Medicine in seventeenth century England

ALLEN G. DEBUS (editor), Medicine in seventeenth century England, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 1974, 8vo, pp. xiii, 485, illus., £8.50. Reviewed by Kenneth Dewhurst, D.Phil., M.Litt., F.R.C.Psych., The Manor House, Sandford-onThames, Oxford 0X4 4YN. A symposium has some merits but more disadvantages, and this collection of papers in honour of the late C. D. O'Malley is no exception to this generalization. Ideally a symposium gives scholars an opportunity to distil the quintessence of their deep labours and offer the grateful reader a succinct, savoury summary. Several of these essays fulfil this criterion, beginning with Lester S. King's lucid account of the transformation of Galenism under the seventeenth-century impact of corpuscular philosophy particularly well illustrated through the works of Robert Boyle. Another excellent summary based on much research is that of Allen G. Debus on the application of Paracelsian medicine in England as traced through the reformist writings of Noah Biggs' The vanity of the craft of physick (1651). James H. Cassedy's useful contribution on 'Medicine and the use of statistics' illuminates Graunt's work on the bills of mortality which swept away several seventeenth-century misconceptions. The commonest cause of death, for example, was "consumptions and coughs", and not the plague, which occupied fourth place. Graunt's analysis of the causes of death reveal that those due to the stone were decreasing while mortality from the gout remained steady, and after 1630, rickets entered the field as a "new" disease. Here we have an example of Bacon's injunction to count, measure and weigh data before drawing meaningful conclusions from them. But probably the best example of a summary based on deep scholarship is to be found in Rupert Hall's 'Medicine and the Royal Society'. He begins by studying the chemical remedies of Boyle and Willis in relation to corpuscular philosophy, and goes on to discuss the interpretation of physiological phenomena in terms of physio-chemical theories, in particular, the explosive theory of muscular contraction as expounded by Croone and Willis. Hall then probes the limitations of the experimental approach to medicine by means of blood transfusion experiments and various injection techniques and convincingly argues that knowledge was then too frail, and the basic research concepts nonexistent, to support such sophisticated inquiries. Hall distinguishes between the activities of the Fellows of the Royal Society and the history of that institution: he then lucidly discusses the relationship between the somewhat parochial activities of the College of Physicians and the international links of the Royal Society forged by the indefatigable industry of its secretary, Henry Oldenburg, over whose enormous correspondence Rupert and Marie Boas Hall have long devoted the fruits of their scholarship. These contributions all bear the stamp of authenticity, based as they are on sound, original research. But turning to A. H. T. Robb-Smith's paper on 'Cambridge medicine', our initial criterion has been cast aside. It was really quite unfair to invite one of the leading authorities on Oxford medicine to write about Cambridge, and Robb-Smith himself promptly acknowledges his indebtedness to the writings of Dr. Arthur Rook. But extracts of quaint and amusing archaisms are no substitute for