So in the decades around 1600 - these are the decades when Queen Elizabeth is at
the end of her reign, it the era of Shakespeare, and plague is periodically
raging particularly in London. What did you do if you were sick? Well you could
consult a physician if you had enough money, you could consult a surgeon if you
had a broken bone or skin lesions or you can consult any range of irregular
practitioners, people who are not officially licensed by the college of
physicians or the universities. And amongst these were astrologer physicians.
"Am I pregnant?", "What is my disease?", "Why can't I sleep?", "Why will the rash on my
elbows not go away?". We have all sorts of questions recorded that people asked
astrologer physicians and what the astrologers traded in was their
knowledge of the motions of the stars.
This is a world in which everything is connected.
So just as we fully accept that the moon
affects the tides, so for them, the stars affected everything on earth but the
system was much more complicated and what the astrologer could do was judge
the effects of the planetary, the stellar motions on your physical body.
He would use the phrase "judgment" to say this is what will happen.
You will or will not be healed....
And here are the things that we can do in order to help you to be healed.
There are 65,000 individuals represented in these casebooks but the people about
whom they tell us the most are the people who wrote them and these are
astrologer physicians Simon Forman and Richard Napier.
The kind of astrology that Forman and Napier were doing
is known as horary astrology and it is
based on the moment at which you ask the question or the moment at which your
message arrives with the astrologer. And he would ask you what your name was?
How old you were?
Whether or not you were married? particularly if you were a woman.
And probably where you lived as well. So he would take the moment at which you had
asked the question and he would then map the positions of the stars and planets,
at that time and create this lovely twelve section chart. He would then
decide that that was an indicator of the nature of your illness in a particular
kind of way. He then might also write down a particular treatment and most of
the remedies are about purges whether they are gentle or less gentle purges
but we also find remedies of other sorts such as putting pigeons, dead pigeons on
your feet.
So the way medicine worked was usually about rebalancing the body in
some way or another. So we have pigeon slippers, we have amulets, we have
bloodletting, we have potions of all different sorts. The remedies are as
weird and wonderful as they they can be across this period but usually either
working with rebalancing the disruption of the humors or channeling
the stellar powers into a particular part of the body.
One of the things that
we find in the casebooks that we find most challenging are the cases of
alleged witchcraft.
So people would come to the astrologer
and they would say "I think I have been bewitched because I have an illness that
will not go away with either the passage of time or the usual remedies". And part
of the job of the astrologer physician would then be to work out what was
really the cause of this illness. These guys were cause specialists.
Sometimes they do assess that there's a foul social situation which is usually what
you find in cases of witchcraft. "She looked at me funny" and the evil eye is
very much in play here. But often it's just a natural cause that is not
responding to the usual treatments.
So the case books are alive with grubby
world of early modern medicine and the occult.
And we have everyone from Shakespeare's landlady to the Archbishop of Canterbury
but what's most remarkable about these records is that they document the
day-by-day hopes and worries of ordinary people whether about their health and
illness, about their fertility across four decades in 17th century England.
This is a world that is both very strange to us and very familiar.
This is the terrain that historians work with best.