Introduction

Abstract

Many, perhaps even most, members of the early Royal Society of London were physicians (though not all of these were practicing physicians). The Society could never have prospered without the support of wealthy physicians, the rolls of the organization were filled with doctors and surgeons, and medical and biological observations and analyses crowd the pages of its journal. Indeed, some members of the College of Physicians complained about the Royal Society’s forays into medicine. Any simple skimming of the Philosophical Transactions will immediately reveal a network of men (and they were only men) persistently occupied with medical and biological problems—hardly an issue was printed without mention of various medicinal cures, surgical or medical procedures, or observations of strange and mysterious animals or plants. To take one small example, in the very first issue of the Transactions there is a brief article entitled, “An Account of a very odd Monstrous calf” (Philosophical Transactions 1665, 10), which describes a calf with various deformities, including having no joints and a triple (‘Cerebus-like’) tongue. Observations like this one—and much more detailed empirical and theoretical analyses—can be found throughout the early issues of the Transactions, and they were of vital importance to those working on various outstanding problems, in this case the problems of animal generation and of the origin of monstrosity. This news item was communicated by none other than the Honorable Robert Boyle, whose interests go well beyond the physical and chemical sciences for which we usually remember him.

There is no more fruitful occupation than to try to know oneself. And the benefit that one expects from this knowledge does not just extend to morals, as many may initially suppose, but also to medicine in particular. – René Descartes , Description of the Human Body.(Descartes 1998, 170)