Abstract
This paper discusses some interconnections between explanations of pain and the experience of pain in seventeenth-century England by focusing on an unusually well-documented episode in the history of pain relief: the visit to England in 1665 by the Irish healer, Valentine Greatrakes. This is an episode which captures the complexity of the early modern medico-philosophical setting and the human experience of illness. I review the role of Henry Stubbe and discuss the role of pain in Anne Conway’s philosophy to argue that her philosophical treatise reflects her acquaintance with medical theories which were in circulation at the time of the Greatrakes affair.”
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Notes
- 1.
Hutton 2004. Greatrakes was not the only healer of this kind. Another was Matthew Coker (Nicolson and Hutton 1992, 98ff). Unlike Greatrakes, Coker laid claim to prophetic powers and the ability to cast out evil spirits. Although More’s former tutor, Robert Gell, believed Coker’s cures to be miraculous, More offered a naturalistic, psychosomatic explanation of Coker’s gift, in terms of what he called a ‘sanative contagion’, an explanation which is echoed in accounts of Greatrakes’ healing by Lord Conway, George Rust and even Henry Stubbe (Crocker 2005, 115–18). In a scholium his Enthusiasmus Triumphatus More recounts his telling Boyle of his explanation (More 1712, p. 51).
- 2.
- 3.
I.e. something akin to Juvenal’s saying, ‘mens sana corpore sano’. There is no definition of psychosomatosis in the Oxford English Dictionary. But the term has modern usage in the literature of psychology, where its associations are with mental illness.
- 4.
Bacon 1640, 183.
- 5.
More 1690, 147–8.
- 6.
Hunter 2009.
- 7.
Nicolson and Hutton 1992.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
Anon. 1666; Greatrakes 1723.
- 12.
Crocker 2005.
- 13.
- 14.
Nicolson and Hutton 1992, 272. Explanations of Greatrakes’s cures were complicated by the fact that he had something of a controversial background, partly because of his claim to have cured the ‘king’s evil’, but also because of his radical associations (he was a friend of the regicide Robert Phaire in whose regiment he served during the Civil War, and was acquainted with Lodowick Muggleton (Elmer 2013)).
- 15.
Stubbe 1666, 4.
- 16.
Ibid., 39–40.
- 17.
Greatrakes 1666, 61.
- 18.
Ibid., 41.
- 19.
Ibid., 3.
- 20.
Stubbe 1666, 10–14.
- 21.
Ibid., 10.
- 22.
Ibid., 10–11.
- 23.
Willis’s De fermentatione was translated into English in The remaining medical works, in 1681, and again, by Samuel Pordage in 1684.
- 24.
Willis 1681, 9.
- 25.
Ibid., 10.
- 26.
Stubbe 1666, 26–7.
- 27.
Boyle 2001.
- 28.
Lord Conway to Major Rawdon, 17th August 1658 (Hastings MSS, HA 14363).
- 29.
Hastings MSS, HA 14363.
- 30.
Nicolson and Hutton 1992, 94ff.
- 31.
Ibid., 448.
- 32.
Ward 1839, 549 and 551–2.
- 33.
Hutton 2004, chapter 5.
- 34.
- 35.
Conway 1996, 58–9.
- 36.
Ibid., 43.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
- 40.
Conway 1996, 38.
- 41.
Ibid., 27.
- 42.
Ibid. The reference to ferment is lost in the 1690 English translation where the Latin ‘tanquam pars fermenti ad fermendam totam massma’ is translated as ‘so was as that little Leaven that changed the whole Lump’ (Conway 1998, 18 and 129).
- 43.
Conway, 1996, 43.
- 44.
Willis 1681, 10.
- 45.
- 46.
The reason for Stubbe turning on More was not indiscriminate polemical petulance, but out of a sense of betrayal. He essentially accused More of bad faith in siding with Glanvill and the Royal Society, having agreed with Stubbe (privately) that he shared his concerns about the atheistical tendencies of the mechanical philosophy. Stubbe’s polemics against Glanvill in fact contain the most devastating critique of More by any of his contemporaries.
- 47.
Hall 1679, Preface.
- 48.
Boyle 1772, 1: lxxi. It is not clear whether the letter was sent (Hunter 2009). For Boyle’s ‘Accounts of cures performed by Valentine Greatrakes during his visit to England in 1666’ in his Work Diary see WD-26 electronic edition http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/wd/view/view.html
- 49.
Boyle 1772, 1: lxxi.
- 50.
Hastings MSS HA 14550, 14,551. Viscount Conway expressed an interest in acquiring Stubbe’s books, noting that he had ‘a very great Library and very choice’ (Huntington Library Hastings MS HA 14554).
- 51.
Hastings MS HA 14506.
- 52.
Hutton 2004, chapter 5.
- 53.
Finch MS, DG7 Lit, 194–5.
- 54.
The experimental approach of the Accademia del Cimento, though not John Finch, is discussed in Boschiero 2007.
- 55.
Hutton 2004, chapter 5.
- 56.
Van Helmont 1694, Sherrer 1958; also Hutton 1996, 2004. This was one feature of his clinical method which, according to Van Helmont, did not meet with the approval of most doctors of his time. He says his method ‘would oblige them to abandon their accustomed method, and to new-model the whole system of their practise’ (Helmont 1694, sig. A45).
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Hutton, S. (2020). Making Sense of Pain: Valentine Greatrakes, Henry Stubbe and Anne Conway. In: Manning, G. (eds) Testimonies: States of Mind and States of the Body in the Early Modern Period. Archimedes, vol 57. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39375-5_6
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