Medical Thoughts of Shakespeare — A Reader’s Guide

A Physician’s Taxonomy of the Plays

Field’s table of contents reads like a medical textbook: Part I, “The Physician”; Part II, “Practice of Medicine,” subdivided by bodily system; Part III, “Surgery”; Part IV, “Obstetrics”; Part V, “Physiology”; Part VI, “Anatomy”; Part VII, “Pharmacy.” Each section collects quotations under subheadings such as “Diseases of the Nervous System” or “Syphilis.” Field does not argue for a unified theory of Shakespeare’s medical knowledge; instead, he catalogs, letting the lines speak as evidence. For instance, under “Syphilis,” he groups passages from Pericles, Henry V, Measure for Measure, and Timon of Athens, noting that “the symptoms of secondary and tertiary syphilis are accurately expressed” in Timon’s curse. Field’s method is associative: he links “hoar the flamen” to leprosy, “down with the nose” to syphilitic collapse, and “consumptions sow” to tuberculosis, calling these “maladies that are hereditary, incurable, and contagious.” The organization imposes a clinical grid on dramatic speech, treating each quotation as a specimen.

The Surgeon’s Knife and the Lawyer’s Brief

Field occasionally steps back from cataloging to note Shakespeare’s verbal precision. In the section on syphilis, he quotes Byron’s couplet—“The lawyer’s brief is like the surgeon’s knife / Dissecting the whole inside of a question”—as an epigraph, but his own commentary is spare. He observes that Shakespeare “shows a very fine point” in grouping leprosy, syphilis, and consumption in Timon’s curse, because all three are “lasting.” Field also draws on contemporary medical authorities: he cites Dr. Macdonnell of Canada on the “tub-fast” treatment for syphilis, explaining that patients were placed in a tub for prolonged diaphoresis and low diet. This move—linking a line from Measure for Measure (“she is herself in the tub”) to a specific therapeutic practice—exemplifies Field’s method. He reads the plays as documentary evidence of early modern medicine, not as metaphor. The result is a work that is part concordance, part medical history, and part homage to Shakespeare’s observational range.

The Limits of a Clinical Reading

Field’s approach has clear boundaries. He does not claim that Shakespeare was a physician, only that his “mighty mind seems to have teemed with the knowledge of languages, medicine, law and court etiquette.” The excerpts show Field treating dramatic dialogue as transparent reportage: when Falstaff says “the pox pinches the other,” Field takes it as a reference to syphilis; when the gravedigger in Hamlet speaks of “pocky corses,” Field reads it as evidence of contemporary mortality. Yet the plays are fictions, and characters’ statements are not necessarily Shakespeare’s own beliefs. Field’s book is valuable as a record of what a late-nineteenth-century physician saw in the texts, but it does not distinguish between a character’s voice and the author’s knowledge. Readers should approach the quotations as Field did—as raw material for a medical taxonomy—while remembering that Shakespeare’s first purpose was dramatic, not diagnostic.

Field’s Medical Thoughts of Shakespeare is best read as a period piece: a physician’s systematic collection of medical references from the plays, organized by specialty and annotated with contemporary medical commentary. It offers a unique window into how a late-nineteenth-century doctor read Shakespeare, but it does not provide literary analysis or historical context for early modern medicine. For modern readers, the value lies in the quotations themselves and in Field’s implicit argument that Shakespeare’s language can be mapped onto a clinical grid—an argument that reveals as much about the cataloger as the cataloged.

That rainy afternoon, I lingered over Field’s quiet gleanings from Shakespeare—how the plays catalogued fever and fracture with such plain fondness. The clinical tenderness made me wonder about inheritance itself, what passes down through bodies. Later, almost by accident, I found Some possible bearings of genetics on pathology — Reading Notes, and it felt like the same rain, falling on different ground.