Abstract
DeLacy reviews European developments in biology and microscopy and the reception of these ideas by members of the Royal Society during the years when the Society was publishing the letters of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. Fellows of the Society, including John Ray, Tancred Robinson, Martin Lister, and Edward Tyson, questioned whether any living entity could be spontaneously generated, forcing a reconsideration of ideas about the nature and origins of contagium vivum, or living contagion. Interest in the possible role of small “worms,” “animalcules,” or “insects” in spreading epidemics coincided with an international epizootic of cattle plague or rinderpest, which inspired a widespread discussion of the mechanism of contagion and the imposition of quarantines to contain the outbreak.
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Marina Benjamin, “Medicine, Morality and the Politics of Berkeley’s Tar-water,” in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, eds. Andrew Cunningham and Roger French (Cambridge: 1990), 165–93.
A. Rupert Hall, “Medicine and the Royal Society,” in Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Allen G. Debus (Berkeley: 1974), 421–2; and Richard Sorrenson, “Towards a History of the Royal Society in the Eighteenth Century,” N&R (1996) 50, no. 1:29–46, esp. 37–8. See also Lotte Mulligan and Glenn Mulligan, “Reconstructing Restoration Science: Styles of Leadership and Social Composition of the Early Royal Society,” Social Studies of Science (August 1981) 11, no. 3:327–64. The Mulligans argue that the Secretaries to the Society affected the composition of its membership and attribute an increase of medical members to Sloane.
For the importance of “weak ties” in a social network, and the even greater value of networks that join strong (face-to-face) and weak ties, see Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (New York: 2009), passim, esp. 158–67. For its application to the Royal Society, see David S. Lux and Harold J. Cook, “Closed Circles or Open Networks? Communicating at a Distance during the Scientific Revolution,” History of Science (1998) 36:179–211. See also Rhodri Hayward, “Emmanuel Mendes Da Costa (1717–1791),” in Travels of Learning: A Geography of Science in Europe, eds. Ana Simoes, Ana Carneiro, and Maria Paula Diogo (Dordrecht: 2003), 101–14; the work of Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall including M. B. Hall, “The Royal Society and Italy, 1667–1795,” N&R (1982) 37, no. 1:63–81; and Andrea Rusnock, “Correspondence Networks and the Royal Society, 1700–1750,” British Journal for the History of Science (1999) 32:155–69. I know of no comparable studies of early Enlightenment medicine, but see Marc Ratcliff, The Quest for the Invisible (Farnham, Surrey: 2009), for the pivotal role of communication networks in determining the selection of problems and the acceptance of findings in eighteenth-century microscopy.
Quoted by Lotte Mulligan and Glenn Mulligan, “Reconstructing Restoration Science,” 333, n. 55. For Lister’s theory that poisonous insects (or possibly venomous animals) originated attacks of smallpox and syphilis that ultimately became contagious, see Anna Marie Roos, Web of Nature: Martin Lister (16391712): The First Arachnologist (Leiden: 2011), 346–50.
Mulligan and Mulligan, “Reconstructing Restoration Science,” 334. See also Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: 1981), 44.
Sorrenson, “Royal Society.” See also Charles Weld, A History of the Royal Society, vol. 1 (London: 1848), chapters 13–16.
Sloane caused great offence when he published his work on Jamaican plants with the imprimatur of the Royal Society above that of the College of Physicians. Harold Cook, “Stubbe and the Virtuosi-Physicians,” in The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, eds. Roger French and Andrew Wear (Cambridge: 1989), 246–71, on 265. His election as President of the Society was opposed by its Tory members, including John Byrom. See also Sorrenson, “Royal Society,” 34.
A. Rupert Hall, “Medicine and the Royal Society,” in Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Alan Debus (Berkeley: 1974), 421–52.
Cecil Wall, H. Charles Cameron, and E. Ashworth Underwood, eds., A History of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London, 1617–1815, vol. 1 (London: 1963), 113.
George Clark, A History of the Royal College of Physicians of London (Oxford: 1964), 1:456.
Andrea Rusnock, ed., The Correspondence of James Jurin (1684–1750) (Amsterdam: 1996), 215: Jurin to Deidier, London, December 30, 1723. On Deidier, see chapter 9 and Raymond Williamson, “The Plague of Marseilles and the Experiments of Professor Anton Deidier on its Transmission,” Medical History (1958) 2, no. 4:237–52. Deidier had sent his papers to Dr. John Woodward, who brought them to the Society.
