The Doctors Stumble• 155when air entered. This led to debates on where to find the healthiest air for
the blood and the other humors.
Within a few weeks of the plague’s entry to London in 1665 , the members
of the Royal Society had scattered to the four winds. But distance didn’t
hamper their communication. From Oxford, Robert Boyle corresponded
with the Royal Society’s secretary, Henry Oldenburg, who stayed on in
Westminster, and greeted such fellow refugees from the capital as Sir Wil-
liam Petty, John Graunt, and several doctors. Boyle offered hospitality at his
residence, and unofficial meetings of the society were held.^44
Though neither a physician nor a professor of medicine, Robert Boyle had
become an authority on the human body and disease. He combined old and
new medical concepts and forged connections between epidemic illness and
the environment. To replace the Galenic emphasis on fine-tuning the body
humors, Boyle adopted a new mechanical-corpuscular philosophy, which as-
sumed that all nature was composed of interacting particles, many of them
chemical in nature. By this theory subtle plague corpuscles penetrated the
body, corrupting or putrefying its own corpuscles. He suggested that chemi-
cally activated effluvia in the soil could be a prime source of these plague par-
ticles. And he engaged chemical physicians in exploring the possible role of
fermentation of the blood. Perhaps, he said, this raised the body temper-
ature, opening pores and releasing the poison.
Boyle’s ideas percolated in the medical marketplace. The apothecary Bog-
hurst hailed him as “that illustrious Virtuoso” and spoke of chemical plague
corpuscles invading the body from the “foeces of the Earth extracted into the
Ayre.” These plague seeds, Boghurst concluded, explained the horrific toll
from the infection better than did the weakness of an individual’s constitu-
tion or the air that people breathed: “The whole kindred [of a family] dying
of the Plague, were commonly taken all alike, affected alike, proceeded in
their sickness alike, lay the like tyme and dyed alike.”^45
Boyle talked to popular male and female healers and bent the ear of his ac-
ademically trained medical friends.^46 Reports reached Oxford of Valentine
Greatrakes, “the stroker,” who cured persons long afflicted with convulsions
by his touch. Boyle wondered if cures like this might be produced by way of
chemical substances on Greatrakes’s hands. Perhaps, he speculated, these
substances prompted the evacuation of morbific matter from the sufferer’s
body.^47
The intuitive Boyle left no stone unturned. He ran across an out-of-print
catalogue among his books, entitled “Of all the Simples and other easily pre-
parable medicines that had been found successful against the plague,” dated