Healing, Performance and Ceremony in the Writings of Three Early Modern Physicians: Hippolytus Guarinonius and the Brothers Felix and Thomas Platter

M.A. Katritzky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351931458
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: World History

While the writings of early modern medical practitioners habitually touch on performance and ceremony, few illuminate them as clearly as the Protestant physicians Felix Platter and Thomas Platter the Younger, who studied in Montpellier and practiced in their birth town of Basle, or the Catholic physician Hippolytus Guarinonius, who was born in Trent, trained in Padua and practiced in Hall near Innsbruck. During his student years and brilliant career as early modern Basle's most distinguished municipal, court and academic physician, Felix Platter built up a wide network of private, religious and aristocratic patients. His published medical treatises and private journal record his professional encounters with them as a healer. They also offer numerous vivid accounts of theatrical events experienced by Platter as a scholar, student and gifted semi-professional musician, and during his Grand Tour and long medical career. Here Felix Platter's accounts, many unavailable in translation, are examined together with relevant extracts from the journals of his younger brother Thomas Platter, and Guarinonius's medical and religious treatises. Thomas Platter is known to Shakespeare scholars as the Swiss Grand Tourist who recorded a 1599 London performance of Julius Caesar, and Guarinonius's descriptions of quack performances represent the earliest substantial written record of commedia dell'arte lazzi, or comic stage business. These three physicians' records of ceremony, festival, theatre, and marketplace diversions are examined in detail, with particular emphasis on the reactions of 'respectable' medical practitioners to healing performers and the performance of healing. Taken as a whole, their writings contribute to our understanding of many aspects of European theatrical culture and its complex interfaces with early modern healthcare: in carnival and other routine manifestations of the Christian festive year, in the extraordinary performance and ceremony of court festivals, and above all in the rarely welcomed intrusions of quacks and other itinerant performers.

PART I
Introduction

Chapter 1
Healing, Performance and Ceremony in the Writings of Three Physicians

This book examines aspects of performance culture, and of the practice of healthcare and medicine, and some of the complex interconnections between these two fundamental areas of human endeavour. The published and unpublished early modern documents it draws on include substantial and rarely cited German-language writings by three physicians. One has achieved worldwide recognition as a physician, one is better known as a traveller, and the third is little known even within the German-speaking regions. This book focuses on how they engaged with and recorded the theatrical and festival culture of their time, and what their writings communicate about it in general, and also about healing performers, the performance of healing, and influences between healthcare and the stage, in its widest sense.

The three physicians, whose writings have not previously been studied together, are Hippolytus Guarinonius¹ and the half-brothers Felix and Thomas² Platter. The Platter brothers were Lutherans who practiced medicine in their home city of Basle. Guarinonius was a devout Catholic bom in Trent, who grew up in Prague and Vienna. He chose to practice in Hall, then already in gentle decline from its medieval status as a major salt-mining centre and the largest and most prosperous city on the Tirol's North-South trade route, to a modest provincial town in the shadow of nearby imperial Innsbruck.³ The medical schools at which they qualified, those of the universities of Montpellier and Padua, were then Europe's most renowned, respectively attracting large communities of Protestant and Catholic German-speaking students, enjoying special privileges (Plates 2, 4-5).⁴ Felix Platter left Basle for Montpellier in 1552. returning in 1557. His much younger half-brother Thomas Platter, brought up by Felix after the death of their father Thomas Platter the Elder, left the University of Basle in 1595 to continue his medical studies in Montpellier. returning to Basle in 1600. Hippolytus Guarinonius. born three years before Thomas Platter and outliving him by a quarter of a century, boarded at Prague's Jesuit College for 11 years before completing his medical studies in Padua between 1594 and 1597.

Felix Platter was an ambitious, highly successful physician who published numerous medical treatises. His unfinished manuscript life writings, compiled in his seventies and never intended for publication, mainly cover the period from his earliest childhood to the mid-1560s. The only published works of the much shorter-lived Thomas Platter are posthumous editions of some of Felix's writings. The fair copy of hi s manuscript travel journal. covering the period 1595-1600. was completed by 1605. By no means all of Hippolytus Guarinonius's numerous Latin and vernacular German medical and theological treatises, tracts and translations have been published even since his lifetime, and the considerable scholarship on him is largely in German. Felix and Thomas Platter attract an international scholarship excellently served by the magisterial editions of their life writings respectively edited by Valentin Lötscher in 1976 and Rut Keiser in 1968. and less so by partial and sometimes unreliable seventeenth-centuiy and modern translations into English of several medical publications, and selected sections of their life writings.⁵ Several passages of theatrical interest in the three physicians' writings are well known notably a brief reference by Hippolytus Guarinonius to English actors, and Thomas Platter's impressions of an itinerant performing and healing troupe in Avignon in 1598, and of his visit to a performance of Julius Caesar on London's South Bank a year later. Most are unavailable in English translation. My title reflects a new perspective on a new selection of primary documents. As such, it prompts immediate questions. Why healing, performance and ceremony? Why physicians? Why these three?

Why Healing, Performance and Ceremony?

