also written on the uses of ‘canker’ in Shakespeare’s
Sonnets. She is currently undertaking research into perceptions of surgery and surgically altered bodies during the
long seventeenth century.
1
Daniel Turner, De Morbis Cutanels: Diseases Incident to
the Skin (1714), 76.
© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine.
doi:10.1093/shm/hku039
Advance Access published 16 June 2014
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited.
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Summary. This essay examines medical and popular attitudes to cancer in the early modern period,
c.1580–1720. Cancer, it is argued, was understood as a cruel and usually incurable disease, diagnosable
by a well-defined set of symptoms understood to correspond to its etymological root, karkinos (the
crab). It was primarily understood as produced by an imbalance of the humours, with women being particularly vulnerable. However, such explanations proved inadequate to make sense of the condition’s
malignancy, and medical writers frequently constructed cancer as quasi-sentient, zoomorphising the
disease as an eating worm or wolf. In turn, these constructions materially influenced medical practice,
in which practitioners swung between anxiety over ‘aggravating’ the disease and an adversarial approach which fostered the use of radical and dangerous ‘cures’ including caustics and surgery.
Constructing Cancer in Early Modern England
633
2
The differences between British and continental theory
and practice relating to cancer are discussed in Daniel De
Moulin, A Short History of Breast Cancer (Leiden:
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), esp. 20–30. See
also Daniel De Moulin, ‘Historical Notes on Breast
Cancer, with Emphasis on the Netherlands: I. Pathological and Therapeutic Concepts in the Seventeenth
Century’, The Netherlands Journal of Surgery, 1980,
32, 129–34, and ‘Historical Notes on Breast Cancer,
with Emphasis on the Netherlands: II. Pathophysiological Concepts, Diagnosis and Therapy in the 18th
Century’, The Netherlands Journal of Surgery, 1981,
33, 206–16.
3
See in particular Elizabeth Lane Furdell, Publishing and
Medicine in Early Modern England (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2002); Ian Maclean. Logic,
Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of
Learned Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002); Mark S. R. Jenner and Patrick Wallis, eds,
Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies,
c.1450—c.1850 (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 133–53.
4
Michael B. Shimkin, Contrary to Nature: Being an Illustrated Commentary on Some Persons and Events of Historical Importance in the Development of Knowledge
Concerning Cancer (Washington: 1977), 21–2; Carl
M. Mansfield, Early Breast Cancer: Its History and Results
of Treatment (Basel; New York: Karger, 1976), 2; H. S. J.
Lee, ed., Dates in Oncology (Carnforth, UK; Pearl River,
NY: Parthenon Publishing Group, 2000); Louis Weiss,
‘Metastasis of Cancer: A Conceptual History from Antiquity to the 1990s’, Cancer and Metastasis Review,
2000, 19, 193–383; and ‘Early Concepts of Cancer’,
Cancer and Metastasis Review, 2000, 19, 205–17.
5
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of all Maladies: A
Biography of Cancer (London: Scribner, 2010), esp. 50;
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patients and medical practitioners alike, and in the charged discourses surrounding it, one
can see how experiences of the disease, from diagnosis to treatment, were both mediated by
existing cultural beliefs about the humours, gender and illness, and contributed to the development of a pervasive early modern image—the devouring, duplicitous ‘canker’.
Turner’s 1714 text comes almost at the end of the period I wish to examine, 1580–1720.
His work, like most of those explored in this essay, was an instructional medical text, printed
for the benefit of those studying and practising medicine as well as those with a layman’s
interest in the subject. However, this essay also looks to domestic receipt books, casebooks,
letters, plays and poems in an attempt to gain as rounded a picture as possible of how potential sufferers, as well as those involved in treating the disease, apprehended their condition. Turner’s text was printed in the vernacular, making it accessible to a wide audience of
fellow practitioners and lay people. Elsewhere, the essay makes use of medical texts which
were translated into English from French, German, Dutch or Latin. Though this essay examines those texts’ impact on practice in England, it is clear that there was a high degree of
consanguinity in ideas about cancer between Britain and mainland Europe.2 The long seventeenth century is chosen for several reasons. It invites inspection of how attitudes to the
disease changed, or failed to change, during a period in which medical historians have
noted change and conflict in medical theory, regulation and professionalization.3 Moreover,
it is a time frame just long enough to yield sufficient surviving material for an informed look at
what appears to have been an uncommonly diagnosed disease.
This period is also one in which the history of cancer has remained largely unexplored, in
marked contrast to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the past three decades,
several historians of medicine have attempted to pinpoint the first incidence of cancer,
and have made the case for the disease’s presence in ancient Egyptian, Indian or Mesopotamian texts, without exploring if or how cancer may have been identified in those cultures.4
More recently, the most comprehensive twenty-first-century works on the history of cancer,
Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of all Maladies, and James S. Olson’s Bathsheba’s
Breast, devote barely a handful of pages between them to the conceptualisation and treatment of the disease between Hippocrates, in the fourth century BC, and John Hunter, nearly
2000 years later in the mid-eighteenth century.5 Luke Demaitre’s insightful article on the
634
Alanna Skuse
James S. Olson, Bathsheba’s Breast: Women, Cancer and
History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2002), esp. 30–5.
6
Luke Demaitre, ‘Medieval Notions of Cancer: Malignancy and Metaphor’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1998, 72, 609–37. Further discussion of cancer
in the medieval period, particularly its supposed relation
to leprosy, can be found in Demaitre’s Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007),
esp. 106–10, 192–4.
7
Sujata Iyengar, Shakespeare’s Medical Language: A
Dictionary, 2 vols (London; New York: Continuum,
2011), vol. 1, 51–4. See also Jonathan Gil Harris,
‘“The Canker of England’s Commonwealth”: Gerard
Malynes and the Origins of Economic Pathology’
Textual Practise, 1999, 13, 311–28; Lynette Hunter,
‘Cankers in Romeo and Juliet: Sixteenth-Century Medicine at a Figural/Literal Cusp’, in Stephanie Moss and
Kaara L. Peterson, eds, Disease, Diagnosis and Cure
on the Early Modern Stage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004),
171–80.
8
Wendy D. Churchill, Female Patients in Early Modern
Britain: Gender, Diagnosis, and Treatment (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2012), 124.
9
Ibid., 130–1.
10
Michael Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick
Body in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), 136, 50.
11
Marjo Kaartinen, Breast Cancer in the Eighteenth
Century (London; Vermont: Pickering and Chatto,
2013).
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topic has filled in many of the gaps for the medieval period, focusing in particular on cancer’s
supposed relationship to leprosy.6 In early modern studies, however, investigations into the
history or ‘meanings’ of cancer have remained relatively limited, in both number and scope.
Building on literary-focused analyses of ‘canker’ by Lynette Hunter and Jonathan Gil Harris,
Sujata Iyengar’s Shakespeare’s Medical Language recognizes ‘canker’ as a term which
denoted a bodily complaint as well as horticultural blight, and briefly describes typical symptoms of cancer.7 However, in common with Hunter and Harris, Iyengar downplays the differentiation between cancer and other forms of skin disease, and the correlation between
dramatic figurations of ‘canker’ and zoomorphic understandings of cancerous disease.
