William Kerwin's Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English Renaissance Drama successfully argues that what is “beyond the body” is a cluster of narratives that convey and create early modern England's inconsistent and inconstant ideas about what counts as medical practice and who figures as its practitioners. The process of looking “beyond” leads Kerwin to challenge the very notion of “boundary” commonly associated with disciplines like medicine: “The boundaries of medicine ultimately are as unstable as the boundaries of culture, in all its transactions and competitions” (230). In this well-written and compelling account of narratives constructing early modern “models of healing,” medicine is not a self-defining and self-contained practice but a social experience—and is therefore shaped by the cultural instabilities of any historical period.

The book's chapters are headed by different medical figures: the apothecary-alchemist, the woman healer, the surgeon-barber, the theatrical doctor, and the diagnosing patient. Kerwin explains that “while each group can be imagined in terms of categories that are traditionally medical—that are internalist history of medicine—each is also fundamentally shaped by external history, by non medical changes and contests” (194). Thus, each figure is treated as a cultural expression that converges medical practice and social stories. The result of Kerwin's willingness to merge the cultural and the medical is a productive, albeit sometimes overlapping, assessment of the economics and the aesthetics of medicine. It seems, for instance, that England's increasing dependence upon and concern with commercial trade is applicable to all the figures heading Kerwin's chapters, but Kerwin puts emphasis on alchemists and apothecaries as emblems of the shift from theologically sanctioned cures to the commercialization of healing, most evident in an inventory of the urban shop. At his best, Kerwin compellingly puts pressure on enduring Renaissance debates. Influenced as he is by Katharine Maus's Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance, he contributes to this discussion by developing the barber-surgeon as an exposer and protector of surfaces. In the chapter “From Mountebanks to Vertuosi,” Kerwin brilliantly plots the trajectory of the physician from a figure condemning the theatrics of healing—“attacking their competitors for being mere actors” (133)—to the representation of “effective physicians who work well because they self-consciously stage their cures” (166). In this complex chapter, Kerwin expertly draws from theories of performance, history of experimentation, narratives of medical professionalization, and astute literary critiques of Samuel Daniel, John Webster, John Ford, and Philip Massinger—and the repercussions for rethinking the relationship between medicine, theater, and authority are undeniable.

The refusal to see medicine as “bounded” allows Kerwin to go directions very different from what one would expect from a book about medicine in early modern England. For instance, although his research uncovers quite singular medical practices, he does not purport to offer a comprehensive index of medical references in historical texts or cultural productions. Albeit his reading of lovesickness builds on the important work of Carol Thomas Neely and Mary Francis Wack, he avoids tracing any one particular disease throughout the period to show its evolution or cultural salience. Additionally, he refrains from turning his study into a critique of medicine and, in fact, seems generous about the gender politics surrounding women healers when he contends that, despite the prolific villainization and consequent punishment of women healers, these figures ultimately become the conduits of reconciliation. (A rather optimistic conclusion to a chapter named after Medea.) And finally, despite a concentrated study of the period, he is not claiming that the meaning of medicine as we know it originates exclusively from the period he is studying. Rather, he premises that something is taken for granted in all methodologies that critique medical discourse or trace the references to healing throughout history—they take as premise the stability and homogeneity of medicine as a practice by wrongfully “imply[ing] a separation of medicine into an independent sphere of culture” (154).

The compelling result of Kerwin's study is to widen the gap between medical knowledge and medical authority; whereas the former might legitimate its own methodologies and findings, the latter is mostly the product of forces outside the medical community. His analysis is not just valuable for critics of early modern culture but beneficial for reevaluating the meaning of medicine in our own time. It is no less important today to decipher the cultural pressures informing our relationship with those that care for the body, just as Kerwin promotes “the painful inclusion of the social text, a reality too often effaced by a medical model” (198–99). Kerwin's book is genuinely and immediately thought provoking, reminding us of the labile processes that precede both doctor and patient participation in a complex nexus of social relations.