“Much Worse Than the Plague”

Abstract

In Goethe’s Faust, Faust expresses his fear that the alchemical “medicine” he and his father once gave their patients to cure them from plague had done more killing than the plague itself. This fear situates Goethe’s work within a critical discourse stretching back to Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia, and carried on from the beginnings of the Faust tradition about magic, medicine and scientific error. From the charges of quackery against the historical Faust, through two centuries of popular literature depicting Faust’s “descent” from theology to medicine as precipitating his embrace of magic, the roots of the Faust legend run through the ambivalent relationship of the magical and medicinal. This article examines how the physician-astrologers of Renaissance Europe informed early Faustian literature, just as the alchemists, whose practices survived well into the Enlightenment, informed not only Goethe’s literary work but the author’s own life. The Faust tradition encodes the cultural salience that medicine has long held in the West as emblematic of the bumpy, dangerous path to knowledge.