Darke hierogliphicks: alchemy in English literature from Chaucer to the Restoration

first published in 1657 by James Cooke (other editions in 1679 and 1683) under the title Select observations on English bodies of eminent persons in desperate diseases, Hall's posthumous casebook gives a rare glimpse into the social interrelations that helped constitute a country doctor's clientele. But more important, it provides a feel for the day-today practice of seventeenth-century humoral medicine. Lane's identification of most of Hall's patients reveals the interlocking social and blood relations that knitted Hall's practice together. From these selective notes, which cover the years 1611-35, we leam that Hall's clients were primarily female gentry, although he counted among his patients numerous male aristocrats with extensive households, including Lord Northampton, Sir Thomas Puckering, and Baron Compton. His most famous patient, barring his wife Susanna (who was Shakespeare's eldest daughter), was the poet Michael Drayton, who required medical services when he was visiting the home of his patron and one of Hall's patients, Lady Anne Rainsford. Hall thus came upon Drayton in the way in which he came upon many of his patients-through their blood, marital, service, or neighbourly connections to established families of the aristocracy or gentry for whom he already provided medical services. When Hall treated lower-class patients they tended to be retainers of such households. Puritan in his sympathies, Hall did not discriminate on religious grounds, many of his patients being members of prominent Catholic families. Hall's medical protocols of purging, humoral alteration, restoration, and sparing venesection are accompanied here by Melvin Earles's invaluable medical commentary and pharmaceutical glosses. Except in pregnant women, Hall usually started treatment with purging. The sheer number of medicaments, let alone their far-flung provenance, is at times dazzling, including Asiatic musk, rubies and emeralds, spider-webs and earthworms, sealed earth or clays from Armenia, East Indian resins, hartshorn, ambergris, frog-spawn, Celtic spikenard, and scorpion oil. But the dazzle wears off as these unfamiliar drugs are prescribed repeatedly by Hall in accordance with particular medical regimens: hartshom for fever, precious stones as cordials, sealed earth for leucorrhoea, frog-spawn for bums, and scurvy grass for scurvy. Given the thoroughness of this edition, one cannot but help but wonder why the book's first editor, James Cooke, is only cursorily mentioned, for it is to Cooke that we must look for explanations as to why Hall's work was first published. As Lane reports, Cooke himself claimed merely that Hall meant for his notes to be published …