Several recent works by medical historians have also drawn attention to the plight of early
modern cancer sufferers. In her 2012 Female Patients in Early Modern Britain, for instance,
Wendy Churchill recognizes that the early modern history of breast cancer has been ‘subsumed’ into broader chronologies of the disease.8 She briefly describes the common symptoms of and treatments for breast cancer, and contends that this was a disease of which most
early modern women were aware.9 A similar, and equally concise, description can be found
in Stolberg’s Experiencing Illness, in which he identifies cancer as ‘ranked among the diseases which aroused the greatest fear’ in the early modern period, on account of the pain
and ‘massive physical decline’ it effected.10
Undoubtedly the most comprehensive work on early modern cancer to date, however, is
Marjo Kaartinen’s recently published Breast Cancer in the Eighteenth Century.11 Kaartinen’s
text discusses the supposed causes of, and methods of diagnosis for, cancer, but focuses in
particular on breast cancer therapies, both pharmaceutical and surgical, and on the physical
experiences of women undergoing these treatments. Although her work informs this essay,
Kaartinen’s approach to cancer emphasises scientific innovation, particularly in the later
eighteenth century, while paying relatively little attention to those who, in the earlier part
of the century, continued to position the disease within a humoral framework. Moreover,
Kaartinen’s text, like those of Churchill and Iyengar, focuses on the physical rather than cultural experience of this disease: the symptoms of cancer, and its curative and palliative treatments. In contrast, as I shall describe, this essay dwells upon conceptualisations of the
disease as a zoomorphic, quasi-ontological entity during the ‘long’ seventeenth century,
and reflects on how those conceptualisations influenced medical practice.
Constructing Cancer in Early Modern England
635
Framing Cancer’s Victims: Discussions of Pathology and Cause
What was cancer, for a person encountering that term in the early modern period? A 1707
text by the French chirurgeon Pierre Dionis, published in an English translation in 1710, suggested that ‘A Cancer is universally agreed to be the most terrible of all the evils which attack
Mankind’.13 ‘Though Wars and Plagues kill in less time,’ he admitted, ‘they don’t yet, to me,
seem so cruel as the Cancer, which as certainly, though more slowly, carries those afflicted to
the Grave, withal causing such Pains as make them every day wish for Death.’14 Cancer was,
then, a much feared disease, worthy of the apprehension of an eminent practitioner such as
Dionis. Further, he pronounced,
’Tis a Disease which attacks not only the Breast, but several other Parts, on which it is not
less outrageous: It sometimes assumes different names; when it comes on the Legs, ’tis
called the Wolf, because if left to itself, ’twill not quit them ’till it has devoured them;
when it fixes on the Face, ’tis called a Noli me tangere, because that touching irritates
it, and makes it a greater Ravage: Authors also observe, that there are besides Tumours
and cancerous Ulcers in several parts of the Body, which I shall not mention to Day.15
Dionis’ text tells us something of the difficulties as well as the rewards of examining cancer.
This disease, he explains, is principally found in the breasts, although it also invades ‘several
parts’. From the earliest ‘formal’ identifications of cancer in ancient Greek texts, this practical
restriction, of being unable to see into living bodies and detect internal tumours, had been
similarly acknowledged.16 Moreover, cancer ‘attacks’ the sufferer, can be irritated, and
12
See for examples: Anon, An Account of the Causes of
Some Particular Rebellious Distempers viz. the Scurvey,
Cancers in Women’s Breasts, &c. (1670).
13
Pierre Dionis, A Course of Chirurgical Operations,
Demonstrated in the Royal Garden at Paris (London,
1710), 247–8.
14
Ibid., 247–8.
15
Ibid., 247–8.
16
Hippocrates termed such tumours ‘occult’ and advised
against their aggressive treatment (Hippocrates and
Celsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus
von Hohenheim) The Aphorisms of Hippocrates, and
the Sentences of Celsus (transl. with additions by C.J.
Sprengell) (London: 1708), 170). See also A. Kaprozilos
and N. Pavlidis, ‘The Treatment of Cancer in Greek
Antiquity’, European Journal of Cancer, 2004, 40,
2033–40.
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Understanding more fully how early modern people thought about cancer is significant
for several reasons. The study of cancer has obvious implications for scholars of early
modern literature, in which (with the exception of Iyengar’s work) the ubiquitous ‘canker’
has, as I discuss below, repeatedly been glossed as referring to a botanical parasite,
without taking into consideration its medical resonance. More broadly, cancer provides cultural historians and historians of medicine with an opportunity to trace the elision of figurative and literal in early modern experiences of illness, reading medical texts, and medical
practice, as both shaping and shaped by the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic images
with which people attempted to make sense of this frightening, painful and usually fatal
disease. This essay begins by considering whom cancer was supposed to affect, and what
was believed to be its cause. In the second part, I consider the ‘nature’ of cancer: the symptoms by which it was diagnosed, the relationship between cancer and canker, and the conceptualisation of the disease as parasitical, even sentient. The final section considers how
medical practitioners explained the malignancy of cancer, and how characterisations of
the disease as ‘rebellious’ and ‘evil’ affected attempts at cure.12
636
Alanna Skuse
17
Mukherjee, The Emperor of all Maladies, 6.
Anon, An Account, 24.
James Handley, Colloquia Chirurgica: Or, the Whole
Art of Surgery Epitomiz’d and Made Easie (London,
1705), 66.
20
From Lazarius Riverius, Four Books of that Learned and
Renowned Doctor, Lazarus Riverius. Appended to Felix
Platter, Abdiah Cole and Nicholas Culpeper, A Golden
Practice of Physick (London: 1662), 277. On internal
cancers as incurable, see: Robert Bayfield, Tractatus
de Tumoribus Praeter Naturam, or, A Treatise of Preternatural Tumors (1662), 183; John Pechey, Theodore
Mayern (Sir Théodore Turquet de Mayerne), Dr Chamberlain (probably Thomas Chamberlayne), and Nicholas Culpeper, The Compleat Midwife’s Practice
(London, 1698), 191. The Compleat Midwife’s Practice
is a text with a complex authorial and publication
18
19
history. This text is the fourth edition of a number
appearing under this authorship from 1659.
However, Helen King identifies the text as closely
related to the 1656 The Compleat Midwife’s Practice
by four midwives, ‘T.C.’, ‘I.D.’, ‘M.S.’ and ‘T.B.’. The
content is altered in the later books, but the preface
remains the same, including a complaint about Culpeper’s ‘imperfect’ work. See Helen King, Midwifery,
Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology: The Uses of
a Sixteenth-Century Compendium (Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 21.
21
See for examples: Sir Edmund King, Sir Edmund King’s
Casebook, 1676–96, British Library, Sloane MS.1589,
297 (pagination is irregular); Christof Wirsung, Praxis
Medicinae Universalis (transl. Jacob Mosan) (London,
1598), 498; Alexander Read, The Chirurgicall Lectures
of Tumors and Ulcers (London, 1635), 215.
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‘devours’ flesh; that is, it is a disease with personality, understood as somehow separate from
the cancer patient. Finally, it ‘assumes different names’, each of which may emphasise a different facet of the disease’s pathology, and which make the complaint difficult to trace
through historical sources. These indeterminacies present considerable difficulties for the
medical historian. However, an era’s interest in, or insistence upon, certain names for and
characteristics of the disease may also signal points of particular interest around which
one can view contemporary constructions of cancer as being arranged. Mukherjee asserts
that ‘Rolling underneath … medical, cultural, and metaphorical interceptions of cancer
over the centuries was the biological understanding of the illness’.17 For early modern
people, I argue, the connection was still more intimate. Beliefs about the disease’s cause
show that the medical was also the cultural and metaphorical.
