Hamnet

Medicine, including both substances and healing practices, functions as a symbol of knowledge in O’Farrell’s novel. Healers—whether Agnes, the physician or the midwife—treat their patients with the potions and practices they know. Their healing practices show both the creative potential and limitations of their knowledge.

The male physician who Hamnet approaches when he finds that Judith is sick is a distant and terrifying figure. His cures, such as a dried toad applied to the abdomen of a plague patient, are administered for the reputation of their “efficacy” and not from his personal examination of the patient (126). He arrives at the family’s door looking like “a creature from a nightmare, from Hell” with his enormous beak-shaped mask (124). To Hamnet, the physician seems like the specter of death, and he feels that “to be seen by his eye, to be noted or recorded by him would be a terrible omen” (125). The physician carries this omen in sentencing Judith to likely death and instructing the family not to leave the house so that they do not pass on the pestilence.

The physician, who claims to be a studied medic, deeply resents Agnes, who with her intuition and cures comprised of plant matter “takes his patients, trespasses on his revenue, his work” (125). Instead of treating patients from a distance, Agnes invites them into her home. Rather than wear a mask, she “bends her head to listen, giving a nod, a sympathetic click of the tongue,” all of which are gestures of empathy (52). Then, taking their hand, “she lets her gaze float upwards, to the ceiling, to the air, her eyes unfocused, half closed” (52). Here, Agnes uses a mixture of physical contact and intuition to heal her patients. She trusts herself and the natural world, which she can read like a book. Her ability to heal gives her confidence in childbirth, a common cause of mortality for women at the time.

Thus, her first childbirth, which takes place in the forest under the guidance of her mother’s spirit, is relatively straightforward; however, when her mother-in-law and the midwife intervene during her second childbirth, she feels out of control and as though she is going to die. Here, and on a greater level when a plague contracted in a faraway land enters her children’s bodies, Agnes meets the limits of her knowledge. When her medicine fails to save Hamnet, her loss of faith in her cures represents a loss of self-trust. She needs to regain this before she can resume her rightful path as a healer.

O’Farrell shows that medicine and the knowledge and intuition it represents is a plural practice amongst the women of Stratford. Their various intuitions complement each other and compensate for each other’s oversights. For example, it is the midwife who uses her knowledge and experience to intuit that Agnes will give birth to twins. The midwife also spots Hamnet’s running ghost during her night rounds of the village. This apparition of Hamnet to a relative stranger who happens to be in the right place at the right time is another way O’Farrell builds the idea that knowledge and inspiration can take root in several sources and bodies.