Deceptive Medicine and (Dis)Trust in Renaissance Drama

“Deceptive Medicine and (Dis)Trust in Renaissance Drama” complicates our perception of medical credibility in medieval and early modern Europe by showing how deceptive and theatrical medical practices simultaneously exploited and substantiated patient trust. Recent recovery work has contested the traditional view of charlatans, empirics, and wise women healers as fraudulent “quacks,” but I clarify how both licensed physicians and lay practitioners subtly manipulated patients’ imaginations to induce lasting placeboic recoveries. I contend that these curative tricks, which achieved efficacy through deception, governed early modern medical ethics by contraposing beneficence and patient autonomy and by prompting consequentialist questions about the means and ends of medicine. Through readings of linguistically diverse plays by Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Brome, and Molière, this project traces transcultural sentiments of medical confidence and skepticism that shaped patient-practitioner relationships during the Renaissance. The restorative capacity of trickery and theatrics was endorsed by medical authorities such as Robert Burton, but deceptive medicine was also especially susceptible to abuse by self-serving frauds and to regression for patients who detected the therapeutic sham. Despite the inherent risks and limited benefits, patients tolerated deceptive medicine as a desperate countermeasure against equally deceptive disease that resisted orthodox remedies. I conclude that Renaissance medicine’s teleological focus on restoring and preserving health reinforced paternalistic practices in which the cure justified the deceptive means.Doctor of Philosoph