To diagnose cancer, one first had to know where to look, and for early modern medical
practitioners, this seems to have been a straightforward decision. As Dionis admitted,
though the disease could strike ‘several parts’ it was, paradigmatically, a malady of the
female breasts. The anonymous 1670 An Account of the Causes of Some Particular Rebellious Distempers declared that ‘Cancers are known in part by the Places they fix on … a
Cancer may happen to sundry Places, as the Lips, Tongue, Cheeks, Womb, and other
loose Glandulous Parts; but were [sic] One has a Cancer in any part besides, Twenty have
them in their Breasts.’18 Likewise, James Handley’s 1705 Colloquia Chirurgica advised
that ‘Altho’ it is possible for it to breed in all Parts of the Body, yet [cancer] generally
seizes either the Breasts or Matrix of Women, and the Lips and Nose of the Face.’19
Reasons for the striking bias toward diagnosis of breast cancers over any other were manifold. Breasts presented a visible, palpable, accessible site: while Lazarius Riverius admitted
that ‘al kinds of Tumors may arise in the Stomach as wel as other parts’, internal tumours
were seldom mentioned, being largely un-diagnosable and, it was agreed, incurable.20
The sole exception to this rule was the womb, where cancers were occasionally diagnosed
either by digital or instrumental examination, or more commonly, by the fetid discharge or
‘sanies’ expelled from that organ.21 Furthermore, in the eyes of many practitioners, the
breasts were composed of such a material, and part of such a body—namely, the cold,
moist female body—that their vulnerability to cancers was exponentially greater than any
Constructing Cancer in Early Modern England
637
22
Anon, An Account, 22; Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory
for Midwives: Or, a Guide for Women, in their Conception, Bearing, and Suckling their Children (London,
1676), 324; Ambroise Paré, The Workes of that
Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey, trans Thomas
Johnson, (1634 first English edition; first French
edition 1575), 281.
23
Pechey et al, The Compleat Midwife’s Practise, 190.
24
Adding to the complexity of cancer terminology,
‘noli-me-tangere’, which was often used to describe
facial cancers, could also, occasionally, denote a separate disease, as when the German physician Matthias
Gottfried Purmann described noli-me-tangere as ‘in
some Particulars worse than a Cancer’ (Matthias Gottfried Purmann (with appended text by Joachim Sprengell), Chirurgia Curiosa: Or, the Newest and Most
Curious Observations and Operations in the Whole
Art of Chirurgery … To Which is Added Natura Morborum Medicatrix: Nature Cures Diseases (London,
1706), 34). In general, however, early modern texts
make clear when ‘noli-me-tangere’ is being used to
designate a separate disease and when it refers to
cancer of the face.
Gail Kern Paster, ‘The Unbearable Coldness of Female
Being: Women’s Imperfection and the Humoral
Economy’, English Literary Renaissance, 1998, 28,
416–40. See also Robert Martensen, ‘The Transformation of Eve: Women’s Bodies, Medicine and Culture
in Early Modern England’, in Roy Porter and Mikulas
Teich, eds, Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The
History of Attitudes to Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 107–33.
26
Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 68–72.
27
See for example Read, The Chirurgicall Lectures, 214.
28
Marylynn Salmon, ‘The Cultural Significance of Breastfeeding and Infant Care in Early Modern England and
America’, Journal of Social History, 1994, 28, 247–69.
29
John Sadler, The Sicke Woman’s Private LookingGlasse (1636), 11; Jean Riolan, A Sure Guide, or, the
Best and Nearest Way to Physick and Chyrurgery, Nicholas Culpeper and W.R. (trans), (1657), 98. On this
subject, see also Patricia Crawford, ‘Attitudes to
25
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other part. The breasts, it was argued, were ‘spungy’, ‘laxe’ and ‘funguous’.22 Their tissues,
seemingly less dense than those elsewhere on the body, were correspondingly more inclined
to soak up bad humours. As the authors of The Compleat Midwife’s Practice attested, ‘The
Canker proceeds from a feculent and grosse humour … which when nature cannot void, it
most commonly in women empties itself upon the breast, by reason of this cavernous and
spongy nature.’23 Medical practitioners’ admission that cancer could occasionally strike
elsewhere—for example, on the face—rather confirmed than undermined their theory,
since other at-risk spots, such as nose, lips and ears, had in common the same fleshy ‘looseness’.24
The female body also provided a humoral pathology which seemed designed to foster
cancers. As Gail Kern Paster and others have shown, women’s bodies paradigmatically occupied the ‘cold and wet’ quarter of the humoral spectrum.25 Lacking ‘vital heat’, women
did not concoct a portion of their blood into seed, as men did, or concocted only watery,
thin seed, and instead this excess nutrition went either to the nourishment of a fetus, or
was expelled through the menses.26 When menstruation was interrupted for any reason
other than pregnancy, therefore, women found themselves particularly vulnerable to a
build-up of excess, excremental humours, especially melancholy. Such humours commonly
gathered in the womb, from whence they were supposed to be expelled, and physicians
explained incidences of womb cancer with reference to this fact.27 Moreover, the womb
was believed by many to have a direct connection to the breasts, such that, as Marylynn
Salmon has observed, the post-partum absence of menstruation was taken as proof that
excess blood was being transformed into milk for the nursing child.28 John Sadler, for
example, insisted in 1636 that breast milk was ‘nothing but the menstruous bloud made
white in the breasts’, having been altered in order to avoid the alarming sight of infants
covered in blood, while in 1657, a translated text by the French physician and surgeon
Jean Riolan (following the venerated opinion of Leonardo Da Vinci), posited the existence
of two veins by which the breasts and womb were directly connected.29 That connection
638
Alanna Skuse
Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past
and Present, 1981, 91, 46–73.
30
Robert Bayfield, Tractatus de Tumoribus Praeter
Naturam, 92–3.
31
Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 86.
32
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: the Making of the
Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 188–9. See also Bridget Gellert Lyons,
Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of
Melancholy in Renaissance England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 4–5.
33
Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night, Or, A Discourse
of Apparitions (London, 1594), 9, <http://www.oxfordshakespeare.com/Nashe/Terrors_Night.pdf>, accessed
1 January 2013.
34
Read, The Chirurgicall Lectures, 212. See also Giovannida Vigo, The Most Excellent Workes of Chirurgerie
Made and Set Foorthe by Maister John Vigon
(London, 1571), xliii; John Browne, The Surgeons Assistant (London, 1703), 76; Philip Barrough, The
Method of Physick (London, 1583), 202. On varieties
of ‘adust’ melancholy, see Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, 63.
35
See Demaitre, ‘Medieval Notions of Cancer’, 618–19.
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meant that humours from the womb were bound to migrate to the breasts over any other
part of the body.
Medical practitioners were broadly united in their belief that a surfeit of humours in the
affected area was the precursor of cancer. In particular, writers on the subject usually held
that melancholy, or black bile, was chiefly to blame. Robert Bayfield’s pronouncement in
the 1662 Tractatus de Tumoribus was typical: ‘when this melancholious humor, resembling
in proportion the dregs of wine, doth descend and flow into any member, and there abideth
compact together … sometimes it breedeth a Cancer, as when the same is somewhat
cool’d.’30 As Bayfield’s description of the ‘dregs’ of melancholy indicated, the substance’s
implication in cancers was symptomatic of its broader characterisation as feculent,
malign, and even associated with the devil.31 In his study of Renaissance self-identity,
Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor argues that ‘black bile doesn’t just cause melancholy
[i.e. melancholia]; melancholy somehow resides in it. The substance embodies this significance.’32 Just as the properties of melancholy humour were realised in the disease of melancholia, the malignancy and evil associated with this substance were also, as we shall see,
manifest in descriptions of intractable, cruel and rebellious cancerous tumours.
