The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England Brian H. Childs (bio) Raymond A. Anselment, The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. 315 pp. Clothbound, $47.50. At the conclusion of this fine work Raymond A. Anselment, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, makes the claim that while other centuries are better known than the seventeenth for making the great contributions to the literary sense of illness, the works of the 1600s mark a major contribution to the uses of language for healing and transformation. “The fundamental meaning of suffering and loss cannot be denied,” writes Anselment: Like the medicine of the period, which now also seems both simple and fanciful, the poetry sought to heal pain that still seems real. Individually, an epitaph by Elizabeth Egerton or an elegy by John Oldham may appear about as relevant as prescriptions of Venice treacle or amulets of arsenic. Together and in the contexts they help to create, however, the literary and medical texts express the need and offer the comfort found in the diary or memoir as well as in the sermon or spiritual tract. All are meaningfully understood as part of a realm long celebrated in tributes to “the lyre and bow of Lykorean Phoibos.” (P. 212) Anselment’s claim is well-founded in its modesty about the literature of the era as well as in the importance of that literature’s attempt to understand pain, suffering, and death. While the eighteenth century gave us the great English literary narrative about plague and the nineteenth century showed us the impact of venereal disease on artists’ lives, it was the seventeenth century that contributed an early attempt to find meaning in suffering and loss, especially as suffering and loss were understood to be the results of smallpox. Making sense of smallpox gave physicians, poets, and the general populace an especially difficult time because smallpox could not be attributed to either corporate or individual sin and [End Page 263] transgression as could the other three major causes of death and suffering—stillbirth and neonatal death (the sin of Eve, which is to say original sin), plague (God’s judgment on sinful nations), and venereal disease (the cost of a profligate life). Smallpox was not in the compendium of the results of divine anger. It was a democratic, cruel, and decidedly impartial disease. Anselment’s method for illuminating the relationships between the four common diseases (stillbirth and neonatal death, venereal disease, plague, and smallpox) and the human attempt to make some sense of them is simple and elegant. Medical texts, treatises of the era, and bills of mortality are cited and discussed in a way that sets the context. Interspersed with the medical discourse are personal accounts of disease found in diaries and other forms of personal narrative. These personal accounts, usually by the survivors or the bereaved, form the link with the poetic works that attempt to put to language what the medical texts and diaries could not. The unifying figure for Anselment’s method is Apollo, the god of medicine, the father of Asclepius, and the god of poetry, who as Pindar writes: . . . sends mortal men and women relief from grievous disease, Apollo, who has given us the lyre, who brings the Muse to whom he chooses, filling the heart with peace and harmony. (P. 11) The unifying theme is the relationship between the Apollonian healing traditions of the Greeks and the literary healing represented in seventeenth century English texts, especially poetic texts. In Chapter 1, Anselment sets the context for subsequent chapters dealing with each of the four causes of death listed above. He asserts that in the seventeenth century Apollonian healing had taken on Christian overtones and united “traditional” medicine with the cura animarum, or the healing of the soul, which was more emotional healing than physical solace. In medicine, the schools of Hippocrates and Galen gave the seventeenth century an explanation of disease that was an alternative to a supernatural one. In addition, the followers of the sixteenth-century Swiss physician Paracelsus offered a naturalistic understanding of disease combined with...