Sorrenson, “Royal Society,” Table 3, 37. Sorrenson includes pharmacy and vital statistics (bills of mortality) in this count. See also Susan Lawrence, Charitable Knowledge (Cambridge: 1996), passim, esp. 233–4.
See also Roy Porter, “The Early Royal Society and the Spread of Medical Knowledge,” in French and Wear, Medical Revolution, 272–93.
Dobell, Antony Van Leeuwenhoek and His ‘Little Animals,’ Being an Account of the Father of Protozoology and Bacteriology (New York: 1958), 25–6.
Howard Gest, “The Discovery of Microorganisms,” N&R (2004) 58:187–201.
Also referred to as Stefan or Steven Hamm or Ham. Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton: 1977), 132.
L. C. Palm, “Leeuwenhoek and Other Dutch Correspondents of the Royal Society,” N&R (1989) 43:191–207.
Charles F. Mullett, “The Cattle Distemper in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England,” Agricultural History (1946) 20:144–65, on 145. See also “An Abstract of a Letter from Dr. Wincler Chief Physitian of the Prince Palatine … to Dr. Fred. Slare … ” Philosophical Transactions (1683) 13:93–5. His name also appears as Winkler and Winckler.
Wilkinson, “Veterinary Cross-currents in the History of Ideas on Infectious Disease,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (November 1980) 73, no. 11:81827, on 821. Benjamin Marten, A New Theory of Consumptions: More Especially of a Phthisis or Consumption of the Lungs (London: 1720), 62. Cotton Mather also refers to it in “The Angel of Bethesda” and might have seen the letter in the Philosophical Transactions, but his reference seems to come from Marten. See Cotton Mather, “The Angel of Bethesda: An Essay upon the Common Maladies of Mankind,” ed. Gordon W. Jones (Barre, MA: 1972), 44.
Marie Boas Hall, “Frederick Slare, F.R.S. (1648–1727),” N&R (1992) 46:2341. See also Daniel L. Brunner, Halle Pietists in England: Anthony William Boehm and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (Göttingen: 1993), and William LeFanu, Nehemiah Grew, M.D., F.R.S.: A Study and Bibliography of his Writings (Detroit: 1990), 33–4.
Boehm wrote his influential Pietas Hallensis (1705) in Slare’s home. Brunner, Halle Pietists in England, 83. For Pietist influences on Cotton Mather, see below, chapter 8. Slare hoped to rationalize the pharmacopeia. His Experiments … upon … Bezoar-Stones (London: 1715) successfully debunked a favorite remedy of early modern physicians. A. C. Wootton, Chronicles of Pharmacy (London: 1910), 1:15–16. He experimented on phosphorus; chemists thought this newly discovered glowing and inflammable substance distilled from urine might represent the “vital spirit.” He was also interested in vital statistics; he published “An Extract of All Persons, That Did, in 1695, in Franckfort on the Maine, Consummate Matrimony, Receive Baptism, and Were Buried,” in the Philosophical Transactions (1695–7) 19:559–60.
M. F. Ashley Montagu, Edward Tyson, M.D., F.R.S., 1650–1708, and the Rise of Human and Comparative Anatomy in England … (Philadelphia: 1943), 146. In 1690/1 Tyson, Slare, Waller, and Hooke were named to assist Halley in editing the revived Philosophical Transactions; Montagu, Tyson, 202. Tyson and Slare had a long and cordial relationship.
Frederick Slare, “An Experiment … in which a Surprizing Change of Colour … was Exhibited … by the Admission of Air Only,” Philosophical Transactions (October 1693) 17:898–908, online from the Royal Society website at http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/17/192-206/898.full.pdf+html (or search under “Slate”). See also Hall, “Slare,” 34.
The entry for Slare in the (old) Dictionary of National Biography by Philip Joseph Hartog concluded that he “occupies a unique position between that of the earlier physicians, who often neglected clinical observations for fantastic interpretations of chemical and physiological experiments, and the almost exclusively clinical school of Sydenham.” Its replacement, by Lawrence M. Principe, emphasizes Slare’s chemical work and does not mention Sydenham, “Frederick Slare (1646–1727),” ODNB (Oxford: 2004), online at http://www.Oxforddnb.com/view/article/35715. The original entry can be found in the “Archive” to this entry. See chapter 7 for Wagstaffe’s attack on Thomas Dover.
