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Abstract
In Occasional Reflections upon the Accidents of an Ague (1665), Robert Boyle investigates the symptoms, signs, and causes of a vexing quartan fever. Boyle’s sickness inspires an exploration of the promises and perils of medicine, in which he tests both regimen and remedy. As he writes through his suffering, Boyle recognises that the eclecticism, eloquence, and flexibility of medical thought provide ways of preserving and re-describing agency and interest, ways of shaping and organising the self. As an “Anglican patient,” Boyle probes counsel, temperance, repentance, and fears of relapse, seeking a via media between enlisting medical assistance and enjoining spiritual rectitude, between curing and caring. His meditations interiorise the world in order to discover the social dimensions, and shared vocabularies, of suffering and the self, the latter embedded in conversations devoted to cure.
Keywords:
Acknowledgements
I thank both the reviewers and the editors of this journal for their criticisms and suggestions. The paper is dedicated to Jeremy Maule.
Notes
1. Petty concludes that remedies are quite like “Vandijk’s Pencills & Pallet, in the hands of a bungling Painter” (Boyle, Correspondence of Robert Boyle, vol. 1, 142–144). Boyle agrees that “it oftentimes happens, that diseases, that seem of a contrary nature, may proceed from the same cause variously circumstanced” (Boyle, Works of Robert Boyle, vol. 3, 473, 458).
2. The “ingenious Dr. Highmore” (Boyle, Correspondence of Robert Boyle, vol. 2, 307) published The History of Generation in 1651, which he dedicated to Boyle.
3. Evelyn, Letterbooks of John Evelyn, vol. 2, 1084.
4. The term is late eighteenth-century, from the German pathographie, but was popularised by Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness.
5. On this history, see Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, and the fortunes of meditation in early modern philosophy, see Rorty, “Experiments in Philosophic Genre.”
6. “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead” (KJV).
7. See Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, and Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State.
8. Henry, “The Matter of Souls,” 90; see also Park, “The Organic Soul.”
9. Baxter, Treatise of Self-Denial, 90–93, and see, too, Edward Reynolds’ early Self-Deniall: Opened and Applyed, first published in 1645, reprinted in 1652 and 1659. Reynolds argues for the necessity of excising self-love, lust, and passions as aspects of our natural dispositions, lest they “return … to their original state and strength again” (6, 8). The “highest & noblest disposition” excludes “all self-respects in every thing,” especially the passions, “having much of mist and darknesse in them” (24, 46).
10. The Dayly Reflection in Boyle, Early Essays and Ethics, 208.
11. Jay, Songs of Experience. While in the later seventeenth century “experience” was transformed into experiment – an event determined by its explanations – earlier explorations of experience suggest an attention to embodiment, and thus to both medicine and rhetoric as interventionist disciplines; see Dear, Discipline and Experience, and, for embodiment as an ongoing concern of early modern science, Science Incarnate.
12. Solomon, Fictions of Well-Being, 95–96.
13. Park, “Rediscovery of the Clitoris,” 173.
14. Mikkeli, Hygiene, passim.
15. For Carlo Ginzburg, the “future epistemological essence of the humane sciences was already being formulated in … discussions on the ‘uncertainty’ of medicine” (“Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in his Myths, Emblems, Clues, 114). Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic, argues for the “fundamental place of medicine in the over-all architecture of the human sciences” because “it is closer than any of them to the anthropological structure that sustains them all” (197–198).
16. Temkin, Galenism, 179; see also 135, 165.
17. Martensen, “Alienation and the Production of Strangers,” 163; Charleton, A Brief Discourse, 41. Boyle offers “such a free and inquisitive age as this” in his manuscript letter “Considerations About the received Galenicall Methodus Medendi,” printed as appendix two in Hunter, “Boyle versus the Galenists,” 353. Robert G. Frank argues clearly: “Before the mid-seventeenth century, anatomical inquiry had occupied a modest and peripheral, albeit slowly improving, place in the landscape of medical knowledge. Thereafter it grew explosively” (Frank, “Viewing the Body,” 66–67).
18. Di Capoa, Art of Physic, 17, preface sig. B2r, 4.
19. For a full argument about medical uncertainty, and relevant literature, see Pender, “Examples and Experience.”
20. See Patey, Probability and Literary Form, 64.
21. Or possibly one of the febres confusae, which were amorphous in contemporary nosology; see Jarcho, “History of Semitertian Fever,” and the entire collection, Theories of Fever. David Harley has warned that retrospective diagnosis is “deeply misleading not only because it relies on naive acts of translation but also because it privileges supposedly stable modern categories” (Harley, “Social Construction of Sickness and Healing,” 419).
22. Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, 185–186. Ten editions appeared between 1583 and 1639.
23. The phrase is Don G. Bates’, “Thomas Willis and the Fevers Literature,” 50, and see Lonie, “Fever Pathology,” both in Theories of Fever from Antiquity to the Enlightenment.
24. Jonstonus, Idea of Practical Physick, vol. 7, 32.
25. “Galenicall Methodus Medendi,” printed in Hunter, “Galenists,” 359.
26. The term denotes a broad concern with hygiene and regimen that speaks to disease and distemper as problems not only of medical categorisation and therapy but also of agency; see Pender, “Subventing Disease.”
27. Burnet, A Sermon, 36: “the tenderness of his Nature made him less able to endure the exactness of Anatomical Dissections, especially of living Animals, though he knew these to be the most instructing.”
28. Boyle’s attention to medicine has been widely recognised; see, for example, King, “Robert Boyle as an Amateur Physician,” which treats Boyle as a medical “practitioner, consultant, and researcher”; Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, esp. 92ff. and 122ff.; Kaplan, Divulging of Useful Truths in Physick, which presents Boyle as rather too accommodating; and Hunter, “Galenists,” which corrects Kaplan and others. Hunter’s biography, Boyle: Between God and Science, treats mainly Boyle’s penchant for medical reform (see, for example, 160–163, 203).
29. Hartlib, Samuel, Chymical, Medicinal, and Chyrurgical Addresses, 140ff. (Boyle’s piece, Communication of Secrets and Receits in Physick, is 113–150).
30. Hunter, “Galenists,” 325; see also Hunter, “Boyle (1627–1691): A Suitable Case for Treatment?,” and Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 155–156 for a concise rehearsal of Boyle’s major illnesses. See also Feingold’s damning review of Shapin, “When Facts Matter.”
31. “Considerations & Doubts,” quoted Hunter, “Galenists,” 351; cf. “Galenicall Methodus Medendi,” in ibid., 357, 361.
32. “Considerations & Doubts,” printed in Hunter, “Galenists,” 350.
33. Thomas Gale, Certaine Works of Chiurgerie, 29r-v, 77r-v, 79r, 80r.
34. Kudlein argues that “one has to keep in mind that in all these cases, ‘indication’ does not mean a mere ‘sign’ but rather an action (for instance, ‘indicatio symptomatica’ is not to be understood as ‘what the symptoms show’; actually, it points to the treatment of certain symptoms of the disease in question)” (Kudlein, “‘Endeixis’,”103, 105–106). The term was used in legal contexts as well.
35. Inst. Log. 11.1, quoted in Galen, On the Therapeutic Method, 204; see Durling, “‘Endeixis’ as a Scientific Term,” 112–113 and Pender, “Between Medicine and Rhetoric.”
36. Barnes, “Galen on Logic and Therapy,” 99–100.
37. Garcia-Ballester, “Galen as Medical Practitioner,” 34–35; Hankinson, “Introduction,” in Galen, On the Therapeutic Method, xxviii.
38. See von Staden, “Anatomy as Rhetoric,” 63–64. Staden cites Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 5.9.1 and Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1393a19–1401a.
39. See Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 2.101, in Sextus Empiricus, Sextus Empiricus, vol. 1, 215. On indications in this context, see Manetti, Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity, 100–103, and on the influence of Sextus, see Kahn, Prudence and Skepticism, esp. 119ff.
40. On this diffusion of early modern Galenism, see Temkin, Galenism, Wear, “Galen in the Renaissance,” 229–267. O’Malley, English Medical Humanists treats Galenism in sixteenth-century England (3–25).
41. The OED records its derivation from sixteenth-century French surgeon Ambroise Paré. See, too Galen, Galens Art of Physic, 45–46, 83–83, etc.
42. Anonymous, A Physical Dictionary. See the entries under indication in McConchie, Lexicography and Physicke.
43. Jonstonus, Idea of Practical Physick, 4.1ff.
44. Hunter, “Galenists,” 326.
45. Wainwright, Mechanical Account of the Non-Naturals, sig. A2v. See also Harris, Pharmacologia Anti-Empiric, 36.
46. See van der Eijk, Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity, the finest work on ancient medical thought to date.
47. Tracy, Physiological Theory and the Doctrine of the Mean, esp. 276ff., and van der Eijk, Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity, esp. 206–237.
