I found myself lost on how to combine Manga with any form of literary criticism, until my last post. I noticed how I started comparing Japanese culture with Elizabethan culture, more to prove that the subjects brought up in Shakespeare's plays are universal rather than to prove the two cultures nearly identical. Carrying on in the spirit of the last post, I decided to have a bit of a research session dedicated to the development of psychology among the two nations.
Elizabethan Practices
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| Judge all you want, but this is how I envision a crazy Elizabethan. |
.......I found an incredible article called Shakespeare and Medicine. I wanted to focus on the psychological side of the article, so I only quoted part of it here:
Besides plague, venereal disease, and other afflictions of the body, mental illness and its symptoms—including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and recitations of gibberish—were commonplace in Shakespearean London. In fact, because treatment was virtually nonexistent for the mentally disabled and because most of the mentally disturbed roamed freely for lack of institutional care, London and other European cities teemed with the eccentric, the paranoid, the schizophrenic. When Shakespeare ventured forth on the streets of London, he entered an alfresco asylum. All he had to do was etch images in his memory and he had raw material for his plays. .In his dramas, both mental and physical illness sometimes inhabit the same character at the same time. For example, in Richard III, Richard exhibits the symptoms of kyphosis (hunched back) and psychopathy (asocial and amoral behavior), which shape him into a grotesque killing machine. In the opening lines of the play, Richard soliloquizes on his appearance and his mindset:Japanese Development
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams. (1.1.16-35)
.......For modern audiences, Shakespeare is a window on human affliction and its treatments in the late 1500's and early 1600's, an age when medical science was an oxymoron and gleeful germs had the run of both the king’s household and the peasant’s hovel. Some people of Shakespeare’s time believed disease was a punishment for sinful behavior. Others thought it resulted from the movement of the stars and the planets. Whatever the cause, virtually everyone agreed that it triggered illness by creating an intolerable imbalance in four vital fluids in the body: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Called “humors” or “humours” (from a Latin word for liquids), these fluids controlled health and human behavior.
.......Persons in whom blood was the dominant humor were kind, loving, merry, enthusiastic, and passionate. Those ruled by phlegm were sluggish, apathetic, cowardly, and dull-witted. Persons dominated by yellow bile were stubborn, impatient, vengeful, and easy to anger, and those dominated by black bile were melancholic, depressed, irritable, brooding, and cynical.
.......When the body produced too much or too little of a humor—or if the humor altered its consistency or ventured beyond its normal location in the body—illness resulted. Diagnosis consisted in one or more of the following: observing symptoms such as fever and headache, evaluating urine for discoloration and frothing, plotting astrological charts, and checking the pulse for the rate and strength of the heartbeat and for rhythm abnormalities. In Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Hamlet underscores the importance of the heartbeat as a measure of well-being when he tells Gertrude "My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time, /
And makes as healthful music". (3.4.160-161).
.......Treatments to restore the proper balance of humors consisted mainly in ridding the body of humoral excess by blood-letting (phlebotomy), vomiting (emesis), and cleansing the bowels (purging). Blood-letting, a frequent practice, required opening a vein or applying leeches. The other treatments required administration of concoctions to induce vomiting spells or bowel movements. In the latter case, a patient could choose from oral laxatives or enemas.
.......Medical practitioners also used a variety of preparations—with ingredients ranging from animal dung and ground gemstones (including emeralds, sapphires, garnets, and topaz) to licorice, mint, rosemary, and basil—to heal the sick. Some preparations, such as herbal remedies, occasionally worked. Patients themselves often prayed for a miraculous cure, touched their bodies with the relics of saints, or went on pilgrimages. A few turned to religious rites to rid the body of a demon.
.......Persons offering preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic services included well educated physicians, minimally educated surgeons, barbers, herbalists, apothecaries, exorcists, astrologers, sorcerers, soothsayers, and do-it yourself healers. At barber shops, patrons could get a haircut, then have a tooth extracted. They could also undergo blood-letting, a service advertised by a spiral red stripe on the barber pole outside the typical barber shop. The striped barber pole survives to the present day as a symbol of the tonsorial profession."
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| This guy is obviously crazy. Just look at those insanely long side burns! |
Traditional Attitudes Towards MentalIllness in JapanIn ancient Japan, written characters and religionsConclusions
were largely based on Chinese cultures. The first
foreign physician was invited from Korea to Japan
during the Shiragi Dynasty, when an Emperor
became ill at the beginning of the 5th century. Since
then, Chinese medicine dominated in Japan until
Western medicine was introduced in the middle of
the 19th century.
For nearly a thousand years, the Japanese have
read the story of Genji-Monogatari written by
Shikibu Murasaki in Japanese characters. In it, one
can find several passages which seem to describe
mental illness. The ancient Japanese thought that
this state of mind was caused by 'Mononoke' (a
monster) or 'Kitsune' (a fox). These were able to
enter into and take over the body of human beings.
'Mononoke' could be someone else's soul bringing a
curse of fury, jealousy or hatred upon the mentally ill
person. In order to cure this, the ancient Japanese
asked priests to say special prayers. When the
'monster' or 'Kitsune' escaped from the body of the
mentally ill person, the patient could then recover
completely, so prognosis and recovery were probably
better in those days than today.
Another important piece of literature that illus
trates the Japanese attitude is a contemporary novel
Naravamahushi-ko written by Shichiro Fukazawa
(1964), which is based on an ancient legend. The
legend tells of a folk tradition whereby old people
were abandoned in the mountains and left to die.
In the middle of the 16th century, the Portuguese
brought guns to Japan. The Japanese sword industry
quickly learned how to produce guns. This radically
changed the state of civil wars. Those who used guns
most effectively took power. Western medicine,
printing technology and the Roman Catholic Church
were also introduced to Japan by the Portuguese.
Missionaries built Western-style hospitals. They
helped and cured the poor and severely ill, including
the mentally ill. The influence of Western medicine
soon declined, because Christian missionaries were
'Based on a lecture given at the Institute of Psychiatry,
London, on 14September 1989.
persecuted and banned by the Tokugawa-GrandShogunate in the 17th century. The Shogunate was
worried that Christianity and Western military
power would undermine the newly set up Tokugawa
Regime and therefore cut off Japan from the outside
world for more than 200 years. No foreigner was
allowed to enter the country. Any Japanese who
secretly tried to go abroad was executed. Trading and
the purchase of Western books were also banned. A
rare exception was Dutch traders who were allowed
to live in Dejima, a very tiny artificial island in
Nagasaki.
During the Tokugawa era, Japanese families were
allowed to confine their own mentally ill relatives in
private cells at home. If a mentally ill relative com
mitted a serious crime such as homicide, then families
were ordered to confine him or her in a home cell.
Though the British blamed humours and the Japanese blamed "Mononoke" (monsters), there is a shared sense of fear among both cultures for those who have lost control of their mental faculties, and abuse was rampant due to misunderstandings.
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