Mark Ratcliff, Quest for the Invisible, 33–50. See also John Farley, The Spontaneous Generation Controversy from Descartes to Oparin (Baltimore: 1977).
Marcia Ramos-e-Silva, “Giovan Cosimo Bonomo (1663–1696): Discoverer of the Etiology of Scabies,” International Journal of Dermatology (1998) 38, no. 8:62530, online from the History of Dermatology Society at http://www.dermato.med.br/hds/bibliography/1998giovan-cosimo-bonomo.htm; and Reuben Friedman, “Bonomo and Cestoni: The Dispute Concerning Their Identity, the Authorship of the ‘Letter to Redi,’ and the Credit for the Discovery of the Acarian Origin of Scabies,” in Abraham Levinson Anniversary Volume: Studies in Pediatrics and Medical History, ed. Solomon R. Kagan (New York: 1949), 279–96.
V. H. Houliston, “Sleepers Awake: Thomas Moffet’s Challenge to the College of Physicians of London, 1584,” Medical History (1989) 33:245–6.
Charles Singer, “Notes on the Early History of Microscopy,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, Section of the History of Medicine (1914), 7:247–79, on 269. Mayerne’s preface described his own observations of itch mites, “being with a needle prickt forth from their trenches near the pool of water which they have made in the skin.” Marjorie Nicholson writes that this may be the “earliest English reference to microscopical observation.” “The Microscope and the English Imagination,” Smith College Studies in Modern Languages (1935) 16, no. 4:1–92, on 8.
This was reprinted with the illustration as “Observationes Medicae Duae, Prima De Crinonibus … Secunda de Sironibus,” in Michael Ettmüller, Operum Omnium Medico-Physicorum, 2nd ed. (Lyons: 1690), 1:348–50. This work has separately paginated items; the “Observationes” are at the end of the volume. For the republication of Ettmüller’s plate by Andry and then by M.A.C.D. see chapter 7. An English translation appeared as Ettmullerus Abridg’d (London: 1699), but it omitted a discussion of pathogenic worms on 213 of the Latin edition. For Ettmüller’s priority over Redi, see C. E. Kellett, “Sir Thomas Browne and the Disease Called the Morgellons,” Annals of Medical History (1935), n. s. 7:467–79.
Richard Mead, trans., “An Abstract of Part of a Letter from Dr. Bonomo to Signior Redi Containing Some Observations Concerning the Worms of Humane Bodies,” Philosophical Transactions (1702/3) 23:1296–99. Italics omitted. This was reprinted in The Medical Works of Richard Mead, M.D. … with … the Life of the Author (London: 1762) with editions in Edinburgh (1763) and Dublin (1767). I have not consulted Mead’s Opera Omnia, which first appeared in Latin (Gottingen: 1748) with editions in Paris (1751, 1757) and Naples (1752). The letter was originally published in Italian by Redi in Osservazioni Intorno a Pellicelli del Corpo Umano Fatte dalDottor Gio: Cosimo Bonomo … (Florence: 1687). Ramos-e-Silva, “Bonomo,” reproduces Bonomo’s drawings of the mite, the first page of his original letter, and the cover of Redi’s book.
Luigi Belloni, “Le ‘Contagium Vivum’ avant Pasteur” (Paris: 1961), 11.
Daniele Ghesquier, “A Gallic Affair: The Case of the Missing Itch-Mite in French Medicine in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Medical History (1999) 43, no. 1:26–54.
Ray, Wisdom, part 2, 298–9. See also Michael Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy (Woodbridge, Suffolk: 1995), 15.
Anna Marie Roos, The Salt of the Earth: Natural Philosophy, Medicine, and Chymistry in England, 1650–1750 (Leiden: 2007), 87–107, reviews Grew’s work on botany and chemistry but does not mention his Nonconformity. See also Brian Garrett, “Vitalism and Teleology in the Natural Philosophy of Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712),” British Journal of the History of Science (2003) 36:63–81.
