ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how fifteenth-century medical literature provides an unusually rich site for examining the relationship between poison and occult phenomena. It describes how some fifteenth-century physicians debated the extent to which the notion of poison could be defined by some kind of occult virtue or specific form. The chapter also explores how fifteenth-century discussions about poison took up a number of perplexing medical questions about the properties of poisons and poisonous bodies. It highlights some key differences between medical approaches to understanding poison, processes of poisoning, properties of poison, and the nature of poisonous bodies with those that appear in literary and pseudo-medical sources, especially their relationship to occult phenomena. The chapter explores the implications of understanding poison through its specific form in terms of medical practice, taking a broad view of the ways in which physicians described how a poison should be explicitly attacked or expelled from the body to enact an effective cure.