Alanna Skuse begins her study with a memorable passage from an instruction manual for ships’ surgeons, who are told that preparation for battle days should include having at the ready a barrel of water for collecting amputated limbs until they can be discarded overboard. It is a vivid image with which to begin, and a good reminder of the frequency with which early modern bodies faced both trauma and permanent alteration. This work is not about those performing surgery, however, but about those upon whom it was performed. Skuse focuses on “people whose bodies were permanently changed by medical intervention” (2), not just in war but in a wide range of settings. What happened next to those who survived these surgeries? We have the medical texts to tell us what procedures were performed, and how they were carried out. But how then did people with changed bodies fit into society?
Focusing on England in the early modern era (shifting throughout the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries), Skuse surveys a range of bodily alteration from the medically necessary (amputations, mastectomy) to the elective (castrati, dental implants, rhinoplasty). Moving beyond the bodily turn in literary studies, Skuse uses “medical history, disability studies, and phenomenology in order to focus intently on issues of embodiment” (3). Her sources are likewise wide-ranging, from Shakespeare and John Donne to medical texts to popular media including newspapers, advertisements, and satirical works.
Skuse argues for the seventeenth century as a turning point for viewing the body as a commodity to be changed and improved. A combination of the new mechanical physiology, Cartesian dualist philosophy, and the rise of consumer culture encouraged people to see the body “as a composition of parts which might be removed and replaced” (9). Bodies with missing limbs and disfigured faces, which were not altered by choice, could nonetheless be deliberately re-altered. Prosthetic surgery, including dental implants and rhinoplasty, as well as the creation of prosthetic limbs, were meant to render visible differences invisible, making bodily difference less noticeable. However, the ability to (re)alter the body, particularly the face, in order to make it more pleasing, led to new fears surrounding bodily truth and falsehoods. Idealism and marketing promised prostheses that could lessen the scrutiny of bodies by returning functionality, but the reality was often the opposite: the vast majority of amputees relied upon basic prostheses that drew more attention rather than less.
The gaze that Skuse interrogates comes inevitably from the “bodily and socially normative” (34). For the most part, there simply are few to no voices of those living in altered bodies. She begins with chapters on the deliberately altered bodies of male castrati and female mastectomy patients. Discussions of the latter are so rare that Skuse turns to examine the lingering myths of the Amazon, a single-breasted warrior who, like the castrato, lived in a body altered for a particular purpose. Both of these foreign bodies, the very real castrati and the imagined Amazon, became potent exotic objects inciting both fear and lust. Ensuing chapters address other alterations, including facial surgery, prosthetic limbs, religious and philosophical speculations on what happened to the altered (“scattered”) body at resurrection, and the question of phantom limbs.
Skuse's interrogation of early modern views of the body as both subject and object ably demonstrates how concerns about embodiment permeated throughout society. Calling upon a wide range of sources, she deftly interweaves religious, medical, artistic, popular, and literary views of the many ways the body, whether intact or altered, was experienced. These “experiences of bodily alteration were almost infinitely varied” (164), a reflection of constant social and cultural shifting. Therefore, the body, whether intact or altered, remains an important focal point to help illuminate broader social changes.