Ray says he was inspired by Andrea Cesalpino, the sixteenth-century author who first classified plants according to their fruits and seeds. John Ray, Historia Plantarum Generalis (1686) quoted in Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: 2003), 256–7. Mayr cites a translation by Edmund Silk that appeared in Barbara G. Beddall, “Historical Notes on Avian Classification,” Systematic Biology (1957) 6, no. 3:129–36. John S. Wilkins reproduced the original passage in “the first biological species concept” (May 10, 2009) on his blog Evolving Thoughts, online at http://science-blogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2009/05/The_first_biological_species_c.php. For the evolution of Mayr’s own idea of biological species, see K. de Queiroz, “Ernst Mayr and the Modern Concept of Species,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (May 3, 2005), 102 supp. 1: 6600–7, online from PubMed at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/.
A. J. Cain, “John Ray on ‘Accidents,’” Archives of Natural History (1996) 23, no. 3:343–68, on 362–3.
Anita Guerrini, “Tyson, Edward (1651–1708),” ODNB (Oxford: 2004), online ed. January 2008 at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27961; Charles Newman, “Edward Tyson,” British Medical Journal (1975) 4:96–7. Newman sees Tyson as “a difficult man, with a chip on his shoulder, always against the government.”
Harold Cook, Trials of an Ordinary Doctor: Johannes Groenevelt in Seventeenth-Century London (Baltimore: 1994), 15.
Nicholas Andry de Boisregard, An Account of the Breeding of Worms in Human Bodies (London: 1701), Maxims IX–XXVII, 194–9.
Boerhaave’s Aphorisms Concerning the Knowledge and Cure of Disease, trans. J. DeLacoste (London: 1725), online from ECCO. For Boerhaave’s publications, see Gerrit Arie Lindeboom, Bibliographia Boerhaaviana: List of Publications Written or Provided by Hermann Boerhaave (Leiden: 1959).
See Wilkinson, “Rinderpest and Mainstream Infectious Disease Concepts in the Eighteenth Century,” Medical History (1984) 28:129–50, on 130. A shorter version is in same, Animals and Disease, An Introduction to the History of Comparative Medicine (Cambridge, UK: 1992). See also C. A. Spinage, Cattle Plague: A History (New York: 2003), and Charles F. Mullett, “The Cattle Distemper in Mid-Eighteenth Century England,” Agricultural History (1946) 20:144–65.
Wilkinson, “Rinderpest,” 132, quoting De Contagiosa Epidemia, quae in Pata-vino Agro, & Tota Fere Veneta Ditione in Boves Irrepsit (Padua: 1712).
Wilkinson, “Rinderpest,” 133; Giovanni Maria Lancisi, Dissertatio Historica de Bovilla Peste … (Rome: 1715).
William Brownrigg, Considerations on the Means of Preventing the Communication of Pestilential Contagion (London: 1771), 18–19. A multitiered military cordon was imposed in Bari, Naples, in 1690. Tom Koch, Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping and Medicine (Redlands, CA: 2005), 19–23.
Antonio Vallisneri, Sr., variously spelled Valisneri, Valisnieri, and Vallisnieri. For Vallisneri’s work on parasitology, see F. N. Egerton, “A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 30: Invertebrate Zoology and Parasitology during the 1700s,” Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America (October 2008) 89, no. 4:413–15, and Jonathan Israel, The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: 2001), 143, 148, 150, and 678–9. Israel describes Vallisneri on 143. He became an FRS in 1703, followed by Lancisi in 1706. Marie Boas Hall, “The Royal Society and Italy 1667–1795,” N&R (August 1982) 37, no. 1:63–81, Table 1, 73.
Belloni, introduction to Cogrossi, New Theory, xxxi. Richard Mead owned a run of this journal. See Bibliotheca Meadiana … Apud Samuel M. Baker (London: 1754 and 1755), 83 #959. He also bought Lancisi, De Bovilla peste (1713) and the works of Vallisneri. Belloni notes that later reprints of Vallisneri’s letter to Cogrossi included this supplement, accompanied by a Latin poem summarizing the idea of contagium vivum by Orazio Borgondio (Horatio Borgondi) SJ of the Collegio Romano. Borgondio (1679–1741), a friend of Vallisneri, was a teacher and mentor of the Croatian physicist and mathematician Roger Joseph Boscovich, SJ and FRS, whose atomic theories inspired the monist matter theory of Joseph Priestley. For more on this circle, see Yasmin Annabel Haskell, Loyola’s Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry (Oxford: 2003).