48. Parker, Nature and Extent of the Divine Dominion, 65–67. The whole passage, 65ff., is germane.
49. “For I consider the Body of a living man, not as a rude heap of Limbs and Liquors, but as an Engine consisting of several parts so set together, that there is a strange and conspiring communication betwixt them, by vertue whereof, a very weak and inconsiderable Impression of adventitious matter upon some one part may be able to work on some other distant part, or perhaps on the whole Engine, a change far exceeding what the same adventitious Body could do upon a Body not so contriv’d” (3.445).
50. Boyle notes that, as a young man, he “became in love with the Stoicall Philosophy”; see Golinski, “The Care of the Self,” 133.
51. This formulation, from Elyot’s Castel of Helth, sig. Bir, is typical. The controversy over the term itself has been explored by Rather, “‘Six Things Non-Natural’,” Jarcho, “Galen’s Six Non-Naturals,” Bylebyl, “Galen on the Non-Natural Causes,” Niebyl, “The Non-Naturals,” and Burns, “The Non-Naturals.” The non-naturals have been explored in relation to eighteenth-century French thought by Emch-Dériaz, “The Non-Naturals Made Easy,” and in contexts ancient and modern by Berryman, “Tradition of the ‘Six Things Non-Natural’.”
52. “No Study is so necessary as to know our selves; no Schoole-master is so diligent, so vigilant, so assiduous, as Adversity” (Sermons of John Donne, 9.257).
53. See, for example, Kargon, “Acceptance of Epicurean Atomism in England,” which briefly treats Gassendi, too, and the erudite chapters concerning Boyle and chymistry in Newman, Atoms and Alchemy, 157–215.
54. See Des Chene, Physiologia, 59–60; see 179 on Aristotelian actualisation of a potentia and teleology.
55. Jonstonus, Idea of Practical Physick, 20; cf. Fenner, Treatise of the Affections, 108; Diemerbroeck, Anatomy of Human Bodies, 343; Willis, Two Discourses, 55 and Willis, Five Treatises, 31; and, in general, see Pender, “Rhetoric, Grief, and the Imagination.”
56. Daniel Sennert, The Institutions or Fundamentals of the Whole Art, 266.
57. James, Passion and Action, passim.
58. See Lawrence M. Principe, “Virtuous Romance and Romantic Virtuoso: The Shaping of Robert Boyle’s Literary Style,” 377–397.
59. Aretology, in Harwood, Early Essays, 64.
60. On the history of the perception of pain in the period, see Sense of Suffering.
61. Quoted in Hunter, “Suitable Case for Treatment?” 266; see Hunter, “Casuistry in Action.”
62. See Pender, “Heat and Moisture, Rhetoric and Spiritus.”
63. Anonymous, Anthropologie Abstracted, vol. 58, 100. A preface by the important printer Henry Herringman states that the work was authored by a physician, “esteemed … as one of the most hopefull of his Profession” (sig. A2v).
64. Temkin, Double Face of Janus, esp. 441ff.
65. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1.1.2.2, 129.
66. A. B., Sick Mans Rare Jewel, 19.
67. See, for example, Principe, “Virtuous Romance and Romantic Virtuoso” and Harwood’s erudite introduction to Early Essays.
68. To point to just three important examples of this argument: Anna Bryson, “Rhetoric of Status”; James, Passion and Action; and Shapin, “Eat Like a Gentleman.”
69. Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism.” Fenner, Treatise of the Affections, notes the controversy between “the Philosophers, the Stoicks, and the Peripatetiques, concerning the affections” and argues that the Stoics were wrong to consider all passions unnatural, since they were “implanted in our hearts” by God, but certain passions, like malice and envy, cannot “be regulated, nor guided by moderation, but are quite to be rooted out” (54–56). And there seems to be a difference between tranquillity, a term popular in the early sixteenth century, and constancy – the latter a neo-Stoic notion popularised after the religious upheavals of the mid- to late sixteenth century.
70. Shapin, “Eat Like a Gentleman,” 22, Golinski, “The Care of the Self,” and Hunter, “How Boyle Became a Scientist.”
71. Bacon, Works, vol. 3, 438. Hirschman, Passions and Interests, explores this concept in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (esp. 20–31). Burton mentions driving one passion out with another (2.2.6.2:477).
72. Hall, Heaven Upon Earth, in Works, 6.17.
73. On Boyle and enargeia, see Wintroub, “Looking Glass of Facts.” I agree with Wintroub’s assertion that enargeia “was a technique of making knowledge mobile; as such it was a means of extending the validity of truths and practices beyond the specific localities of their production through the multiplication of the experience of being an actual witness” (206).
