full bloom, and characters like Newton were the focus of debate in the
coffeehouses and homes of the great city.
Isaac Newton published his masterpiece, Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica, referred to simply as Principia, in 1687.
Fortunately for mankind, Halley, the skillful diplomat, was able to cajole
the reluctant Newton to share his ideas about mechanics and mathematics.
Principia is Newton’s magnum opus, one of the most important works in
the history of science. In it, Newton had painstakingly laid out, in
overwhelming intelligence and insight, the laws of physics, explaining
gravity, celestial motions, and why things work the way they do. Like
Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, it was hailed by everyone, read by
few, and understood by only a tiny handful. It set the stage for the
Scientific Revolution.
Newton would rise to become president of the Royal Society and
Master of the Mint of England. He died at age eighty-four having never
married and with no heirs. Deeply religious and dedicated to alchemy, he
was described by economist John Maynard Keynes as the “last of the
magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind
which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes
as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than ten
thousand years ago.”^30 However magical were his inclinations, he was
able to see a new “system of the world,” presenting the mathematical
framework necessary for all future advanced calculations, including the
mathematics required to launch spaceships to mingle with comets and
planets.
This is not a book about comets and spaceships, but it is about the birth
of science that gave support and foundation to the rise of medicine. And it
was the 17th-century scientists, most notably Bacon and Descartes and
Newton, who theorized that our world could be scientifically investigated
and codified. “Bacon may have been among the earliest, if not the first, of
Western philosophers to give to the concept of a law of nature the meaning
it came to acquire in the natural sciences. When he refers to law in
defining forms, it seems to be detached from any association with a divine
lawgiver, providential design or oversight, or teleological purpose.”^31
Descartes and Newton would rightly claim that their discoveries were
universal truths and laws; this mentality would open the door to the
modernization of medicine, and within a few decades of Newton’s death,