_Wilkinson, “Rinderpest,” 137, quoting Lancisi, Dissertatio Historica de Bovilla Peste (Rome: 1715). See also Belloni, introduction to Cogrossi, New Theory, xxxi and xlv, n. 24.
Wilkinson, “Rinderpest,” 136. In 1661, a year of bitter conflict between Galenists and innovators in Bologna, the physicist Giovanni Alfonso Borelli and the physician Marcello Malpighi exchanged letters on an epidemic at Pisa. Borelli wrote to Malpighi in Bologna: “I concur with you in thinking that the poisonous seeds imbibed with the air in the guise of a ferment can segregate this quantity of bile, which then causes the fever.” Malpighi’s reply has been lost. Malpighi served as Vallisneri’s mentor and worked closely with Lancisi in Rome in 1692. Howard B. Adelmann, Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology (Ithaca, NY: 1966) I:199, 484, and 634.
Wilkinson, “Rinderpest,” 137, referring to Lancisi, De Noxiis Paludum Effluviis (on the noxious effluvia from marshes) (Rome: 1717). Lancisi is credited with introducing the word “malaria” for intermittent fevers. See Eliana Ferroni, Tom Jefferson, and Gabriel Gachelin, “Angelo Celli and Research on the Prevention of Malaria in Italy a Century Ago,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2012) 105:35–40, doi: 10.1258/jrsm.2011.11k049.
Thomas Bates, “A Brief Account of the Contagious Disease Which Raged among the Milch Cowes near London, in the Year 1714. And of the Methods that Were Taken for Suppressing It,” Philosophical Transactions (1718) 30:872–82. It is not clear that Bates knew of the Italian discussion because Lancisi’s Latin treatise appeared in 1715. Spinage notes in Cattle Plague, 725, that a copy of Bates’s ms. letter dated September 24, 1714, is in the Hertfordshire County Archives, D/EP/F125.
William Eamon, “With the Rules of Life and an Enema: Leonardo Fioravanti’s Medical Primitivism,” in Renaissance and Revolution, eds. J. V. Field and Frank A. J. L. James (Cambridge: 1993), 29–44.
Edward G. Ruestow, The Microscope in the Dutch Republic (Cambridge: 1996), 56–60. Ruestow cites a number of Catholic authors who shared this view. The division appears to be between authors such as Kircher and Buffon, who retained Aristotle’s belief in spontaneous generation, and those such as Leeuwenhoek, Redi, Ray, and Reaumur who did not.
This revived the earlier objection that Thomas Erastus had made to Paracelsianism that replacing a physiological model of disease as an imbalance with an ontological model of disease as an entity amounted to Manicheanism. See for example, Peter Niebyl, “Sennert, Van Helmont, and Medical Ontology,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1971) 45:115–37, Harold Cook, “Good Advice and Little Medicine: The Professional Authority of Early Modern English Physicians,” Journal of British Studies (1994) 33:1–31, on 12, and Jole Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine (Copenhagen: 2004), 216–33.
William Bynum, “The Great Chain of Being after Forty Years: An Appraisal,” History of Science (1975) 13:1–28, online from the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADSABS) at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1975hissc..13....1b. The word “biology” was first used by Thomas Beddoes in 1799.
Ray originally thought that a material “specific essence” was being transmitted within species. Stephen Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1660–1760 (Oxford: 2010), 193, following Phillip Sloan, argues that Ray abandoned the concept of “species essentialism” by the 1690s under Locke’s influence. This, however, is a claim about Ray’s epistemology—he agreed with Locke that we cannot know about essences—not about his theory of generation. Ray conceded that all humanmade classifications are artificial because they cannot capture essences, but presumably a perfect “natural” classification would avoid this problem. See Sloan, “John Locke, John Ray, and the Problem of the Natural System,” Journal of the History of Biology (1972) 5, no. 1:1–53, on 46, esp. n. 121.
Despite its constant use, taxonomists do not agree on the definition of species. See John Wilkins, “Species, Kinds and Evolution,” Reports of the National Center for Science Education (2006) 26, no. 4:36–45, online at http://ncse.com/rncse/26/4/species-kinds-evolution, retrieved May 2, 2012, and Richard A. Richards, The Species Problem: A Philosophical Analysis (Cambridge: 2010).
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DeLacy, M. (2016). Animalcules and Animals. In: The Germ of an Idea. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-57529-6_5
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