Despite the humour’s negative associations, however, few practitioners argued that melancholy in itself caused cancers. After all, a healthy bodily complexion included all four
humours, each with positive as well as dangerous attributes. Instead, many practitioners
shared Bayfield’s view that melancholy became dangerous when it gathered in one place,
where it ‘compacted’ or became ‘stagnant’. Again, this belief traded on the popular
image of melancholy humours as excremental dregs. Thomas Nashe’s 1594 The Terrors
of the Night, for example, characterised ‘the thick steaming fenny vapours’ of melancholy
as like ‘slime and dirt in a standing puddle’, likely to engender ‘misshapen objects’.33 Still
more practitioners viewed cancer as the result of a qualitative change in the melancholy
humour provoked either by heat or by combination with other substances, particularly
choler. Alexander Read, who (unsuccessfully) treated Nicholas Culpeper’s mother for
cancer in 1639, proposed in 1635 that cancerous tumours might arise ‘from Atra bilis, or
melancholy, or choler adust … for there are two sorts of Atra bilis: the one is caused of naturall melancholy adust: the other is caused of yellow choler burned, and it is much more
maligne than the former.’34 This view was one inherited from medieval accounts of cancerous disease, and it remained prevalent well into the eighteenth century.35 Almost 70 years
after Read’s pronouncement, John Browne asserted in his 1703 The Surgeons Assistant that
‘a Scirrhus is made by natural Melancholy, which is in the Blood … but a Cancer is not bred
Constructing Cancer in Early Modern England
639
from natural, but adust [burned] Melancholy’.36 Adust melancholy was, as Paster has
observed, a substance deemed even more toxic than regular black bile, and it was described
as unnatural, foreign, malignant and degenerate by contemporary physicians.37 In common
with much early modern medicine, however, explanations of cancer frequently concluded at
this point, offering only vague or partial descriptions of how, exactly, malignant humours
caused malignant tumours. To explain cancer’s frightening propensity to overtake the
body, humoral theory was set aside, and medical practitioners of all kinds employed explanatory models which blurred the line between metaphor and somatic reality.
‘Knowing’ Cancer: Symptoms and Characterisations
of Malignant Disease
36
Browne, The Surgeons Assistant, 81.
Gail Kern Paster, ‘Melancholy Cats, Lugged Bears, and
Early Modern Cosmology: Reading Shakespeare’s Psychological Materialism Across the Species Barrier’, in
Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary FloydWilson, eds, Reading the Early Modern Passions:
Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 118. See also
Paul Dubé, The Poor Man’s Physician and Surgeon
(London, 1704), 333–4.
38
Olivia Weisser, ‘Boils, Pushes and Wheals: Reading
Bumps on the Body in Early Modern England’, Social
History of Medicine, 2009, 22, 321–339.
39
Wirsung, Praxis Medicinae Universalis, 572. See also
Barrough, The Method of Physick, p. 274.
40
Paré, The Workes, 279. See also Dubé, The Poor Man’s
Physician, 362; Wirsung, Praxis Medicinae Universalis,
498.
41
Richard Wiseman, Several Chirurgical Treatises
(London, 1686), 101; Paré, The Workes, 279; Dionis,
37
A Course of Chirurgical Operations, 248. See also
Pechey et al, The Compleat Midwife’s Practice,
183–4; Anon, An Account, 23; Read, The Chirurgicall
Lectures, 213–14.
42
Paré The Workes, 148; See also Bayfield, Tractatus de
Tumoribus, 180; Dionis, A Course of Chirugical Operations, 248; Wiseman, Several Chirurgical Treatises, 98;
Read, The Chirurgicall Lectures, 211; Barrough, The
Method of Physick, 273; Browne, The Surgeons Assistant, 81.
43
Pechey et al, The Compleat Midwife’s Practise, 190;
Dionis, A Course of Chirurgical Operations, 248. See
also for examples: Bayfield, Tractatus de Tumoribus,
180; Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, 324;
Wiseman, Several Chirurgical Treatises, 98; Everard
Maynwaringe, The Frequent, but Unsuspected Progress
of Pains, Inflammations, Tumors, Apostems, Ulcers,
Cancers, Gangrenes and Mortifications (London,
1679), 194–5; Peter Lowe, The Whole Course of Chirurgerie (London, 1597), n.p.
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Early modern patients were subject, as Olivia Weisser has shown, to any number of lumps
and bumps.38 Cancer, however, was recognisable by a very distinct set of symptoms, primarily visual in form and intimately tied to perceptions of the disease’s unique ‘nature’. Medical
practitioners generally, though not universally, agreed that cancerous tumours were accompanied by heat and pain. As Christof Wirsung asserted, ‘the Canker causeth … great paine
and beating, whereof Schirrhus is free’.39 Others, including Paré, described ‘a sense like the
pricking of Needles’.40 Also characteristic of the disease was a distinctive and discomfiting
appearance. Appearing under the skin ‘From the smalness of a Vetch [legume] to the
bigness of a Pomion [fruit—often an apple]’, tumours were often highly coloured, either
red and ‘livid’ or ‘blackish’.41 Unlike some other swellings, cancers were said to be ‘rough
and unequall’ and ‘round’; that is, circular, but with an uneven surface appearance.42
The most distinctive mark of a cancerous tumour, however, was the appearance of darkened
veins extending from the swollen area. A ‘Canker in the Breasts’, argued The Compleat Midwife’s Practise, ‘is known by the crooked windings, and retorted veins that are about it,
stretching out long roots a good way from it, being sometimes blackish, and sometimes
inclined to black and blue’, while Dionis noted that the disease was ‘Remarkable … on
account of the Veins of black Blood disperst over its whole Superfices’.43 Such symptoms
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Alanna Skuse
announced the presence of a cancer far before the disease’s most feared stage, the ‘breaking out’ of a morbid cancerous ulcer, ‘inequall, sordide, turned over, cavernous, evill
favoured’ and ‘round horrible’.44
The visual characteristics of cancerous tumours proved easy ones for medical writers and
their audiences to remember. Not only were they peculiarly gruesome even by the standards
of the age, but, crucially, they evoked the very name of the disease, a derivation of the Greek
karkinos, or crab. Round and red, the tumour appeared like the body of that creature, whilst
the blood vessels extending outward were ‘verie like unto the feete of crabbes, descending
from the round compasse of their bodies’.45 For early modern as for medieval authors, the
comparison seemed a perfect one, ‘exquisite’ in its fit to the disease’s symptoms.46 According to Read’s Chirurgicall Lectures:
From the etymology of cancer, one can see how the term became used interchangeably with
‘canker’ across many texts, medical and otherwise, across the early modern period. The
ejective form, ‘canker’, hearkened back to the Latin cancer (both the ‘c’s being pronounced
ejectively), which was a stepping stone between Greek and English terms.48 ‘Cancer’ and
‘canker’ were both used, seemingly indiscriminately, to describe the disease we now recognise as cancer. Interestingly, however, ‘canker’ could also be used to describe a broader
range of ulcers, including mouth ulcers and pox sores, which, judging from their description
and treatment in contemporary texts, were clearly not confused by medical practitioners
with the more serious malignant ulcers and tumours of ‘true’ cancer. Such a confusion of
linguistic forms naturally presents a challenge to the medical historian, and even sometimes
frustrated medical practitioners of the period, with the Swiss physician Théophile Bonet
complaining of the ‘Cheat and Errour’ made by his contemporaries with regard to these
terms.49 However, as Read’s observation demonstrates, the evolution of ‘cancer’ as a
term also shows how closely the disease was associated with its namesake, both in behaviour and form. Not only did they look alike, but, as Peter Lowe asserted, cancer ‘gnaweth,
eateth and goeth like this fish [the crab]’.50 Moreover, cancer was, according to Philip Barrough, ‘verie hardly pulled awaie from those members, which it doth lay holde on, as the sea
crabbe doth, who obstinately doth cleave to that place which it once hath apprehended’.51
44
Lowe, The Whole Course of Chirurgerie, n.p.
