ABSTRACT
This chapter examines health practices alongside theatrical practices as cultural creations of society as a whole. The point that unites them all is that the representation of illness from its genesis to its definition and characteristics, its actual diagnosis or its treatment is based on and strictly conforms to seventeenth-century academic medicine. It illustrates the dramatization of medical knowledge and academic medical culture, putting on stage a female doctor with extensive theoretical knowledge, but one who shares with the audience a conventional and literary understanding of love as a kind of illness. There are monographic studies on melancholy in Golden Age drama, and it has been studied both from the point of view of the history of medicine and in literary terms, though separately. The chapter examines the ways in which the academic medicine, the medical knowledge represented in plays, and the experiences of audiences can be understood to overlap.
