ABSTRACT
In Jonson’s play The Magnetic Lady; or Humours Reconciled (1632), Doctor Rut, annoyed by the talkative Mrs. Polish, expresses his exasperation through recourse to his favorite medical procedure: “Would thou had’st a dose of pilles, a double dose, / O’ the best purge, to make thee turne tale, tother way” (5.5.25–26). Polish’s retort suggests the perhaps too great enthusiasm this “foule-mouth’d, purging, absurd Doctor” has for it. The damage that he has caused to Lady Loadstone and her niece, she insists, “you can never take off / With all your purges, or your plaister of Oathes” (5.5.27, 30–31). Her dislike of the Doctor merges with her distaste for the foulness of the cure that he would seem to prescribe indiscriminately. Purging, however, had not yet been discredited as a medical procedure; its usefulness, moreover, had been extended beyond medicine in recent decades. Near the start of his career, Jonson had recognized the significance that purging held as a remedy for humoral imbalances in the prevailing medical theory of the day. More importantly, he had also realized its potential not just as a satiric metaphor but as a guiding concept for reformative satire. Prescribed moderately and in the right doses, this potentially distasteful procedure could help bring about the cleansing of the inveterately foul Juvenalian satire polluting the body of English literature.
