ABSTRACT
In the moments before Othello falls to the floor in a trance, he describes his memory, that faculty of his mind in which his thoughts are retained, in terms of disease. Within twenty lines, he collapses to the floor in what lago diagnoses as epilepsy. Whether or not lago's diagnosis is correct, it represents the pinnacle of his manipulations, the "medicine" that contaminates both the body and spirit of the Moor. Together with lago's earlier exploitation of the handkerchief as ocular proof, his diagnosis suggests that the Moor's corporeality is situated within the dominant Galenic ideology as it was studied in English universities. As theory, Galenism concerned itself in great part with categorizing disease and symptoms. Paracelsan theory, however, was predicated on intuitive knowledge: every herb had a specific curative "virtue" that the physician could "overhear" ("ablauschen," in Paracelsus's Alemannic German). This meant that knowledge dwelt within or was immanent in the interior mechanism of each herb and the naturalist should be able to intuit that knowledge. As the seminal Paracelsan historian Walter Pagel states: "There is an element inside the naturalist-himself a microcosmic wholewhich corresponds to this particular plant and must, by an act of sympathetic and magnetic attraction, unite with it."2 Paracelsus's understanding of knowledge, then, was unmediated by the a priori knowledge that marked Galenic information.3
