Sexual Healing: Medicine, Pleasure, and Mirth in Mountebank Representations

• Published in: Shakespeare studies (Columbia) Vol. 49; pp. 167 - 11
• Main Author: Mayo, Sarah Elizabeth
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Columbia Associated University Presses 01.01.2021
• Subjects: 17th century; Advertisements; Children; Disorders; Early modern period; Embodiment; Ethics; Humor; Jargon; Jonson, Ben (1573-1637); Killigrew, Thomas (1612-1683); Laughter; Medicine; Morality; Narratives; Patients; Physicians; Rhetoric; Sexual disorders; Sexual ethics; Sexuality; Shakespeare, William (1564-1616); United Kingdom; United Kingdom > UK; England
• ISSN: 0582-9399

The mountebank, theatrically immortalized by the portrayal of Scoto of Mantua in Ben Jonson's Volpone, was a figure whose economic livelihood involved vague and jargon-laden haranguing, constant movement between different magisterial districts, and theatrical shock value through sleight of hand: whatever medical competence mountebanks might be granted, the theatricality and oftentimes dubious legality of their practice led to a reputation for medical roguery. With particular regard to reproductive and sexual health, the mountebank in representation came to embody a kind of gleefully self-conscious accomplice of illicit sex: mountebank treatments of venereal diseases, barrenness, love melancholy, and other disorders are phrased as an enabling of all sexual whims, uncircumscribed by moral dictates, such that the apparent goal of treatment is not the eventual conception or birth of a child, but immediate sex, however you want, with whomever you want. What emerges in documentation, however, is a sense of sexual permissiveness as an ethic delivered by precisely the kind of champion positioned to do so; mountebanks, excluded from a medical professionalism being discursively cultivated by the London College of Physicians, had room to address reproductive and sexual disorders with almost charitably uncritical and therefore commercially appealing rhetoric.2 Mountebank theatricality inclines already to certain affective capacities: their performances are represented as cultivating wonder and laughter as counteragents to the fear inherent in occupying a body subject to illness, and in the treatment of sexual disorders these affective moves are accompanied by others-namely, validation, perhaps even a sense of absolution.3 Even when the strategies of mountebank rhetoric are coopted by literary authors for satirical purposes, in order to mock sexual indiscretions or the mountebank's unchristian excusing of them, the vision of liberated sexuality validated through medical comfort lingers. Rather than presenting a history of medicine and sexuality focused, therefore, on suppression or shame, the history of medicalized sexuality accessible through the lens of mountebank rhetoric is capacious and shame-averse.4 It is no surprise that poxed patients in early modern England should seek discretion, speed, and non-judgmental aid from potential treating practitioners, and mountebank advertisements promised as much.5 A typical posted advertisement for pox treatment promises "A Certain, Safe, and Private Cure . . . without Loss of Time, or Hindrance of any Business.