Barrough, The Method of Physick, 144.
46
On medieval characterisations of cancer as crab-like,
see Demaitre, ‘Malignancy and Metaphor’, 620–22.
47
Read, The Chirurgicall Lectures, 211–12. See also Bayfield, Tractatus de Tumoribus, 180; Wiseman, Several
Chirurgical Treatises, 102; Lanfranco of Milan, A
Most Excellent and Learned Woorke of Chirurgerie,
John Halle (trans) (1565), 20; John Browne, Adenochoiradelogia, or, an Anatomick-Chirurgical Treatise
45
of Glandules & Strumaes or, Kings-Evil-Swellings
(1684), 31–2.
48
On Old English terms for cancer, see P. Thompson ‘The
Disease That We Call Cancer’, in S. Campbell, B. Hall
and D. Klausner, eds, Health, Disease and Healing in
Medieval Culture (New York: St Martin’s Press,
1992), 1–11.
49
Théophile Bonet, A Guide to the Practical Physician
(London, 1684), 62.
50
Lowe, The Whole Course of Chirurgurie, sig. L3r.
51
Barrough, The Method of Physick, 273.
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as a crab, in Latine Cancer, hath a body and feet of a livid colour, and whatsoever it claspeth with the clawes, it holdeth it firmly, so this griefe is of a livid colour, and so girdeth
the part which it possesseth, that it seemeth to be nailed to the part, and about it the full
veines exquisitely imitate the feet of a crab: and from these similitudes the tumor hath its
name.47
Constructing Cancer in Early Modern England
641
A certain Emperick did cure many Cancers by this one medicine: He took Worms, called
in Latin centum pedes, in English Sowes; they are such as lye under old Timber, or
between the Bark and the Tree. These he stamped and strained with the Ale, and
gave the patient to drink thereof morning and evening. This medicine caused a
certain Black Bug or Worm to come forth, which had many legs, and was quick, and
after that the Cancer did heal very quickly with convenient Medicines.55
Elsewhere, this conviction was repeated in various forms. Both physicians and receipt book
writers offered remedies to ‘slea the worme’, with Elizabeth Sleigh and Felicia Whitfield advising that ‘For a canker in a Womans breast’, one should ‘Take goose, sallandine [celandine]
bray them together well … lay them to the dugge or teat it will cleanse the canker, kill the
worme, and heale the sore.’56 Many more practitioners included crushed or powdered
52
See Wiseman, Several Chirurgical Treatises, 104; Barrough, The Method of Physick, 273; Jacques Guillemeau and ‘A.H.’, A Worthy Treatise of the Eyes …
Translated into English, Togeather with a Profitable
Treatise of the Scorbie; & another of the Cancer by
A. H. (London, 1587), 61–2.
53
Joanna Bourke, ‘What is Pain? A History (The Prothero
Lecture)’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society,
2013, 23, 160.
54
Harris, ‘“The Canker of England’s Commonwealth”’,
317.
William Salmon, Paraieremata, or Select Physical and
Chirurgical Observations (London, 1687), 378. The
story repeats almost verbatim a similar account from
D. Border’s Polypharmakos kai Chymistes (1651), 15.
56
A.T., A Rich Store-House or Treasury for the Diseased.
Wherein, are Many Approved Medicines for Divers and
Sundry Diseases, which have been Long Hidden, and
55
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The attribution of zoomorphic behaviours to cancerous tumours was central to their designation as ‘crab-like’. It can also help to explain the disease’s monikers of ‘worm’ and ‘wolf’,
and in particular, why the ‘canker-worm’, commonly read by scholars as denoting an eating
caterpillar, had such an intimate relationship to another kind of parasite—the ‘worm’ of
cancer. Cancers, as Lowe and many others observed, appeared to ‘gnaw’ and ‘eat’ the sufferer.52 Tumours became larger as the patient visibly diminished. Moreover, like a parasite,
cancers were often only discovered by their appearance at the body’s surface after the
patient had been suffering pain and emaciation from the disease for some time. These distinctive factors marked cancer out from the multitude of degenerative diseases to which one
might fall victim in the period, and gave rise to a zoomorphic idea of the disease unmatched
elsewhere in the medical lexicon. This phenomenon bears striking similarities to the construction of pain as recently identified by Joanna Bourke. In ‘What is Pain?’, Bourke
argues that metaphorical statements, such as ‘a pain in my shoulder’, are apt to be ‘literalised’, such that we fall for an ‘ontological fallacy’ of believing pain to have an independent
existence. In descriptions of cancerous disease, this ‘literalising’ is taken still further.53 Harris
has observed, in his analysis of Gerard Malynes’ 1601 A Treatise of the Canker of England’s
Common Wealth, that the worm image lent ‘ontological agency’ to the ‘eating’ action of
cancer.54 Employing this observation in service of an analysis of economic language,
Harris does not pursue the worm analogy through its progress from figural tool to
medical belief. However, the primary materials show that at various points throughout
the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some medical practitioners became
convinced not only of the likeness of cancer to parasites, but of the disease’s literal composition as such. In one such example from William Salmon’s 1687 Paraieremata, it was
reported that
642
Alanna Skuse
worms and insects in their cancer remedies, in hopes of curing like with like.57 Presenting an
account similar to that of the ‘certain Empirick’, but with a veneer of scientific respectability,
Dionis declared in 1710 that
Some believe, that the ulcerated Cancer is nothing else but a prodigious Multitude of
small Worms, which by little and little devour all the flesh of the part: What made room
for this Opinion, is, that with the Microscope we have sometimes discerned some of
these Insects in Cancers; and that putting a bit of Veal on the Ulcer, the Patient has
felt less Pain; because, say they, these Worms then feeding on the Veal, leave the
Patient at rest for some time.58
not Come to Light Before this Time (London: 1596),
41–2; Elizabeth Sleigh and Felicia Whitfeld, Collection
of Medical Receipts (1647–1722), Wellcome Library
MS.751, 5.
57
See for example: Mrs Corylon, A Booke of Divers
Medecines (1606) MS.213, 141; Johanna St John,
Johanna St John Her Booke (1680) Wellcome Library
MS.4338, 14.
58
Dionis, A Course of Chirurgical Operations, 249.
59
See Guy de Chauliac, Grande Chirurgerie, ed. E. Nicaise,
(Paris, 1890 (1363)), 305.
Turner, De Morbis Cutanels, 75.
61
Oswald Gabelkover, The Boock of Physicke (1599),
367.
62
de Chauliac, Grande Chirurgie, 305.
63
See Genesis 49:27; Jeremiah 5:6; John 10:12;
Matthew 7:15. All Biblical references are taken from
Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, eds, The Bible:
60
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The cure Dionis describes was a popular palliative cure for cancer throughout the early
modern period, and, like many cancer therapies, had its roots in medieval practice.59 Applying fresh meat, whether veal, poultry, or, less commonly, puppies and kittens, was felt to
offer the eating cancer something more tempting to consume, affording temporary
respite to the patient.