Traces of ancient shamanic and other links between healing, performance and ceremony persisted into the early modern period - and beyond - at many levels. Most obviously, they informed the activities of religious faith healers and the class of itinerant traders known as quacks, mountebanks or charlatans. They contributed to the renaissance revival of classical health therapies for melancholy based on music, laughter and comedy, and are a factor in the early modem period's heightened medical, theatrical and popular interest in supernatural phenomena and wondrous humans: magic and monsters.⁶ These links also profoundly shaped the interlocking hierarchical power networks underpinning Europe's social and political frameworks, in which spectacle is widely utilized to promote and enhance legally-binding as well as symbolic performed rituals or ceremonies (as compellingly demonstrated by the Europe-wide tradition of the Royal Touch). Recognizing the power of performance and healing to attract the respect, money and compliance of individuals, build and bind communities, and forge perceptions of physical and mental norms, early modern Church, court and city all competed for their control. Their confrontations highlight the interdependence of the practice of medicine and theatre, at a time when the boundaries between them were still porous and flexible.

Early modern healthcare and performance encroached on and enriched each other in many ways. Physicians performed public dissections to spectators in anatomy theatres; monstrous humans were eagerly examined by physicians as well as being collected by aristocrats and viewed by fairground visitors; religious centres and leaders drew crowds by staging exorcisms or other spectacular procedures associated with healing powers. Itinerant quacks pioneered many theatrical trends. Strongly incentivized to attract clients and promote their medical products and services, their stage routines often involved magic and medicine. From the beginnings of Western drama, popular theatrical trends crossed fluidly between quack and non-quack stages, in a lively culture of Europe-wide interchange. During the medieval period, the medical activities of actual quack troupes were promoted by professional performers, and medicine-peddling quacks became the earliest secular characters in the religious plays then at the heart of the Christian festive year. Their 'merchant scene', as it became known, dominated the central third of certain late medieval Easter mystery plays. It provided a public forum for ridiculing and debating popular medical practices, and initiated the surprisingly high medical content of the performing arts (which continues to flourish unabated in the age of television).

Researches into the interdependencies between early modern healing and performing do not reflect a unified field of enquiry. Generally, they follow discipline-led concerns and approaches of one or another academic field. Unremarkably, theatre historians traditionally foreground spectacle; medical historians concentrate on healthcare activities. One fruitful approach treats literary play texts as a primary documentary source for enquiries into early modern medical practice.⁷ Some are general, others focus on specific questions.⁸ Despite the heavy pressures of disciplinary agendas, increasingly holistic approaches are being pioneered by scholars publishing in several languages on another developing area: performing quacks.⁹ Groundbreaking collaborative ventures are contributing towards the goal of achieving fruitful new approaches and findings in this field.¹⁰ This book builds on these findings. In order to eontextualize key texts and their English translations within the overview of early modem theatrical culture offered by the chosen three physicians, it interrogates their descriptions of spectacle and ceremony, performers, and performance strategies for insights into theatrical and medical practice, and their interfaces, and for evidence concerning specific healers and performers.

Why Physicians?

In order to maintain their position at the top of the early modern healthcare provision pyramid, qualified physicians were required to safeguard their economic interests in a precarious balancing act that postmodern medical history is only now beginning to fully explore. As well as apothecaries, surgeons and barbersurgeons, midwives, hangmen and other professional colleagues with officially recognized healthcare expertise, they competed with various less clear-cut categories of unlicensed religious, supernatural and itinerant rivals. In the medical arena, practitioners of faith healing, magic and quackery integrated performance into their commercial and medical practice, in multifarious ways that qualified healthcare professionals increasingly ridiculed and undermined. Fortune-tellers, potion sellers, snake charmers, wise women and astrologers drew extensively on spectacle and ceremony in the service of health enhancement and promotion. A close relationship between healthcare provision and performance was central to early modern itinerant medical practice, and contributed materially to the effectiveness of its cures. Many quacks were actual performers themselves, using theatricality, in its widest possible sense, to attract customers and to promote and advertise their pharmaceuticals and healthcare services.

Qualified physicians were unusually informed and articulate observers of such activities. The privileged multiple viewpoints available to those who contributed to religious or secular performances staged within their own communities, or whose medical responsibilities took them to courts or foreign regions where they could experience performances and ceremonies inaccessible to most commoners or non-locals. greatly enriched their theatrical perceptions. As well as aiding assessment of genuine and false symptoms, diagnosis and cure, their professional training and medical experience supported accurate interpretation and communication of on and offstage healthcare practices, magic, and acrobatic routines. Keenly aware of the competitive threat of unlicensed healthcare practitioners, early modem physicians have left some of the most insightful observations on overlaps between medical and theatrical culture. No historical record is uncoloured by personal bias. The passages examined here are taken from the writings of three individuals whose social, religious and geographical backgrounds, and medical train...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Diagrams and Plates
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• PART I INTRODUCTION
• PART II CEREMONY AND FESTIVAL
• PART III HEALERS AND PERFORMERS
• PART IV PERFORMING HEALING: COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE QUACK TROUPES
• PART V SOURCE TEXTS
• Diagrams and Plates
• Bibliography
• Index