Papers by Alanna Skuse
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies , 2017
This article traces the history of the nose ‘grafting’ operation of Gaspare Tagliacozzi – an extr... more This article traces the history of the nose ‘grafting’ operation of Gaspare Tagliacozzi – an extraordinary but little-studied moment in surgical history. It argues that the imaginative reworking of this procedure in the Tatler reflected both seventeenth-century interest in ‘sympathetic cure’ and the contemporary socio-economic developments which troubled ideas of the ‘noble body’.
Social History of Medicine, 2019
This article examines stories of men who gelded themselves in early modern England. These events,... more This article examines stories of men who gelded themselves in early modern England. These events, it argues, were shaped and partly motivated by a culture in which castration was seen as both degrading and potentially empowering. Religious precedents such as that of Origen of Alexandria framed self-gelding as a foolhardy activity, but one which nevertheless indicated an impressive degree of mastery over the body and its urges. Meanwhile, judicial and popular contexts framed castration as a humiliating and emasculating ordeal. Instances of self-gelding in this period are rare but nonetheless illuminating. Relayed in medical texts and popular ballads, such actions typically occurred as a response to emotional distress. In particular, men gelded themselves as a means to express feelings of emasculation within heterosexual relationships, and to dramatically renounce their role in the libidinal economy. In 1676, the surgeon James Yonge was called to an unusual kind of accident. A young man of about twenty, the nephew of 'alderman W.', was bleeding dangerously from the groin. This in itself was fairly uncommon, and potentially fatal. When Yonge arrived at the scene, he was surprised to discover that the injury was self-inflicted: from some disappointment in Love, as was imagined, or rather as himself confessed , on a Religious account, to cure salacious heats, [the patient] did castrate himself, by griping up the Testicles, with the whole Scrotum in one hand, and with a keen Knife in the other cutting them off close to the body; the sudden pain and effusion of bloud made him faint and fall back on the Bed, where he sat while he thus acted Origen Secundus. 1 Yonge's patient had 'bled very largely before any one discovered it', and was in a perilous state. In his Currus Triumphalis, Yonge described how he gripped the wound in his hand in order to stop the haemorrhage while his assistant prepared dressings; when he withdrew his hand, he recalled, 'the bloud forthwith spouted out, as it had been from a small quill'. 2 Between Yonge and his colleague, the bleeding was got under control, but the patient, suffering from blood loss and shock, fainted. Observing his coldness and lack of Alanna Skuse is Wellcome Trust research fellow at the University of Reading, working on a project to trace the experiences of people whose bodies were altered by surgery in the early modern period. Her first book Constructions of Cancer in early Modern England: Ravenous Natures, is available via open access with Palgrave. She has also published on Shakespeare, disability, cosmetic surgery and Thomas Dekker.
Social history of medicine : the journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine / SSHM, 2014
This essay examines medical and popular attitudes to cancer in the early modern period, c.1580-17... more This essay examines medical and popular attitudes to cancer in the early modern period, c.1580-1720. Cancer, it is argued, was understood as a cruel and usually incurable disease, diagnosable by a well-defined set of symptoms understood to correspond to its etymological root, karkinos (the crab). It was primarily understood as produced by an imbalance of the humours, with women being particularly vulnerable. However, such explanations proved inadequate to make sense of the condition's malignancy, and medical writers frequently constructed cancer as quasi-sentient, zoomorphising the disease as an eating worm or wolf. In turn, these constructions materially influenced medical practice, in which practitioners swung between anxiety over 'aggravating' the disease and an adversarial approach which fostered the use of radical and dangerous 'cures' including caustics and surgery.
Renaissance Quarterly, 2015
The Journal of Literature and Science, 2014
Public engagement by Alanna Skuse
With special guests Dr. Camille Baker and Professor Tracey Harwood. Held 2018, Reading town centre.
2018 event with special guests CN Lester, Maggi Stratford and Jane Boston, exploring topics aroun... more 2018 event with special guests CN Lester, Maggi Stratford and Jane Boston, exploring topics around voice, gender and identity. Held in Reading town centre.
Conference papers by Alanna Skuse
My PhD, and my first book, was on the history of cancer in the seventeenth century. As I discover... more My PhD, and my first book, was on the history of cancer in the seventeenth century. As I discovered, cancer in that period mostly meant breast cancer, and one of the more extreme treatments for breast cancer was mastectomy. I read more accounts of mastectomy without anaesthesia than any normal person should, and they were normally pretty detailed about the procedure and looking
Books by Alanna Skuse
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Papers by Alanna Skuse
Public engagement by Alanna Skuse
Conference papers by Alanna Skuse
Books by Alanna Skuse