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Abstract
In early modern England, the term “mountebank” appeared across an enormous spectrum of literary genres as a metaphor for deceit for false scholarly pedants, corrupt priests, conniving politicians, and a range of other ill-doers. The term denoted, too, however, a real medical practitioner: one who mounted a stage or bank in order to sell medical wares to the public in squares and piazzas across Europe. Records of mountebank performances describe elaborate acrobatics, songs, and animal tricks used to lure an audience before attempting to sell concoctions or services—including tooth-pulling, urinalysis, and treatments for venereal diseases—to the enraptured audience below. As a result of this unusual context for medical practice, the mountebank operates as an ambivalent figure straddling the lines of medicine and theatrical performance, offering simultaneously to entertain and heal an audience of the poor and sick. In “Medical Practice, Medical Performance,” I analyze the ways in which mountebanks in seventeenth-century England conceptually and theatrically played with arenas of medical ambiguity, including the instability of a medicinal substance that might heal or harm, the inscrutability of a prognosis based on astrological or uroscopic readings, or the euphemistic language surrounding the treatment of sexual disorders. The mountebank, I argue, turned medical anxiety into material for a performance that was itself intentionally dense and ambiguous, mixing sleight of hand and rhetorical circumlocution in order to disorient and delight the audience. Disorientation ensured on the one hand that audience members had space and allowance to project their personal desires for health onto the performance, and on the other that the audience could only determine the mountebank’s or his medicine’s validity through one means: trial. Seventeenth-century England saw the birth of print medical advertising, but the genesis of that marketing practice was in the mountebank.