The_Invention_of_Surgery

FOUR

The Rise of Science

“Let us hope ... there may spring helps to man, and a line and

race of inventions that may in some degree subdue and

overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity.”

—Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, 1620

“Their first purpose was no more, than onely [sic] the

satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet

one with another, without being ingag’d [sic] in the passions,

and madness of that dismal Age.”^1

—Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 1667

On a sunny spring morning in London 1715, a group of young scientists
gathered at the world’s greatest clubhouse for insatiably curious people.
Weeks before, the astronomer Edmund Halley had issued a bold claim: he
had carefully reviewed the star charts, calculated the courses of the sun
and the moon, and was predicting, with startling bravado, that a total solar
eclipse would engulf the city of London on the morning of April 22. Come
to the Royal Society’s home on Crane Court—he bade the virtuosi—and
witness the spectacle with me.
There are apocryphal stories of ancient stargazers predicting eclipses;
usually these prophecies were stated in months, if not years. Eclipses are
not altogether rare; such predictions were not completely daring.
Alternatively, Halley (the one member of the Royal Society who could
interface with the brilliant and testy Isaac Newton) was inviting the