The technique of using pigeon slippers – “a pigon slitt & applied to the sole of each foote” – is one of several surprising “cures” revealed by a team of Cambridge researchers, who have spent a decade sifting through thousands of almost illegible medical records of two controversial Elizabethan quacks.
Simon Forman was a self-taught doctor and astrologer who turned to medicine after claiming to have cured himself of the plague in 1592. Scorned by the College of Physicians of London, he established an astrological practice claiming to be able to use the stars to diagnose and cure everything from disease to hauntings. Country rector Richard Napier, his protege, continued his practice when Forman died in 1611. Four years later, Forman was posthumously implicated in the notorious Overbury Murder Scandal; said to have supplied the arsenic used to despatch the poet Thomas Overbury.
Case #14488
Elizabeth Townsend of Odell, 80 years. Sunday 20 February 1603, 5pm.
Without consent. A kinsman for his aunt. Without consent.
Light headed. Head and eyes. Cannot rest in her bed. Somewhat tempts her. Says that somewhat comes to her bed. Was up one night and went to a little spring and came in again herself all wet, and nobody knew of it till she was coming in.
She says if she had drowned herself she had saved her soul. For said she there was one of Harold that did so & saved herself. One Franklin’s wife.
She will pray well.
She has been long lightheaded for she loved one that deceived her.
Case #55351
William Wyle of Clifton, 33 years. Saturday 7 December 1622, 2pm.
Much troubled with the fearful dreams that something lies at night on his breast.
Very fearful & thinks that something at night lies upon his breast.
Cannot sleep for fear. Used now & then to light candles. Cannot sleep at home yet can abroad.
Scorned by the medical establishment of the time, Forman recorded much of his life in autobiographies, which included eye-witness accounts of some of Shakespeare’s plays. Together with Napier, he also wrote extensive case notes about the 80,000-odd patients he saw, containing times, dates, names, locations and details about the clients’ maladies. Unfortunately for historians, the notes written into 66 calfbound volumes kept in Oxford’s Bodleian Library are virtually illegible.
Researchers at Cambridge have spent the last 10 years sifting through the books, working to transcribe, edit and digitise them. On Thursday, transcriptions of their 500 favourite cases will become available online to lay readers.
These range from one John Wilkingson, whose hair was lost to “the French disease” and presents for treatment after being “thrust with a rapier in his privy parts”, to a Joan Broadbrok, who “thinks her children to be rats & mice” and Edward Cleaver, who is recorded to have had “ill” thoughts such as “kisse myne arse”. This may, note the physicians, be down to the witchcraft of a neighbour – that Jane Parbery, who has been suckling her puppy “a twelvemonth since”.
Some of the cases are genuinely sad, as in the “much troubled in mind” Eleanor Burge of Archester, 37, who “cannot abide her child though she love it exceedingly” but is “afraid to have a knife in her hand least that she should either kill her self or her child or friend”. Or Alice Woodward of Stoke Hammond, 38, who “has taken much grief for that she had 7 children at full time & yet born still … all saving her first … Cannot quiet her mind because she has not the like fortune that other women have,” write the physicians.
Others are more disturbing. Joan Savage of Northlie is recorded, in 1624, to be “devilish minded”: “Much bedlam, whipping & cruel dealing made her senseless & worse than before,” say the notes. “Mad since Whitsontide & has ever since been tied with chains & is ravenous of meat.”
Professor Lauren Kassell, from Cambridge’s history and philosophy of science department explained: “Napier produced the bulk of preserved cases, but his penmanship was atrocious and his records super messy. Forman’s writing is strangely archaic, like he’d read too many medieval manuscripts. These are notes only intended to be understood by their authors.”
Kassell said the transcriptions are “the very tip of the iceberg”, with the volumes containing “thousands of pages of cryptic scrawl full of astral symbols, recipes for strange elixirs, and details from the lives of lords and cooksmaids suffering with everything from dog bites to broken hearts”. The complete casebooks, containing all 80,000 cases in the astrologers’ original writing, are also viewable online.
The most popular treatments recommended by the pair are purges, fortifying brews or bloodletting, said Kassell, while others get prescribed the touch of a dead man’s hand or pigeon slippers. Napier also liked to seek second opinions from angels, whose diagnoses he faithfully recorded. “He will die shortly,” he is told, conclusively, by on one occasion by a ministering spirit. “I should not meddle with him,” advises Archangel Michael on another.
The pair also sold their clients “counter-spells” to go up against harmful or suicidal thoughts, which they believed to be the work of witchcraft or possession.
Kassell hopes the project will “open a wormhole into the grubby and enigmatic world of 17th-century medicine, magic and the occult” for the browsing public.
“Until now, scholars that ventured into the casebooks found navigation to be gruelling. Our vast digital project has changed all that, and will send future generations tumbling down the casebooks rabbit-hole,” she said. “We encourage people to use the transcriptions as a taster, before plunging into the thicket of scribbles and symbols. The cases of Forman and Napier may well suck you in.”
