154 • The AbyssRobert Boyle and his onetime assistant, the microscopist Robert Hooke. A
few physicians were also members, including Thomas Willis, whom the
ever-inquiring apothecary William Boghurst hailed as “that great ornament”
of Oxford University.^40 Curiously, the empirically minded Thomas Syden-
ham, although a friend of Robert Boyle, was not a member, nor was he sup-
portive of much of the virtuosi’s agenda.^41
At the society’s beginning in 1662 , its leading members were too young
and ambitious to bow to tradition. Halley was a mere twenty-seven, Wren
thirty, Boyle thirty-five, and Willis forty-one. Pepys observed some of their
demonstrations that were almost comical. “So out to Gresham College and
saw a cat killed with the Duke of Florence’s poison,” he wrote in his diary.
“And saw it proved that the oyle of Tobacco... [has] the same effect.” Many
experiments, however, had a high level of sophistication and possible appli-
cability. England was fast achieving prominence in experimental science:
Boyle proposed his signature gas laws, Hooke observed animal and plant
cells with a microscope, and Willis charted fevers and blood circulation in
the brain.^42
There had been setbacks, to be sure, especially in blood transfusion from
animal to animal and once from animal to human, which caused life-threat-
ening thrombosis and embolisms. Richard Lower transfused blood between
dogs, though not many survived. In a lighter vein, Pepys chuckled over the
prospect of transfusing blood from a Quaker to the archbishop of Canter-
bury. A later attempt by a Parisian experimenter to exchange blood between
an animal and a human resulted in the latter’s death, and such transfusions
were not tried again for two centuries.
Despite these failures the urge to explore continued, with anatomy high
on the list of experimental subjects, although its usefulness for advancing the
art of healing was controversial. Dr. Thomson believed that his own dissec-
tions helped the fight against disease, even as he castigated the Galenists for
wasting their time in “impertinent and superfluous searches in stinking car-
casses.” Their academically oriented anatomy, he charged, was meant only
“for ostentation and to get fame abroad.”^43 That was certainly not true of ex-
perimental dissections in the Baconian spirit. New treatments for kidney
stones and a better understanding of the role of the spleen in digestion un-
folded. Wren’s precise anatomical illustrations aided Willis in pinpointing
the brain’s arterial blood supply. Hooke saw “insects and worms” in body
fluids, tissues, and organs through his lens and joined Lower in blowing
“ayre” into the lungs of dogs whose blood had become blue from asphyxi-
ation. They observed that the blood turned bright red and sustained life