Medieval Meditations

How This Came To Be & Further Reading

Katie and Phoebe have been trying to find their way into William Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well for years. On a cold autumn morning at the Morning Star Diner, bemoaning the fact that the show didn't focus enough on what they thought was its most interesting attribute (a Shakespearean heroine who works as a doctor), the concept of The Medicine Show was born. This show is built from Manly Enterprise's combined enthusiasm for and frustration with its source material. We hope you have nearly as much fun attending the event as we've had building it!

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The Amazing Doctor She Medicine Show is a blend of fact and fiction. We have no specific evidence about the actual woman upon whom Bocaccio and Shakespeare based their story, if she even existed. But though the medical prowess of Madame De Narbone is mostly a literary conceit used to advance a traditional love story, we were delighted to find information on plenty of real women who were practicing medicine in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In fact, beyond the specifics of our mysterious Doctor She, everything else we've included about the checkered history of underrepresented genders in the development of traditional Western medicine is based in truth. The outmoded theories of medicine and misogyny that our show picks through are all well-documented and we live in the long shadow of their legacy.

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If you're interested in further reading on these topics, here are a few resources to get you started...

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Women in Medicine

• The History of Hysteria McGill Office for Science and Society. Ada McVean B.Sc.  31 Jul 2017

• The History Of Witches: How Christianity And Misogyny Turned Revered Healers Into Wicked Pariahs By All That's Interesting | Edited By Leah Silverman Published October 31, 2015

• Uppity women of medieval times, Vicki León.  Berkeley, Calif. : Conari Press 1997

• Trotula & The Women of Salerno

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European Medicine in the Early Modern Period

• Shakespeare And Beyond: Balancing the body and consulting the heavens: Medicine in Shakespeare's time, Esther French. August 23, 2016 Folger Shakespeare Library

• A Brief History of Bloodletting, Jennie Cohen. History.com May 30, 2012

• National Geographic, Plague was one of history’s deadliest diseases—then we found a cure, Jenny Howard, July 6 2020

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Traveling Medicine Shows

• NYU Dept of Media Culture and Communication - Dead Media Archive, “Traveling Medicine Show”

• The Great American Medicine Show, David Armstrong, New York Prentice Hall 1991

And if you have more questions about how we made this show or where to find more interesting things to read, please get in touch! We love to chat.