Abstract
DeLacy focuses on three unorthodox medical populists: Marchamont Nedham, the opportunistic journalist who admired van Helmont’s work and published Medela Medicinae: the first English work on living pathogens; Gideon Harvey, who thought that venereal diseases arose from living particles and that consumption was often contagious; and the “Chymical Physitian” Everard Maywaringe, who attributed diseases to “seminal agents,” provided a clear description of the mechanism of contagion, and argued that “Qualities cannot be Diseases.” DeLacy shows that Helmontian medical ideas persisted through the Restoration period despite the political defeat of the sectarian reformers. Because they believed that the causes of disease were omnipresent, not all Helmontians believed in contagion or disease specificity, but some Helmontian authors did propagate this idea.
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Notes
It also figured in the battle between the “Ancients,” who valued traditional learning, and the “Moderns,” who thought recent discoveries had surpassed classical knowledge. Richard Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth Century England (Berkeley: 2nd ed. rpt. 1965), 111.
J. G. A. Pocock quoted in Joseph Frank, Cromwell’s Press Agent: A Critical Biography of Marchamont Nedham, 1620–1678 (Lanham, MD: 1980), 94. I thank Glenn Burgess and Steve Pincus for replies to a question about Nedham. See also Allen G. Debus, Chemistry and Medical Debate, 87–102. There is a short and unsympathetic discussion of Nedham in Lester Snow King, The Road to Medical Enlightenment (London: 1970), 147–54. Jones, Ancients and Moderns, 206–10, has a more favorable view.
Charles Harding Firth, “Needham, Marchamont,” Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: 1894).
P. M. Rattansi, “The Helmontian-Galenist Controversy in Restoration England,” Ambix (1964) 12:1–23, on 17; and Henry Thomas, “The Society of Chymical Physitians, an Echo of the Great Plague of London, 1665,” in Science, Medicine and History, ed. E. Ashworth Underwood, vol. 2 (London: 1953), 55–71. Peter Anstey, “John Locke and Helmontian Medicine,” in The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, eds. Charles T. Wolf and Ofer Gal (Dordrecht: 2010), 93–117 notes John Locke’s previously unknown connections with the Society.
King, Medical Enlightenment, 151. These arguments would be echoed by Gideon Harvey, A New Discourse of the Small Pox and Malignant Fevers, with an Exact Discovery of the Scorvey (London: 1685).
Charles-Edward Amory Winslow, The Conquest of Epidemic Disease rpt. (Madison: 1980), 150; Brian Ford, Single Lens: The Story of the Simple Microscope (London: 1985), 18–20.
John Edward Fletcher, A Study of the Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher, ed. Elizabeth Fletcher (Leiden: 2011), 111. Borel’s two works were sandwiched between the publication of Kircher’s Ars Magnus Lucis et Umbrae (to which Borel refers) and the Scrutinium.
Pierre Borel (also Petro or Petrus Borello or Borell), “Observations,” 31, 32, De Vero Telescopi Inventore, cum Brevi Omnium Conspiciliorum Historia. Ubi de Eorum Confectione … Accessit etiam Centuria Observationum Microscospicarum (The Hague: 1655 [1656]), 21. As noted elsewhere, the meaning of “varioli” was unstable during this period; it can roughly be translated as “poxes.” Ned-ham refers to Borel in the Medela, 13, and Marten in chapter 2, 72, as “the learned Borellus.” Borel, a friend of Descartes, and a physician to Louis XIV, also published a work defending the idea of a multiplicity of inhabited worlds and a chemical bibliography (1654) that Newton used to build his alchemical collection. Karin Figala and Ulrich Fetzold, “Alchemy in the Newtonian circle,” Renaissance and Revolution, eds. J. V. Field and Frank A. J. L. James (Cambridge: 1993), 172–92, on 176.
It is not always clear what Borel means by “worms”—many of his observations were of animals easily seen with the naked eye. Borel, like Kircher a believer in spontaneous generation, evidently thought that the putrefying matter and bad air were generating the worms. See also Clifford Dobell, Antony van Leeuwen-hoek and his ‘Little Animals’ rpt. (New York: 1960), 365. Dobell objects to a comment by Charles Singer, who suggested in a 1915 article on microscopy that Borel might have priority over Leeuwenhoek in visualizing bacteria, arguing that the passages cited by Singer were hypothetical, not actual observations.
