ENG 350 SICKNESS/HEALTH IN REN LIT

Sickness and Health in Renaissance Literature.  An exploration of the role of narrative or metaphor in science and medicine, and how literature can be experimental, therapeutic, or diagnostic.  The course examines the mutual shaping of science and literature in the transformative sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when human dissection became legal in Europe.  The course also considers humors, liquid thoughts, child and maternal mortality, and what it means to be "well" in an age without germs.  Readings may include Hamlet, All's Well that Ends Well, The Faerie Queene, Every Man in his Humour, and Renaissance physiology and psychology.