âMuch Worse than the Plagueâ: Magical Medicine and the Faust Tradition

Dustin Lovett

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ChapterÂ 4 âMuch Worse than the Plagueâ

Magical Medicine and the Faust Tradition

äºWorld Literature in and for Pandemic Times

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Dustin Lovett

Dustin Lovett
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Page Range:: 28â45

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004744622_005

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Abstract

In Goetheâs Faust, Faust expresses his fear that the alchemical âmedicineâ he and his father once gave their patients to cure them from plague had done more killing than the plague itself. This fear situates Goetheâs work within a critical discourse stretching back to Pliny the Elderâs 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 Faustâs âdescentâ 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 Goetheâs literary work but the authorâs 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.

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World Literature in and for Pandemic Times

ä¸ç¼ï¼ Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature, å·ï¼ 110

ISBN:: 9789004744622

åºçç¤¾:: Brill

å°å·åºçæ¥æ:: 08 Oct 2025

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African Studies	Education	Media Studies
American Studies	History	Middle East and Islamic Studies
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Art History	International Law	Philosophy
Asian Studies	International Relations	Religious Studies
Biblical Studies	Jewish Studies	Slavic and Eurasian Studies
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Book History and Cartography	Life Sciences	Theology and World Christianity
Classical Studies	Literature and Cultural Studies

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ChapterÂ 4 âMuch Worse than the Plagueâ

Magical Medicine and the Faust Tradition

Abstract

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World Literature in and for Pandemic Times

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