Notes to Pages 154–156 • 327- Sydenham denied the relevance of the microscope, was unenthusiastic about
Harvey’s theory of the circulation of blood, and refused to consider the practice of dis-
secting, not seeing its applicability to the cause or treatment of disease. His observa-
tions, he proudly said, stopped at the “outer husk of things.” See Kaplan,“Divulging
Useful Truths in Physick,” 146 – 49 , and Rather, “Pathology at Mid-century,” 73 – 75. - Pepys,Diary, 6 : 95. Traditional surveys of the history of medicine pay scant atten-
tion to the effect of the virtuosi on medicine. A good corrective is Wear, “Early Modern
Europe,” in Conrad et al.,The Western Medical Tradition, 340 – 59. One of the best intro-
ductions, focusing on Boyle, is Kaplan,“Divulging Useful Truths in Physick.” - Wear,Knowledge and Practice, 442 – 43.
- Robert Boyle to Henry Oldenburg, Sept. 30 , 1665 , RSL, Letter Book Supple-
ment, 2 : 37 – 38. - Boghurst,Loimographia, 98.
- See Kaplan,“Divulging of Useful Truths in Physick,” 1 – 4 , 128 – 30 ; Wear, “Early
Modern Europe,” 341 – 42 ; and Lester S. King, “Robert Boyle as an Amateur Physician,”
inMedical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England,William Andrews Clark Li-
brary Papers (Los Angeles, 1968 ), 23 – 41. - D. Coxe to Robert Boyle, Mar. 5 , 1665 / 6 , RSL, Letter Book Supplement, 2 : 64 – 65 ;
Kaplan,“Divulging Useful Truths in Physick,” 129 – 30.
48 .Boyle to Oldenburg, Aug. 27 , 1665 , RSL, Letter Book Supplement, 2 : 29 – 31 .How-
ever, Boyle was very cautious about plague antidotes whose advocates failed to spell out
“which way the medicine works.” And he was scathing in his denunciation of conven-
tional Galenic therapies in times of plague, “there being several Examples of those who
in infectious times have fallen into pestilential Fevers upon their having purged or bled
to prevent them... having excited and by degrees brought inwards those latent seeds of
contagion, which Nature might else have by degrees discharged by Transpiration.”
Boyle to Oldenburg, Sept. 30 , 1665 , RSL, Letter Book Supplement, 2 : 36 – 37. - Before 1665 Willis had published innovative treatises on fermentation and fevers,
muscular motion, and transmission by nerves. He is credited as the first to recognize
scarlet fever, and he detected sweetness in a patient’s urine, connecting it to diabetes. In
1664 , his crowning achievement came with Anatomy of the Brain,describing the vascu-
lar system at the base of the brain. Anatomical textbooks still refer to the “circle of Wil-
lis” circuit. - See Thomas Willis,A Plain and Easie Method for preserving those that are well from
the infection of the Plague(written in 1666 ; London, 1691 ), and Rather, “Pathology at
Mid-century.” Wear,Knowledge and Practice, 342 – 43 , offers a balanced evaluation of
Willis’s mix of innovation and traditionalism.
51 .The City Remembrancer: Being Historical Narratives of the Great Plague at London
(London, 1769 ), 130 – 31. - Marchamont Nedham,Medella Medicinae. A Plea for the free Profession, and a Ren-
ovation of the Art of Physic Tending to the Rescue of Mankind from the Tyranny of Diseases
(London, 1665 ), 193 – 94 ; Cook,Decline of the Old Medical Regime, 200.