Wombs, Worms and Wolves: Constructing Cancer in Early Modern England

Skuse, Alanna

doi:10.1093/shm/hku039

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…He described with great compassion what this misery entailed. The patient feels the cancer 'eating and gnawing the Flesh, Nerves and Bones', a pain which in this era was commonly likened to the sensation of being bitten by a wolf or crab [6]. These patients also 'suffer hunger and thirst', owing to the difficulty of swallowing, and if they are able to eat and drink, 'yet it is with an unsavoury taste, by reason of its passing through such sore corrupt Parts'.…”

Section: The Dangers Of Delaying Treatment In Oral Cancer: a Seventeementioning

confidence: 99%

The dangers of delaying treatment in oral cancer: A seventeenth-century perspective

2020

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Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre-including this research content-immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

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Section: The Dangers Of Delaying Treatment In Oral Cancer: a Seventeementioning

confidence: 99%

The dangers of delaying treatment in oral cancer: A seventeenth-century perspective

2020

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“…In her article on malignancy in early modern England, Skuse describes how in the seventeenth century, the disease was imagined as 'quasi-sentient, zoomorphising the disease as an eating worm or wolf ' . 21 This idea that cancer was an animal, distinct from its host, persisted into the nineteenth century. It was endowed with character, temperament and disposition -with needs in direct competition with those of the body it occupied.…”

Section: Nineteenth-century Cancermentioning

confidence: 99%

The Pre-History of the Paleo Diet: Cancer in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Arnold-Forster¹

2019

Proteins, Pathologies and Politics

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Dr Loren Cordain describes himself as the 'world's foremost authority on the evolutionary basis of diet and disease' and as 'one of the world's leading experts on the natural human diet of our Stone Age ancestors' . 1 He is the self-proclaimed founder of the Paleo Diet Movement and champions a way of eating that mimics that of our hunter-gatherer forbears. As its online advocates perform their commitment to this arcane way of eating through the very modern mediums of blogging, Twitter and Instagram, the popular Paleo diet and its cousins seem closely tied to the peculiarities of the twenty-first century. And yet, the Paleo premise is not new. In 2014, Cordain published an article on his website, titled 'Breast Cancer and Other Cancers: Diseases of Western Civilization?' 2 In it, he claims that cancer was 'rare or non-existent in historically studied hunter gatherers and other less westernized peoples' . In support of this, he quotes various early-twentieth-century authorities, including the Nobel prizewinning physician Dr Albert Schweitzer, who wrote on his arrival in Gabon in 1913, 'I was astonished to encounter no case of cancer . . . This absence of cancer seemed to me due to the difference in nutrition of the natives as compared with the Europeans. ' 3 This quotation, which Cordain takes as near-irrefutable evidence, provokes him to insist at the end of the article, ' Any way you look at it, the Paleo Diet is a good remedy to prevent cancer. ' 4 It is unusual for someone positioning themselves as a contemporary scientific authority to make use of, and directly quote, historical sources -not as errors to be refuted but as evidence for their claims. What are not unusual, however, are the assumptions that underlie the cancer-preventing claims of the Paleo diet. It is a wellknown, if ill-supported, trope that cancer constitutes a 'pathology of progress' -an unintended consequence of modernity. Or, as Charles Rosenberg puts it, 'The notion that the incidence of much late-20th-century chronic disease reflects a poor fit between modern styles of life and humankind's genetic heritage. ' 5 His seminal article on 'the idea of civilization as risk' identifies a tendency on behalf of late-twentieth-century critics to point to the 'structured asymmetry between a body evolved in Paleolithic conditions and the late-twentieth-century environment in which that body must maintain itself ' . However, he suggests that the conventions of this argument -that the 'change from savage to settled rural and then to urban life brought with it conditions

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“…1 , sig.G2 v , ref. 18 ). Simultaneously, the physician must resist objections from ‘the common People’ that lead them to be overly ‘cautious’ in their interventions (ref.…”

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confidence: 99%

‘He would by no means risque his Reputation’: patient and doctor shame in Daniel Turner'sDe Morbis Cutaneis(1714) andSyphilis(1717)

Cock

2017

Med Humanities

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This article offers a historical corollary to the examination of shame in medical practice by considering the negotiation of shame in the treatment of a stigmatised disease at a time in which surgeons themselves occupied a highly ambivalent social position. It will focus on case studies provided by Daniel Turner (1667–1741), prominent surgeon and later member of the College of Physicians, in his textbooks De Morbis Cutaneis. A Treatise of Diseases Incident to the Skin (1714) and Syphilis. A Practical Dissertation on the Venereal Disease (1717). Turner demonstrates an awareness of the precarious position of both the surgeon and the syphilitic, and devotes significant portions of his text to advising the trainee surgeon on how to manage patients' reticence over disclosure of symptoms, expectations for cure and impudence towards medical authority. In turn, the trainee must manage his own reputation as a moral and medical authority who can treat all distempers, yet without condoning or facilitating the shameful behaviours associated with a sexual disease. Furthermore, shaming plays a key role in enabling Turner to fashion an ideal patient whose successful cure will both respond to and build the surgeon's medical authority and that of the medical field in general.

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Wombs, Worms and Wolves: Constructing Cancer in Early Modern England

Cited by 5 publications

References 4 publications

The dangers of delaying treatment in oral cancer: A seventeenth-century perspective

The dangers of delaying treatment in oral cancer: A seventeenth-century perspective

The Pre-History of the Paleo Diet: Cancer in Nineteenth-Century Britain

‘He would by no means risque his Reputation’: patient and doctor shame in Daniel Turner'sDe Morbis Cutaneis(1714) andSyphilis(1717)

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