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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.

Summary This article examines stories of men who gelded themselves in early modern England. These events, it argues, were shaped and partly motivated by a culture in which castration was seen as both degrading and potentially empowering. Religious precedents such as that of Origen of Alexandria framed self-gelding as a foolhardy activity, but one which nevertheless indicated an impressive degree of mastery over the body and its urges. Meanwhile, judicial and popular contexts framed castration as a humiliating and emasculating ordeal. Instances of self-gelding in this period are rare but nonetheless illuminating. Relayed in medical texts and popular ballads, such actions typically occurred as a response to emotional distress. In particular, men gelded themselves as a means to express feelings of emasculation within heterosexual relationships, and to dramatically renounce their role in the libidinal economy.

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