Historian Marc Ratcliff has shown that Redi’s experiments were not as decisive as some scholars have suggested, and it was only after Louis Joblot showed in 1711 that eggs did not appear in a vial that was boiled, immediately corked, and inspected after “a considerable time” that antispontaneism (briefly) prevailed. After decades of skepticism, the English microscopist John Turburville Need-ham revived the idea of spontaneous generation in the mid-eighteenth century. Ratcliff, The Quest for the Invisible (Farnham, Surrey: 2009), 40–1.
Critics are discussed by King, Enlightenment, 154–60 (John Twysden); Jones, Ancients and Moderns, 210–13 (Sprackling, Twysden); Harold Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca and London: 1986), 147 (Sprackling); and Allen Debus, Chemistry and Medical Debate, 94–8 (Castle, Twysden).
Castle, The Chymical Galenist: a Treatise wherein the Practice of the Ancients is Reconcil’d to the New Discoveries … in Which Are Some Reflections upon … Medela Medicinae (London: 1667), dedication.
John Twysden, Medicina Veterum Vindicata (The medicine of the ancients vindicated) (London: 1666), 68–9.
H. A. Colwell, “Gideon Harvey: Sidelights on Medical Life from the Restoration to the End of the XVII Century,” Annals of Medical History (Fall 1921) 3, no. 3:205–37, online from the Hathi Trust. Cf. John Toland’s comment on “explanatory repetitions of difficult words,” in Christianity Not Mysterious cited in Colin Jager, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: 2007), 44–5. See also Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester: 2003), 83.
Gideon Harvey, Little Venus Unmask’d (2nd ed., London: 1670), online from EEBO, 38–40. I have not been able to locate any copies of a first edition; Col-well mistakenly dates a first edition to 1671.
Gideon Harvey, Great Venus Unmasked (2nd edn. London: 1672), online from EEBO, 48. Colwell, who disliked Harvey, described this as “a dirty little book on a dirty subject.”
Harvey, Morbus Anglicus (London: 1666), 3.
Harvey, Morbus Anglicus, 3–4. Richard Morton’s classic work “Phthisiologia” (1689) maintained that consumption “like a contagious fever does infect those that lie with them,” but Morton believed that the humors grew more acrid with age and predisposed the lungs to be susceptible to this disease. R. R. Trail, “Richard Morton,” Medical History (1970) 14: 166–74, 173.
Gideon Harvey, A Discourse of the Plague (London: 1665), and same, Discourse of the Smallpox, and Malignant Fevers, and same, A Treatise of the Small-pox and Measles … (London: 1696).
Antonio Clericuzio, “Maynwaring, Everard (b. 1627/8),” ODNB (Oxford: 2004), online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18449, accessed June 20, 2011.
E[verard] Maynwaringe, A Treatise of Consumptions (London: 1668), 17, online from EEBO. This is the second edition of Tabidorum Narratio, A Treatise of Consumptions (London: 1667).
Maynwaringe, Lues (London: 1673), online from EEBO.
The evolution of ideas about syphilis and its transmission in early modern Europe (through Sennert) is traced by Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger French, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven: 1997).
E[verard] M[aynwaringe], Inquiries into the General Catalogue of Diseases Shewing the Errors and Contradictions of that Establishment … (London: 1691). In Ignota Febris, Fevers Mistaken in Doctrine and Practice (London: 1691), he argued that fever and a quickened pulse were symptoms of diseases, not diseases in themselves.
In a study of works on venereal disease published between 1700 and 1800, historian William Bynum noted that the participation of elite authors “gives the lie to the idea of a fringe monopoly in the treatment of what one anonymous pamphleteer actually called ‘the secret disease.’” W. F. Bynum, “Treating the Wages of Sin: Venereal Disease and Specialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Medical Fringe and Medical Orthodoxy, eds. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London: 1987), 11.
