The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon
Forman by Barbara Howard Traister, University of Chicago Press,
$30, ISBN 0226811409
IF ever a character stepped straight out of a Ben Jonson comedy, surely that
was Simon Forman, by far the most notorious physician to haunt late Elizabethan
and Jacobean London. His was a practice, however, that wears a somewhat bizarre
aspect to us today, since he routinely drew upon magic and astrology, casting
horoscopes to frame his diagnoses and prognoses. Indeed, cashing in on his
renowned mastery of the occult arts, Forman鈥檚 speciality was helping clients
track down lost property, select a husband, or determine if they would be lucky
in love.
A cocky egoist and a tricky customer, Forman crossed swords in stormy
controversies with many of his contemporaries. A shameless sexual athlete, he
bedded no small number of his female patients, along with scores of other
women鈥攁nd no less after his marriage than before. Rumour also had it that
he was involved in the most scandalous high-society murder story of the Jacobean
age, the Overbury affair, in which he was accused of supplying both love
philtres to aid a clandestine liaison and the poison used to murder Sir Thomas
Overbury himself.
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Small wonder, then, that the Royal College of Physicians shut its doors on
this ambitious provincial from Salisbury who had made his way up to the capital
to make his fortune. Indeed, they hounded him relentlessly, with repeated fines
and occasional jail terms, to debar him from practising, even after he had
managed to wangle a licence out of Cambridge University in 1603.
All this鈥攁nd much more鈥攊s known about this extraordinary fellow
because he was a compulsive chronicler of his own affairs (in both senses of the
term). Indeed, you could say he fashioned his own life through his pen. And,
luckily for us, his voluminous manuscripts were handed down to his heirs, ending
up in the possession of that distinguished antiquarian, Elias Ashmole, who
passed them on to Oxford University for safe keeping.
Barbara Howard Traister, a professor of English, gives a more rounded
biography of this irrepressible man than the rather sensationalist account
produced by the late historian A. L. Rowse a quarter of a century ago. Whereas
Rowse concentrated on the passions and poisons, Traister pays far more attention
to Forman鈥檚 day-to-day medical practice. In particular, by examining his case
notes鈥攖hey are, she believes, the earliest systematic English medical
records to survive鈥攕he ably shows that Forman鈥檚 medical theories and
practice were, horoscopes notwithstanding, far more standard than we might
suppose.
Certainly, Forman attempted to conjure up spirits. No doubt he prescribed
such quasi-magical sympathetic remedies as roasted turd as a cure for anal
fistula, or boiled snake as a rejuvenator for impotent men. Touching a hanged
man鈥檚 hand was his preferred prescription for a swollen throat, and he also
handed out sigils and talismans to his patients. But what chiefly differentiates
鈥渢he astrological physician from Lambeth鈥� (his favourite way of describing
himself) from his contemporaries is not what he did but that he recorded his
activities and his papers survive. As is lucidly analysed in Traister鈥檚 concise
and pleasantly illustrated study, they open an engrossing window onto a medical
world of Shakespeare鈥檚 times far more individualistic, entrepreneurial and
competitive than is suggested by the usual image of the pompous and ponderous
physicians of the Royal College.