One of Pulter’s two emblems featuring a poisonous duel, “Two Mountebanks” can be read as a commentary upon the medical marketplace in seventeenth-century England, as well as a reflection on the very real danger to patients’ bodies that doctors posed. In early modern England, patients had a wide range of medical practitioners to choose from. Licensed physicians from the College of Physicians in London were classically educated and skilled, but often unaffordable. Cheaper options abounded: surgeons could set bones, fix wounds, and administer medicine, but their knowledge was often experiential and, the College claimed, lacking an educated foundation. Apothecaries and chemists could make and administer remedies, but given the English fear of being poisoned by malicious or inexperienced doctors, apothecaries and chemists had to assert their legitimacy and authority continually. Those in the country had to make do with the care options around them—often, a traveling doctor, local midwife, or lady of the house (Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama [Cambridge University Press, 2002]). Even as many lay people had some knowledge of how to heal, the College of Physicians was trying to make medical practice by non-College members illegal, claiming that unscrupulous or uneducated quacks could prey on patients and cause serious harm.
Much of educated early modern medicine was Galenic, based on the writings of Galen of Pergamon (129-200/216 AD), a Greek philosopher and surgeon. He believed that the body was governed by four humors (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood), and that health was achieved by keeping these humors in balance, through careful regulation of food, environment, activity, and personality. Another significant paradigm in the seventeenth century came from the writings of Theophrastus von Hohenheim, otherwise known as Paracelsus (1493-1541). Paracelsus based his chemical remedies on a thorough study of alchemy and the natural world. His writings taught that “like cures like”: if a disease had a chemical origin, it could be cured by a specific chemical remedy, rather than a generalized rebalancing of the humors. Paracelsus brought toxic chemicals like arsenic and mercury into common use, and English patients worried about the introduction of poisons into their remedies. Medical practitioners also worried about the consequences of misunderstanding Paracelsian doctrine. Without careful study, Paracelsus’ “like cures like” doctrine could produce toxic remedies in the hands of unscrupulous doctors like those in Pulter’s poem (Tanya Pollard, “‘No Faith in Physic’: Masquerades of Medicine Onstage and Off,” in Disease, Diagnosis and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, ed. Stephanie Moss and Kaara Petersen [Ashgate, 2004]). Some early modern plays reflect this fear as well: in Act 4, scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet, Friar Laurence gives Juliet a potion to fake her death. It is so convincing that Romeo believes her dead and subsequently poisons himself.
The two mountebanks’ weapons of choice draw upon these two dominant medical paradigms in the seventeenth century: the young gallant’s dressed dish of toads and the chemical poison verdigris echo Paracelsian doctrines of treating diseases with chemical compounds, while the old mountebank turns to classical philosophy and poisons found in nature, a practice closer to Galenism. The young mountebank’s toad-poison causes the older much agony, but he eventually recovers: since his poison had a chemical origin, it presumably could be cured by chemicals as well. In the end, the older mountebank succeeds because of his familiarity with classical knowledge, opposing “youthful” “wit” with “sage” knowledge of classics and the virtues of plants.
However, the final lines of the poem present a paradox: Pulter admonishes her readers to trust their “betters” and not rely on their own wit, but the “better” she uses as an object lesson in this poem is the older mountebank, who remains a dubious medical authority despite his classical training. No one really wins this struggle over knowledge—the two contestants remain mountebanks trading poison. So what counts as reliable knowledge, and who can be trusted with medical authority? In order to discern this, and to avoid false peddlers of knowledge, one must use one’s wit. The poem seems to question the purpose of fighting over medical authority, and to cast suspicion on healers who attempt to build their own reputations by discrediting others. Readers are left with the realization that no medical knowledge is perfect or entirely trustworthy.
— Samantha Snively and Frances E. Dolan
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