Abstract
This chapter is about the commerce between physicians and patients, angels and demons, and the living and the dead. In 1656 Nicholas Culpeper, the prolific medical author and audacious critic of the College of Physicians, spoke from the grave. He had been dead for two years, and his voice issued from a brief, satirical pamphlet called Mr Culpeper’s Ghost.1 His ghost affirms that alchemy provides a key to understanding natural philosophy and to preparing medicaments. He also wonders whether chymical remedies are appropriate for all cases, or whether conventional Galenic and Hippocratic ones are more reliable.2 He began to have these doubts when on a walk through heaven he bumped into Robert Wright, former apothecary to Robert Fludd. Fludd was an eminent London physician and prolific philosophical author who had died in 1637. ‘[T]hough a Trismegistian-Platonick-Rosy-crucian Doctor’;, Wright reported of his employer, he ‘gave his Patients the same kind of Galenical Medicaments, which other Physitians in the Town ordinarily appointed’. Even when he himself was ill, Wright insisted to the ghost, Fludd only used Galenic therapeutics.3
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Notes
Mr Culpeper’s Ghost may have been written by Culpeper’s publisher, Peter Cole. It seems to have been issued on its own (Wing C7523), to have been appended to several of Cole’s productions (Wing P3328, C7549), and to have been re-set at least once (compare Wing P3328 and C7549). On ghost pamphlets, see J. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003).
Culpeper’s Ghost, 6. On the work, see: A. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy (Mineola, NY, 1977), 249–50;
W. Huffman, Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance (1988), 19–20.
See Mary Fissell’s essay in this volume and C. Webster, The Great lnstauration, (1975), 264–73.
C. Irvine, Medicia Magnetica: Or, The Rare and Wonderful Art of Curing by Sympathy (Edinburgh, 1656), 23. On this text see Note 63 below.
L. Kassell, ‘The Economy of Magic in Early Modern England’, in M. Pelling and S. Mandelbroteeds, The Practice of Reform in Health, Medicine, and Science, 1500–2000 (Aldershot, 2005).
A. Debus, The English Paracelsians (1965), 142–5;
C. Webster, ‘Alchemical and Paracelsian Medicine’, in C. Webster ed., Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979).
On Fludd, see Huffman, Fludd; Debus, English Paracelsians (1965);
Debus, The Chemical Philosophy (Mineola, NY, 1977);
F. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago, 1964);
idem, The Art of Memory (1966);
P. Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth Century England (New Haven, 1999);
R. Westman, ‘Nature, Art, and Psyche: Jung, Pauli, and the Kepler-Fludd Polemic’, in B. Vickers ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984). On the weapon salve, Stuart Clark concludes that it attracted so much attention because scholars wanted to know ‘On which philosophy is this remedy based?’ Thinking with Demons (Oxford, 1997), 269–70.
M Fludd, Doctor Flvdds Answer vnto M. Foster Or, The Sqvesing of Parson Fosters Sponge (1631), sig. [A3v].
See L. Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London (Oxford, 2005), 152; Pelling, Conflicts, 97–8 and passim.
Foster, Sponge, sigs. A2v, B1. Foster dedicated the work to Robert Dormer, first Earl of Carnarvon, a rising courtier with substantial holdings in Buckinghamshire (ODNB) and to the prominent surgeons Richard Wateson, Joseph Fenton, William Clowes Jr. and James Molines, all officers in the Barber-Surgeons’ Company in the 1620s and 1630s, with Wateson and Clowes also holding royal offices, as well as Scott and Charley: S. Young, The Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London (1890), 8. Thanks to Margaret Pelling for help in identifying Charley.
Fludd, Anatomœ: amphitheatrum (Frankfurt, 1623), 236–9; see also Debus, ‘Robert Fludd and the Use of William Gilbert’s De Magnete in the Weapon Salve Controversy’, JHM, 19 (1964) 392, 394.
On Fludd and the weapon salve controversy, see esp. Debus, Chemical Philosophy, 279–90 and Debus, ‘Fludd’. See also W. F. Bynum, ‘The Weapon Salve in Seventeenth Century English Drama’, JHM, 21 (1966); Daniel Stolzenberg, ‘The Sympathetic Cure of Wounds’ (M.A. thesis, Stanford University, 1999) (which the author kindly sent me along with further references).
C. Z. Camenietzki, ‘Jesuits and Alchemy in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Ambix, 48 (2001). See also Debus, ‘Fludd’, 390–2; Debus, Chemical Philosophy, 246, 303ff.; W. Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont (Cambridge, 1982), 8–13; Stolzenberg, ‘Sympathetic Cure of Wounds’; L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1923–41), vols. 6–8, passim.
Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (1811), vol. 1, 503–4, cited in Huffman, Fludd, 174–5; cf. Flvdds Answer, 47.
For magnetical medicine that predates the Paracelsian weapon salve, see Pliny, Natural History, bk. 36, chs. 16–17; William Gilbert, De Magnete (1600), bk. 1, chs. 1, 14, 15. For broader discussions about magnetical medicine, see: Debus, ‘Fludd’, 389n; H. Schott, ‘Paracelsus and van Helmont on Imagination’, in G. William and C. Gunnoe eds, Paracelsian Moments (Kirksville, MO, 2002).
On remedies and ingredients: C. Webster, ‘William Harvey and the Crisis of Medicine in the Jacobean Age’, in J. Bylebyl ed., William Harvey and His Age (Baltimore, 1979), 11–14; Stolzenberg, ‘Sympathetic Cure of Wounds’; Thorndike, Magic, vol. 8, 413–20; A. Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 2.
Kenelm Digby, A Late Discourse … Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy, trans. R. White (1658), 11–14, 5–6; ODNB.
See also Nathaniel Highmore, A Discourse of the Cure of Wounds by Sympathy, appended to The History of Generation (1651), 134. See also Stolzenberg, ‘Sympathetic Cure of Wounds’; Thorndike, Magic, vol. 7, 503–8.
Andreas Tentzel, Medicina Diastatica (Jena, 1629);
trans. Ferdinando Parkhurst, Medicina Diastatica or Sympatheticall Mumie (1653).
On Tentzel, see Thorndike, Magic, vol. 8, 414–15. Tentzel abstracts Paracelsus’s teachings on mummy, and I suspect that he is borrowing Petrus Severinus’s notion of transplantation as a theory of morbidity and applying it to the production of remedies, on which see J. Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine (Copenhagen, 2004), 177, 183–5 and passim. Perhaps there is a longer-term history to be written about a shift from exotic to local to domestic ingredients.
See Debus, ‘Fludd’; S. Pumfrey, Latitude and the Magnetic Earth (Cambridge, 2002).
Foster, Sponge, sig. A3. On the popularity of the weapon salve, see K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, 1973 [1971]), 225.
John Evans, The Universall Medicine: Or, the Virtues of the Magneticall, or Antimoniall Cup (1642), sig. C3v.
Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 248. Earlier Fludd reported that he had cured himself of a persistent ache in the back of his hand by anointing it with the ‘crude quintessential balme of wheat’, though he regretted not pursuing the virtues of this substance with further experiments: Fludd, ‘A Philosophical Key’, in A. Debus ed., Robert Fludd and his Philosophical Key (New York, 1979), f. 56v, cited in Huffman, Fludd, 23.
Ashm. 358.7, pp. 88–91 (quotation p. 89). The two 1656 editions are Boulton, Medicina Magica (Wing 3833A) and Irvine, Medicina Magnetica (Wing I1053). A variant of Boulton mistakenly records ‘1665’ on the title page (Wing B3833B). These are variants of the same text. Ashm. 358.7, pp. 1–108 is at least partially in Ashmole’s hand, with corrections by him. He completed his transcription in July 1648 (C. H. Josten ed., Elias Ashmole, Autobiographical and Historical Notes, Correspondence, and Other Sources (Oxford, 1966), vol. 2, 490).
Authorship of the work has been erroneously attributed to him: W. Black, A Descriptive, Analytical and Critical Catalogue of the Manuscripts Bequeathed unto the University of Oxford by Elias Ashmole (Oxford, 1845), 270. BL, MS Sloane 1321 is similar to Ashm. 358.7, and lacks date, title and author; BL, Sloane 2220, ff. 251v-65 contains only the aphorisms and conclusions (cf. Thorndike, Magic, vol. 7, 320, n. 219). BL, Sloane 643 ff. 1–17b contains Dr S. Bellingham’s extracts from Boulton’s edition. These texts are discussed in: Thorndike, Magic, vol. 8, 418–21 and ODNB, s.n.
De Medicina Magnetica libri III (Frankfurt, 1679). Its publisher corresponded with Henry Oldenburg about the text in 1677 (A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall eds, The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg (1986), vol. 13, 339–40). On this edition, see: Thorndike, Magic, vol. 8, 419–20. For evidence of the confusion about the authorship of the various versions of this text, see: BL, Sloane 696, ff. 2, 18v, 20.
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Kassell, L. (2007). Magic, Alchemy and the Medical Economy in Early Modern England: The Case of Robert Fludd’s Magnetical Medicine. In: Jenner, M.S.R., Wallis, P. (eds) Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591462_5
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