Ofer Hadass
Medicine, Religion, and Magic in Early Stuart England: Richard Napier’s Medical Practice
The Pennsylvania State University Press
213 pp, $34.95, ISBN: 9780271080192
Publication date: 2018.
This work was created by Ofer Hadass who has released several books on the subject of medicine and magic in Stuart England. This Interestingly seems to be an extension or rewrite of his dissertation at University of Haifa (Israel) called Richard Napier,” renowned Physician Both of Body and Soul”: Astrological Medicine, Theology and Magic in Early Stuart England (2014). Even though this book is only 213 pages, it reviews not only a general understand of medicine during this time, but also how Napier and a few others operated on “hard evidence” theories when practicing. Hadass states several time that he and other scholars want to understand how medicine and religion or spiritual work could be reconciled at this time. The book is then broken down into four chapters but then further separated in each chapter with subsections.
Starting with chapter one, “Astrological Medicine,” Hadass begins by giving the reader a general understanding of where medicine is at by 1600, plus a general view of Napier’s framework. This is discussed in the subsections of The Image of Body, The Image of Illness, and The Basics of Astrological Medicine. I learned a vast amount about humors and how the belief that the whole body was interconnected (p 17) was used by Napier at a time to better understand these illnesses, and some of his treatments seemed to prove this theory correct.
Chapter two, “Astral Magic,” contained Napier and other practitioners using charms and spells in their medicine plans. This seems like it would contradict the idea of hard evidence in medicine. However, this seems to be “balanced” out with the idea of using natural items from the earth. When a patient came back to the doctor with the same issues more than twice, Napier told her that she was condemned and no goodness from the earth could save her. He believed (as the author portrayed) that it was not the medicine alone that was giving them health, but the power of god through the medicine would help his patients. Another way Napier used astral magic was to use a copper or tin talisman to ward off the illness from that person. Thinking that the planets in specific phases, these talisman would attempt to counteract the effects.
Chapter three, “Converse with Angels,” is a bit harder to grasp at first. Very basically, some doctors like Napier began the practice of extending contact to Raphael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Asariel to gain advice or information about how the patient is doing. This was following an English natural philosopher, John Dee, who subscribed to the belief that angels could assist mankind. Hadass states that “at this point, most recorded answers limited to disease prognosis or to forecasting the outcome of Napier’s treatment” (p 96). This seems to be controversial even for the time, but was not unheard of. Napier was attempting to find some facts, even within faith that would explain why treatments would work for some patients and not others. Asking angels and looking at the positions of the planets seemed to be what he saw as hard evidence.
Finally chapter four. This chapter is called “Religion and Knowledge” and it begins to answer some of the confusion that may have arose in the previous chapter. We see that Napier was stuck in two worlds, and Hadass offers that these two realms of thought may not have been so different after all. The author offers that ‘religion and the investigation of nature’ were simply different ways of seeing God (p 123). This starts to tie together all the strings from the previous chapters as Napier is looking for hard evidence in his work. Hadass uses this chapter to dive into Napier’s letters with others as tensions rose throughout his career. Napier would often write sermons in his personal notes, but did not fare well with the other members of society. At several points he was accused of heresy, especially in one case when his sermon mentioned pagans gods and goddesses (p 131). I believe this makes the case that, as much as Napier wanted to be a man of God, he was not religious in the way that Early Stuart England expected. After his sermon, he was chastised by the minister and many others. He battled religion and knowledge.
As a historian that is interested in medicine but not an endless wealth of knowledge on this topic, Hadass does well at explaining (sometimes more like translating) what would happen when patients came to see Napier for help. In what I thought was the most interesting case, a female had come to see Napier because she had not had her menstrual cycle in two months and had body aches, swelling, and feeling vertigo. When applying astrology and finding out that she has also had nose bleeds, Napier concludes that the interconnected body lost its menses and the blood needed a place to escape (p16). This is how we start to see connections between astrology, astral magic, and religion to his daily cases and the search for what caused these changes in the humors of the body.
This was a time of questions and attempting to find answers that made sense to these doctors. Hadass makes the claim here that “Napier was not an uneducated practitioner and certainly not a quack,” and I have to agree (p 140). Looking at the mix of what was proven science and educated estimate based on experience, Napier was quite close to what we know today. Hadass makes a strong and convincing case that Napier and others may have called this work magic and conversing with angels, but had shown that there was some “hard evidence” in his work. Napier would not have moved forward with a treatment or medical exam if he did not think it would be helpful, or even harmful as shown in his notes for each patient.
