No Cure: Anne Bradstreet’s Frenzied Brain

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Notes

1. ¹If Bradstreet is rejecting Galenic anatomy and physiology in theses poems, she is perhaps drawn instead to Paracelsianism, a school of medicine begun in the sixteenth century by the alchemist Theophrastus Bombastus van Hohenheim (otherwise known as Paracelsus) that directly opposed humoralism. Bradstreet reveals her familiarity with Paracelsus in the poem “The Four Elements,” which precedes “Of the Four Humours” in the quaternions. The element Fire, for instance, explains her usefulness in the following way: “Ye Paracelsians too, in vain’s your skill / In chemistry, unless I help you still” (ll. 54–55). Though it’s difficult to determine the scope of Bradstreet’s exposure to Paracelsus’s work, her criticism of Galen echoes Paracelsus’s rejection of humoralism. In his four-part text outlining the foundations of medicine, titled Paragranum (1530), he disputes the elemental origins of the humors and criticizes the theory for being mere “speculation.” He writes, “Who has ever seen cholera in nature? Who has ever found melancholia in philosophia? Who has ever recognized phlegma as an element? When has sanguis become equal to the element air?” (119). While Bradstreet stops short of wholly dismissing the humors, she, like Paracelsus, takes aim at their artificial arrangement in the body.

2. ²Carrie Calloway Blackstock argues that Phlegm is “confounded by the attempt to innumerate her virtues,” and she contends that Phlegm proves her power by elaborating on her association with the sovereign brain (232). While I agree with Blackstock that Phlegm experiences puzzlement in the poem, I would argue that it’s her very association with the brain that causes her to become confounded. For Phlegm, even if the brain enjoys sovereignty over the body, it resides in a far more dangerous and unprotected zone than Crooke and his predecessors had acknowledged.

3. ³It’s important to note that Bradstreet herself suffered from smallpox as a girl. In her letter “To my Dear Children,” she recounts the painful ordeal: “About 16, the Lord laid his hand sore upon me and smote me with the smallpox,” she writes (240). Even after her recovery, she endured episodes of illness for the rest of her life, which she details in the letter to her children and in her “Occasional Meditations.” Youth’s experiences, then, are undoubtedly informed by Bradstreet’s own sicknesses. Moreover, Bradstreet’s interest in finding a personalized language of the body was almost certainly motivated by her own experiences of pain and suffering that could not be articulated through the rhetoric of Galenic science.

4. ⁴Wai Chee Dimock argues that “Bradstreet is eloquent on the afflictions of the body and the all-powerful, all-consuming grip they exert on the mind. … Bodily existence … is a prison with no respite, no exit” (37). I concur with Dimock’s suggestion that the body is a prison for Bradstreet, but I see the scientific history and rhetoric of the body, and not the physical body itself, as the prison from which Bradstreet seeks freedom. In this sense, affliction plays a very different role in my reading of Bradstreet, as the force that opens the mind and body to new modes of self-expression.

5. ⁵Sarah Rivett explains that Bradstreet rejects the seventeenth-century taxonomization of the soul. She argues that in the poem “Contemplations,” Bradstreet “critique[s] … the methods of natural philosophy as applied to human souls” (195). Specifically, she sees Bradstreet as rejecting “the idea that the soul’s faculties could be observed and understood by expanding the scientist’s observational capacities” (193–94). Moreover, Rivett contends that Bradstreet is critical of this scientific trend particularly because it fails to accommodate adequately for the magnitude of religious experience and, in particular, religious vision. While the soul is largely outside of the scope of my argument in this article, it’s helpful to reference Rivett’s discussion because she argues for another way in which Bradstreet critiques the historical representation of the human body.