The realms of Apollo
Subtitle: literature and healing in seventeenth-century England
By: Raymond A. Anselment.
Publisher: University of Delaware Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Newark; London; Cranbury, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 316
Subjects: English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism; Literature and medicine -- England -- History -- 17th century; Healing -- England -- History -- 17th century; Apollo (Greek deity) in literature; Body, Human, in literature; Medicine in literature; Diseases in literature; Healing in literature; England -- Intellectual life -- 17th century
Description: In The Realms of Apollo, literary scholar Raymond A. Anselment examines how seventeenth-century English authors confronted the physical and psychological realities of death.

Focusing on the dangers of childbirth and the terrors of bubonic plague, venereal disease, and smallpox, the book reveals in the discourse of literary and medical texts the meanings of sickness and death in both the daily life and culture of seventeenth-century England. These perspectives show each realm anew as the domain of Apollo, the deity widely celebrated in myth as the god of poetry and the god of medicine.

Authors of both formal elegies and simple broadsides saw themselves as healers who tried to find in language the solace physicians could not find in medicine. Within the context of the suffering so unmistakable in the medical treatises and in the personal diaries, memoirs, and letters, the poets' struggles illuminate a new cultural consciousness of sickness and death.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 261-304) and index.