The particular emphasis on cancer’s appetite for meat also gestured to another of the disease’s pseudonyms, the wolf. As Turner’s account of the creature emerging from the body
demonstrates, this image seeped into popular use as a byword for an eating tumour by dint
of its ‘ravenous’ and ‘fierce’ characteristics.60 Naturally, it was harder to imagine this creature
as literally rather than metaphorically present in the body: nonetheless, some practitioners
(including Turner’s ‘villainous Empiric’) evidently did just that, representing the wolf as ‘discovering his Head’ from within a cancerous ulcer. Elsewhere, the inclusion of powdered ‘wolvestunge’ in a cancer remedy from Oswald Gabelkover’s 1599 The Boock of Physicke likewise
testifies to the real therapeutic impact which even apparently figurative zoomorphism
wrought upon treatment for cancer.61 ‘Wolf’ could be used to describe a cancer anywhere
on the body, but was, as Dionis observed, most commonly used to designate tumours and
ulcers on the legs. Why this should have been the case is unclear, and may have gestured
toward wolves’ modus operandi, seizing the hind legs of their prey. In any case, it appears
that this comparison had been in circulation for many years. In 1363, for example, the French
surgeon-physician Guy de Chauliac linked cancer’s ‘wolfishness’ with ‘meat cures’ such as
that later described by Dionis, grimly suggesting that ‘the people say that [cancer] is called
“wolf”, because it eats a chicken every day, and if it did not get it it would eat the person’.62
Zoomorphic metaphors for cancer traded on the disease’s symptoms, and materially
affected how cancerous tumours and ulcers were treated. In aligning cancer with worms
and wolves, medical writers also accessed long-standing cultural, religious and scientific discourses about those creatures. Wolves, for example, were described in the Bible as ‘ravening’ animals, and, moreover, creatures liable to appear in sheep’s clothing.63 As Karen
Constructing Cancer in Early Modern England
643
Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha
(1611), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
64
Karen Edwards, ‘Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early
Modern Bestiary’, Milton Quarterly, 2009, 43, 277–8.
Edwards’ ‘Bestiary’ appears, arranged alphabetically,
over several volumes, from 39 to 43.
65
Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 165.
66
“wolf, n.”. OED Online. December 2013. Oxford
University Press. <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/
229845?rskey=XUXp21&result=1>, accessed 10
March 2014.
67
Henry Smith, ‘The Benefit of Contentation’, in The
Sermons of Maister Henrie Smith (London, 1593), 209.
68
John Webster, The White Devil (1612) in René Weis
(ed.), The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 1–103.
69
Matthew Cobb, The Egg and Sperm Race: The
Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the
Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth (London: The Free
Press, 2006), esp. 15, 66, 84–5.
70
See Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early
Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1997), 70–80. For stories of bodily worms, see
William Ramesey, Helminthologia, or, Some Physical
Considerations of the Matter, Origination, and
Several Species of Wormes Macerating and Direfully
Cruciating Every Part of the Bodies of Mankind
(London, 1668); R. Clark, Vermiculars Destroyed,
with an Historical Account of Worms, Collected from
the Best Authors as well Ancient as Modern, Proved
by that Admirable Invention of the Microscope
(London, 1690). An advertisement for this text shows
that it was first printed in 1661, though no extant
copy remains. It was reprinted at least four times
until 1691.
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Edwards notes, contemporary writers of poetry and polemic frequently utilised those tropes
to vilify certain groups, such that ‘The figurative wolf in Milton’s works consistently represents those with Romish allegiances or inclinations, promoters of superstition, archhypocrites, and rapacious predators’.64 The analogy was lent particular force by the fact
that wolves, like Catholics, had been eliminated from England by the sixteenth century,
but still roamed in continental Europe, and were felt as a constant threat. Similarly, Bruce
Thomas Boehrer observes that wolves became a popular symbol of deception in early
modern culture, augmented by the presence of three wolf fables in William Caxton’s influential 1483 edition of Aesop.65 The Oxford English Dictionary locates the first use of ‘wolf’ to
describe fierceness or rapacity even earlier, in the c.950 Lindisfarne Gospels (and only around
175 years after the word’s first recorded use c.725).66 It seems likely that such abiding
discourses of expulsion and corruption both bolstered, and later drew from, the eating
‘wolf’ of cancer, and by the early seventeenth century, preachers and dramatists were
using ‘wolf’ in ways which clearly showed their understanding of the word’s medical
context. Henry ‘Silver-tongue’ Smith, for example, informed his congregation in the late sixteenth century that ‘[covetousness is] … like the disease which we call the Wolfe, that is
always eating, and yet keeps the bodie leane’.67 In John Webster’s 1612 The White Devil,
the villainous Flamineo refers to ‘meat cures’, as outlined above, when he describes
himself as ‘like a wolf in a woman’s breast … fed with poultry’ (5.3.54).68
The ‘worm’ of cancer, meanwhile, drew even more extensively on diverse contemporary
and ancient discourses about bodily parasites. The presence of intestinal worms in children,
and maggots in unstitched wounds, had long fostered the notion that worms of several varieties could live in the body’s cavities. Moreover, as Matthew Cobb describes, it was commonly believed in the early modern period that worms could be spontaneously generated
by decaying organic matter.69 With the rise of microscopy in the mid-seventeenth
century, interest in bodily worms reached new heights, with several texts providing lurid
accounts of worms found in various parts of the body.70 Indeed, Turner, who had related
(and discounted) the tale of the wolf emerging from a cancerous ulcer, asserted in 1714 that
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Alanna Skuse
That not only Worms of sundry kinds, but other living Creatures are found in our Bodies
(however they come there) is too notorious to want Proof: Nay, that our Blood is full of
them, that most of our Diseases take Rise from them, more especially the Cancer, Itch,
Ringworm, &c. has been asserted by learned Men.71
Cancer as Dramatis Persona in Prognosis and Treatment
Possible conflict between viewing cancer as a parasitical disease or a disease of the humours
seems to have gone unremarked in the early modern period. Descriptions of the cancer
worm often appeared alongside explanations of atra bilis, while in remedies for the
disease, crabs, worms and wolves’ tongues shared the page with simples for correcting
choler and melancholy. That this was possible attests to the flexibility which characterised
much early modern thought on disease causation. It also indicates the conceptual utility
of a permeable boundary between figural and literal notions of cancer. Notably, there
was no suggestion from either ‘villainous Empiric[s]’ or licensed physicians that the worm
or wolf of cancer entered the body from without.77 Nonetheless, conceptualising cancerous
tumours as somehow distinct from the patient in whom they were situated allowed both
practitioners and patients to make sense of the disease’s seemingly unstoppable progress
and resistance to cure.
71
Turner, De Morbis Cutanels, 158.
Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of
Indo-European Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 541–3.
73
See also Job 7:5, 17:14, 21:26, 24:20, 51:8; Acts
12:23.
74
Job 25:6; Psalms 22:6.
75
See Edwards, ‘Milton’s Reformed Animals’ Milton
Quarterly, 2005, 39, 250; Marta Powell Harley, ‘Last
72
Things First in Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale: Final Judgment and the Worm of Conscience’, The Journal of
English and Germanic Philology, 1992, 91, 1–16; Jonathan Wright, ‘The World’s Worst Worm: Conscience
and Conformity During the English Reformation’,
The Sixteenth Century Journal, 1999, 30, 113–33.
76
John Abernethy, A Christian and a Heavenly Treatise
(London: Felix Kyngston, 1622), 104.
77
Turner, De Morbis Cutanels, 76.