74. Quintilian argues that images, and one who is able to conjure those that “seem actually to be before our very eyes,” have enormous power over the emotions; such power rests on enargeia, called illustration or evidence (illustratio et evidentia) in Latin (6.2.25–33). Enargeia is a palpable depiction that vividly “brings before the eyes” attributes, actions, or actualities, and it has an irresistible, emotional gravity. By making the absent present, it plays strongly on the passions of the audience (Institutio, 6.2.29, 32); see Newman, “Aristotle’s Notion of ‘Bringing-Before-the-Eyes’.”
75. Harwood, “Science Writing and Writing Science,” 44, 38.
76. Aretology, in Harwood, Early Essays, 52
77. Kroll, Material Word, 22. See Nienkamp, Internal Rhetorics, which, for my concerns, treats only Francis Bacon.
78. Wintroub, “Looking Glass of Facts,” 211, and see 190, 194.
79. See, for example, Serjeantson, “Proof and Persuasion,” and James, Passion and Action, 208–224. In a more recent survey of early modern science, Smith does not treat rhetoric, and treats medicine hardly at all (“Science on the Move”).
80. Moss, Novelties in the Heavens, 2. Although her work is devoted to Copernicus’ reception, her point is general; see also Lonie, “Fever Pathology,” who claims that elegance and clarity of style, in part, were responsible for Fernel’s popularity in the late sixteenth century; Gross, The Rhetoric of Science; Franklin, Science of Conjecture, esp. 102–130; and spurring work by Jones, Good Life in the Scientific Revolution, esp. 55–86.
81. Principe, “Virtuous Romance and Romantic,” 393, 389; see also 379, 387.
82. Coreanu, Regimens of the Mind, 3. Making a broad case for the ways in which theological, anthropological, and “scientific” traditions coalesce in the seventeenth century, Coreanu investigates these “anthropological-therapeutic questions” (47) in relation to Boyle, and concludes that Boyle justifies experimental inquiry, in part, by his “concern with the proper regimen of the mind,” a central constituent of which is proper self-estimation (126, 117).
83. See Pender, “The Open Use of Living.”
84. Hunter, “A Suitable Case for Treatment?,” 267; Harwood, “Science Writing,” 42.
85. Shapin, Social History of Truth, 152ff. Boyle mentions his melancholy in a letter to his sister, Lady Ranelagh (Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 1, 68).
86. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 74.
87. Principe, “Virtuous Romance and Romantic Virtuoso,” 392.
88. Baglivi, Practice of Physick, 170–171.
89. de Nantes, Coloquio del Conocimiento de Sí Mismo (1587), quoted in Flynn, “Taming Anger’s Daughters,” 875.
90. Griffith, A la Mode Phlebotomy, 184.
91. Mandeville, Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, 43, 41. One might even get sick from reading medical texts: As the character Misomedon conveys, when he “grew better [he] found, that all this had been occasion’d by reading of the Lues, when I began to be ill, which has made me resolve since, never to look in any Book of Physick again, but when my Head is in very good order” (44).
92. Richardson, Benefite of Affliction, 23, 67, 35, 34, 94.
93. Rogers, Practical Discourses, 93. Rogers clearly read Boyle closely (143, 145–146, 224–225).
94. Starobinski and Gallucci, “The Body’s Moment.”
95. Among the most important studies are Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning; Ferry, “Inward” Language; Barker, Tremulous Private Body; Maus, Inwardness and Theatre; Grossman, Story of All Things; Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves.
96. Geertz, “From the Native’s Point of View,” 229.
97. For the latter, see Ashworth, Jr., “Natural History and the Emblematic World View.”
98. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 188–189.
99. Taylor makes the point most emphatically with respect to politics: The modern notion of subjectivity allowed for a “free, disengaged individual” to offer political consent in the form of contracts; consent was produced only to be given away (see 193–198).
100. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 346–347, 341 (2.27.26–27, 17).
101. Romanell, John Locke and Medicine, 41ff. Romanell treats extensively Locke’s relationship to Boyle.
102. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 229, 335 (2.20.3, 2.27.9).
103. In early modernity, “we see an attempt to establish a territory of enquiry, in which the passionate engagement with the external world, both for itself and as the depository for the conflict-ridden internal world, can be moderated” (Figlio, “Psychoanalysis and the Scientific Mind,” 306).
104. As Golinski argues, the “care of self” was critical to Boyle’s identity and natural philosophical practice (Golinski, “The Care of the Self,” 135).
105. Aretology, in Harwood, Early Essays, 94ff., 90.