F. N. L. Poynter, “A Seventeenth-Century Medical Controversy: Robert Witty versus William Simpson,” in Science, Medicine and History, ed. E. A. Underwood (London: 1953), 2:72–81. See also Peter Elmer, “Medicine, Religion and the Puritan Revolution,” in The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, eds. Roger French and Andrew Wear (Cambridge: 1989), 30–1, and David Harley, “Honor and Property: The Structure of Professional Disputes in Eighteenth-Century English Medicine,” in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, eds. Andrew Cunningham and Roger Kenneth French (Cambridge: 1990), 143.
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: 1972), 236–7; Allen G. Debus, “Paracelsian Doctrine in English Medicine,” in Chemistry in the Service of Medicine, ed. F. N. L. Poynter (London: 1963), 5–26, 22. See also Andrew Wear, “The Failure of the Helmontian Revolution in Practical Medicine,” chapter 9 in Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: 2000), 353–98. Debus later argued for the survival of chemical medicine into the eighteenth century in Chemistry and Medical Debate: Van Helmont to Boerhaave (Canton, MA: 2001).
See the essays in Margaret J. Osler, ed., Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: 2000), esp. Jan W. Wojcik, “Pursuing Knowledge: Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton,” 183–200, and Lawrence M. Principe, “The Alchemies of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton: Alternate Approaches and Divergent Deployments,” 201–20. See also Jole Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine: The Ideas, Intellectual Contest, and Influence of Petrus Severinus (1540/2–1602 (Copenhagen: 2004), 249.
Peter Elmer, “Medicine, Science and the Quakers: The ‘Puritanism-Science’ Debate Reconsidered,” Journal of the Friends Historical Society (1981) 5:265–86. See also Jan V. Golinski, “A Noble Spectacle. Phosphorus and the Public Culture of Science in the Early Royal Society,” Isis (1989) 80:11–39, and Paul Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts (New Haven: 2013), 133. Monod argues that “alchemy with its veiled heterodoxy and radical social aspirations” was at odds with (polite) culture and entered a period of intellectual torpor but was not discredited.
J. Andrew Mendelsohn, “Alchemy and Politics in England, 1649–1665,” Past and Present (May 1992) 135:30–78.
Lawrence Principe, “A Revolution Nobody Noticed? Changes in Early Eighteenth-Century Chymistry” in same, ed., New Narratives in Eighteenth-Century Chemistry (Dordrecht: 2007), 1–22.
Anna Maria Eleanor Roos, The Salt of the Earth: Natural Philosophy, Medicine, and Chymistry in England, 1650–1750 (Leiden: 2007), 206.
On Starkey, a Harvard-educated Presbyterian who moved to London in 1650, see William R. Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: 1994). For his influence on Boyle, see William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: 2002).
Starkey’s work Introitus Apertus ad Occlusum Regis Palatium (1667) had nine Latin editions and was translated into English, French, German, and Spanish, William R. Newman, “Starkey [formerly Stirk], George [pseud. Eirenaeus Phila-lethes] (1628–1665),” ODNB (Oxford: 2004), online edn. May 2008 at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26315. See also same, Alchemy Tried in the Fire. For the interest of the English Swedenborgians in alchemy, see August Nor-denskiöld, “Spiritual Philosopher’s Stone: An Address to the True Members of the New Jerusalem Church, Revealed by the Lord in the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg” (London: 1789) rpt. on the Alchemy website at http://www.alchemywebsite.com/spiritual_stone.html, retrieved January 6, 2011, and David Ruderman, “Levison, Mordechai Gumpel Schnaber [pseud. George Levison] (1741–1797),” ODNB (Oxford: 2004), online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/72790. Levison was a student of John Hunter’s.
Elizabeth A. Williams, A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier (Aldershot, UK: 2003). See also Stephen Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility (Oxford: 2010), 212.
See also Elizabeth Furdell, chapter 7 “Medical Advertising: Publishing the Proprietary,” in Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England (Rochester: 2002), 135–54.
For possible sources of this expansive view of abiogenesis, see Nicholas S. Davidson, “‘Le plus beau et le plus meschant esprit que ie aye cogne’: Science and Religion in the Writings of Giulio Cesare Vanini, 1585–1619,” in Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion, eds. John Brooke and Ian MacLean (Oxford: 2005), 59–80, on 74–6.
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© 2016 Margaret DeLacy
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DeLacy, M. (2016). Populist Writing on Diseases in the Late Seventeenth Century. In: The Germ of an Idea. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-57529-6_3
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