The Doctor on the Stage
The Doctor on the Stage
Herbert Silvette
This volume is the fruit of Herbert Silvette’s leisure reading of about 500 plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, yielding a rich harvest of quotations on medical and paramedical topics, arranged in chapters under main subject headings. With such a nucleus, this could have been an important addition to the history of medicine, but the selected extracts, made some thirty or more years ago, are presented by an editor who gives little evidence of familiarity with all that has been written and published on the subject since that time.
Nevertheless, the book is very well produced and offers a most useful array of relevant literary quotations for those who may be delving more deeply into the medical and scientific ideas and practices of the period.
Available
1967
LCCN 66-14775
Study
The University of Tennessee Press
Herbert Silvette has a long literary and medical-scientific background that particularly suits him for writing “The Doctor on the Stage”. His education at the University of Virginia culminated in a doctoral degree in physiology, and during the course of his teaching career in medical schools he has written or collaborated in some 120 papers in clinical pathology, biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, immunology, and history of medicine.
He is translator of Molière’s “Le Médicin Volant” and author of the “Catalogue of the Works of Philemon Holland of Coventry, Doctor of Physicke, 1600-1640”. He is co-author of “Tobacco: Experimental and Clinical Studies” and the author of eight novels. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Porter Fellow of the American Physiological Society and was also Visiting Professor of Pharmacology at the Medical College of Virginia.