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Literary and biblical sources, meanwhile, continually positioned worms as a memento mori
associated in various ways with man’s sinfulness and bodily frailty. Linguist and classicist
Calvert Watkins has noted the prevalence of ‘slaying the worm’, particularly in relation to
illness, as a ‘mythographic basic formula’ in a number of ancient Proto-Indo-European languages.72 Closer to home, worms also appear in the Bible on numerous occasions as a reminder of the mortality of the flesh, with Job declaring that ‘though after my skin worms
destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God’ (19:26).73 The presence of worms in the
body after death was therefore an example of the transience and corruptibility of the
flesh, a theme on occasion expanded to include viewing oneself as a lowly worm.74 Intriguingly, worms also appeared in literature from the medieval period onward as agents of
conscience, physically ‘gnawing’ at the minds, hearts, and bowels of sinners in a manner uncannily akin to breast-devouring cancer worms.75 ‘Like a worm to gnaw the heart,’ as one
treatise observed, conscience provokes ‘our own thoughts to trouble and affray.’76 As creatures both generated by the self and hostile to it, ‘eating’ one in a figurative and a painfully
literal sense, gnawing conscience-worms seem to have been influenced by images of
gnawing bodily worms, and such images no doubt contributed in turn to the popularisation
of a parasitical vision of cancerous disease.
Constructing Cancer in Early Modern England
645
78
See Pechey, The Compleat Midwife’s Practice, 108;
Anon, An Account, 26–7.
79
Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, 324.
80
Peter Lowe, The Whole Course of Chirurgerie (London:
1597), sig. Aa1r; Anon, An Account, 26–7.
81
See Pechey, The Compleat Midwife’s Practice, 183;
Wiseman, Several Chirurgical Treatises, 98–9;
Browne, The Surgeon’s Assistant, 78, 111–12.
82
Anon, An Account, 22.
83
William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1 (3.1.1296–7) in
John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor and
Stanley Wells, eds, The Oxford Shakespeare, 2nd edn
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). On duelling,
see Anon, An Account of the Damnable Prizes in Old
Nicks Lottery … In a Gradation of Familiar Thoughts,
Arising, Upon the Not Passing of the Duelling Bill,
Brought in Last Session of Parliament (London,
1712), 3; on corruption, see George Wither, Opobalsamum Anglicanum: An English Balme, Lately Pressed
out of a Shrub, and Spread Upon these Papers, for
the Cure of some Scabs, Gangreeves and Cancers
Indangering the Bodie of this Common-Wealth
(c.1645), l.49–74.
84
John Tanner, The Hidden Treasures of the Art of
Physick (1659), 443.
85
See for example: John Fernelius, Select Medicinal
Counsels of John Fernelius, Chief Physitian to the
King. Appended to Felix Platter, Abdiah Cole and Nicholas Culpeper, A Golden Practice of Physick (London,
1662), 412–13; Barrough, The Method of Physick,
275; Paré, The Workes, 281–2. Even the most optimistic practitioners admitted that dietary changes could
only cure a cancer in its incipient stages. Most saw
such regimen as a means of slowing down the
tumour’s growth.
86
See: John Pechey, The Store-House of Physical Practice
(1695), 62; Nicholas Fontanus, The Womans Doctour
(London, 1652), 114–16; Joannes Jonstonus, The
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Medical practitioners of the early modern period keenly observed the growth of cancerous tumours, their transformation into ulcers, and on occasion, their metastasis to other
parts of the body.78 A 1651 edition of Nicholas Culpeper’s popular Directory for Midwives,
for example, delineated the progress of breast cancer as ‘a little tubercle, no bigger than a
pease, [which] … grows up by degrees, and spreads out roots with Veins about it’.79 Other
practitioners dwelt upon the disease’s possible degeneration into ‘an ulcer round horrible’,
or, less commonly, its capacity to ‘break forth afresh, either in the same place, or in some
other parts of the Body’.80 Sometimes, medical writers tried to explain these phenomena
as evidence of the poisonous nature of cancers, or their relation to contagious diseases, primarily leprosy and venereal pox.81 For the most part, however, it was agreed that this mysterious phenomenon was simply an inextricable part of cancer’s nature. ‘Malignancy’ in its
fullest sense was the defining characteristic of cancer, connecting the otherwise puzzling
‘behaviours’ of the malady to a semi-sentience that was universally understood as evil,
cruel and deliberately intractable. As one anonymous medical practitioner put it, ‘[it] discovers its evil Nature by the grievous Symptoms that appear, and a[s] it increases in
bigness, it increases in malignity.’82
Casting cancer as a dramatis persona apart from the sufferer allowed for the evolution of
‘cancer’ and ‘canker’ as particularly useful terms for describing maladies of rhetorical bodies
in which one part seemed to rebel against the rest, such as duelling among the aristocracy,
corruption in parliament, or ‘Civil dissension’, the ‘viperous worm / That gnaws the bowels of
the commonwealth’.83 It also contributed to a discourse which viewed medicine as having
the moral and professional task of defeating this ‘malignant and stubborn enemy’, however
difficult and dangerous that task might be.84 The most common treatments for cancer
during this period appear to have been relatively gentle ones. The majority of medical practitioners began their prescriptions by urging patients to stick to a spare, ‘cooling’ diet and
avoid strong, salty foods or potent wines.85 In addition, more or less mild purgatives, analgesics such as nightshade and henbane, and plants thought to quell flux, expel melancholy,
and strengthen the body all appear frequently in the tisanes, broths, unguents and salves
prescribed in most medical texts.86 This circumspect approach reflected the contemporary
646
Alanna Skuse
I have observed [septics], especially Arsenick … applied to Ulcers near the heart, as to a
Cancer in the breast, that they once carried off a Woman in 6 days: About three hours
after the Powder was strewed on her Breast, she … was taken with a Shivering, then
with a Vomiting, and frequent Faintings, with a languid Pulse; which symptomes,
encreasing by degrees, her extreme parts growing cold, and her Face and whole
Body swelling beyond measure, she was miserably murthered.90
As Bonet’s account makes clear, such therapies were hazardous to the patient, but they also
posed economic and moral risks to the medical practitioner, who risked being cast as a ‘murderer’.
This risk was exponentially increased in relation to surgery for cancers, most notoriously
the mastectomy operation. In this procedure, the breast was excised from the body,
without anaesthesia, using a sharp wire or a knife, and the area usually cauterised with a
hot iron.91 It was clearly a horrific experience, with an extremely high mortality rate. According to Browne, ‘you at once had as well cut your Patients Throat, as use the Knife in this case,
by which you will certainly see her fall under your hands, and in her goar Blood make her
exit’.92 Nonetheless, mastectomies, along with less invasive operations to remove surface
tumours, continued throughout the early modern period.93 For patients experiencing debility, social isolation, and constant pain, facing the prospect of a slow death from their illness,
the seemingly extraordinary decision to undergo surgery was sometimes deceptively
Idea of Practicall Physick (1657), 8; Lazarus Riverius,
The Practice of Physick (transl. with possible additions
by Nicholas Culpeper, Abdiah Cole and William
Rowland) (London, 1655), 88.
87
See for example: Dubé, The Poor Man’s Physician and
Surgeon, 362; Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives,
165–6.
88
Barrough, The Method of Physick, 276.
89
Paré, The Workes, 281.
Bonet, A Guide to the Practical Physician, 62.
91
See Paré, The Workes, 281–2; Dionis, A Course of Chirurgical Operations, 254–5.
92
Browne, The Surgeons Assistant, 87.
93
Cancer surgeries were recorded prior to this period,
albeit very infrequently. See Demaitre, ‘Medieval
Notions of Cancer’, 630–2.
90
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view that most cancers were incurable, and worse, were ‘enraged’ by the application of
harsh medicines.87 In line with images of the disease as ravenous, punitive and semisentient, many believed that, as Barrough stated, ‘the malignitie of the evill through … vehement medicines is stirred, and provoked, and made more fierce and savage’.88 Hippocrates’
aphorism 6.38 was often cited in support of instituting only palliative cures: ‘it is better not to
cure occult, or hidden Cancers; for the Patients cured … doe quickly die, but such as are not
cured live longer’.89
Despite such cautions, however, the therapies most strongly associated with cancer were
not gentle, holistic, palliative cures. Frequently decried in medical textbooks, but nonetheless described with grim fascination, chemical caustics and surgery were the most radical
courses available to the cancer patient and their practitioner. In these cures, the removal
of the cancer from the body by any means necessary took centre stage, despite the
massive risks this posed to the patient. Arsenic and mercury, which had been in use as mortifying agents since the medieval period, accomplished this feat as ‘caustics’ or ‘septics’.
Applied to the cancer site, they would, in theory, break the skin over the tumour, and
mortify the flesh of the resulting ulcer so that it died and sloughed off or could be cut
away. In practice, they frequently killed the patient. In 1684, Bonet recorded that:
Constructing Cancer in Early Modern England
647
94
Wiseman, Several Chirurgical Treatises, 113.
On the economic and legal hazards which accompanied dangerous surgeries, see Harold Cook, Trials of an
Ordinary Doctor: Joannes Groenevelt in SeventeenthCentury London (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1994).
96
See for example, Alexander Read and unknown
author, Chirurgorum Comes: Or the Whole Practice
of Chirurgery. Begun by the Learned Dr. Read; Continued and Completed by a Member of the College of
Physicians in London (London, 1687), 27; also Lynda
Ellen Stephenson Payne, With Words and Knives:
Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern
England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), esp. 73–112.
97
Reverend John Ward, Diary of the Rev. John Ward,
A.M., Extending from 1648 to 1679, ed. Charles
95
Severn (London: Henry Coldurn, 1839), 245–7. From
Internet Archive (online resource) <http://www.
archive.org>, accessed 2 March 2012.
98
Barrough, The Method of Physick, 232; Johann Jacob
Wecker (with additions by John Banister/Banester), A
Compendious Chyrurgerie (1585), 506.
99
John Moyle, The Experienced Chirurgion (London:
1703), 48.
100
See Andrew Wear, ‘Medical Ethics in Early Modern
England’ in Andrew Wear, Johanna Geyer-Kordesch
and Roger French, eds, Doctors and Ethics: The
Earlier Historical Setting of Professional Ethics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 106–8.
101
T.D., The Present State of Chyrurgery, with some
Short Remarks on the Abuses Committed Under a
Pretence to the Practice (London, 1703), 19–20.
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straightforward. In his 1686 Several Chirurgical Treatises, for example, Wiseman recorded
one patient’s response to being informed of the risks of surgery: ‘I had rather die than live
thus.’94
Both surgeons and patients were uncomfortably aware of the mortal danger which accompanied cancer surgeries. Unsurprisingly, therefore, not all surgeons were willing to
undertake such hazardous procedures, which posed a substantial risk to their reputation
and therefore their livelihood.95 Of those who did, some implied that the experience was
traumatic for the operator as well as the patient. In 1687, for example, a text by Read and
another unnamed author, Chirurgorum Comes, warned that for all tumour operations, surgeons needed to be particularly ‘resolute, chearful in countenance and speech, and no ways
scrupulous’.96 After observing the mastectomy operation of ‘Mrs Townsend’ in the midseventeenth century, the Reverend John Ward recorded that ‘One of the chyrurgeons
told her afterwards, that shee had endured soe much, that hee would have lost his life
ere hee would have sufferd the like.’97 Despite these scruples, however, the undertaking
of these operations, and the language in which they were recorded, implies that conceptualisations of cancer as evil and alien were central to the desire among physicians, patients, and
especially surgeons, to aggressively remove tumours and ulcers. The 1585 A Compendious
Chyrurgerie, for example, counselled surgeons to ‘fetch it out, roote and all, with instrumentes or causticke medicines: to wit, cutte it wholly awaye’.98 Over a century later, John
Moyle similarly pronounced: ‘This Cancer, or wolf, cannot be cured any other Way than
by extirpating of it.’99
The adversarial language in which some surgeons represented cancer operations thus
added to early modern people’s widespread ambivalence toward medical practitioners in
general and surgeons in particular.100 Cancer operations, in which the body was dangerously and visibly altered, put surgeons at risk of being deemed avaricious and reckless, with the
operator characterised, as in one 1703 text, as ‘[a] shameful Undertaker, who makes no
more of taking off a Breast (altho’ no otherwise than a Butcher might do the same) than
some Persons do to pair [pare] their Nails’.101 At the same time, however, cancer surgeries
represented the limits of medical intervention, and the fact that it was surgery, not physic,
which seemed to offer the best chance of a cure for cancer may have contributed to the
growing sense among some surgeons that their trade was a noble and professional one,
648
Alanna Skuse
on a par with that of the physician.102 The most innovative surgeons of the period flocked to
view and partake in radical cancer operations, seeking new ways in which to minimise
patients’ blood loss and prevent the enemy from returning.
Conclusion
Funding
‘This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [SL-04755].
102
On the professionalization and self-construction of
surgery in this period, see Andrew Wear, Knowledge
and Practice in English medicine, 1550–1680
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
esp. 211–55.
103
Lady Sarah Cowper, Diary (1700–1703). Available at
Defining Gender (online resource), <www.gender.
amdigital.co.uk>, 31, accessed 30 January 2011.
104
Ibid., 22–3; See also Diary, Volume 2, 1703–1704 on
Defining Gender <www.gender.amdigital.co.uk>,
87, accessed 30 January 2011.
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As a (diagnosed) cause of death in the early modern period, cancer was a minor player. As a
disease which played upon the consciousness of Englishmen and women throughout the
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, it had a prominent part on the
cultural stage, and remains of major significance to social, medical and cultural historians.
Examination of the supposed causes, symptoms and cures for cancer show how the way
in which this disease was experienced was of a piece with how it was imagined. Moreover,
two things remained remarkably stable over a period which saw sea-changes elsewhere in
medical understanding. Constructions of cancer as both of and distinct from oneself, generated by the body and hostile to it, materially affected the development of treatments for
the malady, while the pragmatic facts of the disease’s symptoms and response to ‘cures’ reciprocally contributed to its reputation as cruel and rebellious. Like those who came before
and after them, early modern people feared cancer, and were only slightly less afraid of the
treatments which could supposedly relieve it. On 3 December 1700, Lady Sarah Cowper
wrote in her diary: ‘My Breast is unquiet and gives me troublesome apprehensions. I sometimes seem weary of living, yet find myself often in fear of a painfull lingering Death.’103 The
marginal note alongside the entry reads ‘Fearing a Cancer’, and Cowper’s apprehension
was heightened by the death of several female acquaintances from the disease.104 It was
against this backdrop of anxiety and indeterminacy that the seemingly incredible tale of
the wolf ‘discovering his head’ from a cancerous ulcer found a readership in the early eighteenth century. Whether by appeal to troublesome female bodies, feculent humours, or
ravening worms and wolves, early modern medical writers and their audiences united scholarship, observation, and imagination as they sought a way to understand how their bodies
could so dramatically turn against them.