Robert Boyle's Memoirs for the natural history of human blood (1684): Print, manuscript and the impact of baconianism in seventeenth-century medical science

Medical History

Volumn 51, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 145-164

  Knight, Harriet ^a   Hunter, Michael ^b  

^a QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247263293     PISSN: 00257273     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0025727300001162     Document Type: Review

References (143)

1. John Farquhar Fulton, A bibliography of the Honourable Robert Boyle, 2nd edn, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1961, p. 99.
2. Lynn Thorndike, A history of magic and experimental science, 8 vols, New York, Columbia University Press, 1958, vol. 8, p. 193.
3. A Rupert Hall, 'Medicine and the Royal Society', in A G Debus (ed.), Medicine in seventeenth century England: a symposium held at UCLA in honour of C D O 'Malley, Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 1974, pp. 421-51, on pp. 447-50.
4. Johannes Büttner, 'Die Physikalische und Chemische Untersuchung von Blut im 17 und 18 Jahrhundert: Zur Bedeutung von Robert Boyle's Memoirs for the Natural History of Human Blood (1684)', Medizin Historisches Journal, 1987, 22: 185-96.
5. E Hackett describes Boyle's researches into blood in 'Robert Boyle and the human blood', Irish J. med. Sci., 1950, 6: 528-33.
6. See below, pp. 163-4. This subject was further explored by Harriet Knight in 'Designed instability: Robert Boyle's works in manuscript and print', a paper presented at 'Sitting on the Cat', a symposium held on 3 June 2006 at Queen Mary, University of London, to be published in a volume based on the symposium edited by Alison Wiggins.
7. See The works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B Davis, 14 vols, London. Pickering & Chatto, 1999-2000, vol. 3, pp. 327-9 and passim (hereafter Works). Boyle's patronage was also emphasized when Wren's experiment was recapitulated in Philos. Trans., 1665, 1: 128-30. See also Works, vol. 5, p. xxxvii.
8. On research into blood in this period, see Robert G Frank Jr., Harvey and the Oxford physiologists: scientific ideas and social interaction, Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 1980;
9. W C Gibson, "The biomedical pursuits of Christopher Wren', Med. Hist., 1970, 14: 331-41;
10. A Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, 'The first human blood transfusion: priority disputes', Med. Hist., 1980, 24: 461-5;
11. Pete Moore, Blood and justice, Chichester, John Wiley and Sons, 2003.
12. Lower to Boyle, 8 and 24 June 1664, The correspondence of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio and Lawrence M Principe, 6 vols, London, Pickering & Chatto, 2001, vol. 2, pp. 277-91 (hereafter Correspondence).
13. Frank, op. cit., note 7 above, pp. 183-5. The minutes of the Royal Society for 21 Dec. 1664 include a report from Boyle, which recounts, among others, an experiment "of putting volatile and acid salts into warm sheep's blood" and records that while the former preserved and sometimes brightened blood, the latter darkened and congealed it. Thomas Birch, History of the Royal Society,4 vols, London, for A Millar, 1756-7, vol. 1, p. 509.
14. Philos. Trans., 1665,1: 100-1.
15. See also Works, vol. 5, pp. 499-500.
16. Birch, op. cit., note 9 above, vol. 2, pp. 83-4, 98, 115. Boyle's involvement as emissary was also emphasized when the experiment was reported in Philos. Trans., 1666, 1:353-8.
17. See also Works, vol. 5, pp. 540-3.
18. Birch, op. cit., note 9 above, vol. 2, p. 84.
19. Ibid., pp. 132-4.
20. Philos. Trans., 1667, 1: 385-8.
21. See also Works, vol. 5, pp. 544-6.
22. Birch, op. cit., note 9 above, vol. 2, p. 162;
23. Correspondence, vol. 3, pp. 368-9.
24. Birch, op. cit., note 9 above, vol. 1, p. 509; The workdiaries of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter, http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/wd/, Workdiary 21-205, 206, 207 and 208 (hereafter WD). The first of these (only) was used in the materials for the second edition: Royal Society Boyle Papers 18, fol. 18 (hereafter BP), published in Michael Hunter and Harriet Knight (eds), Unpublished material relating to Robert Boyle's 'Memoirs for the natural history of human blooef, Robert Boyle Project Occasional Papers, No. 2. Birkbeck, University of London, Robert Boyle Project, 2005 (available at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/boyle), p. 5 (see also p. x) (hereafter Unpublished material).
25. Warks, vol. 10, p. 5; Bodleian Library, MS Locke f. 19, pp. 272-3, 302-3. The first section of these (pp. 272-3) bears a fairly close relation to the heads printed by Boyle in 1684: the second part (pp. 302-3) consists of more detailed heads, none of which recur in Human blood. For an edition of this document, see Unpublished material, pp. 19-20. Pages 272-3 are reproduced and Locke's notes discussed in Kenneth Dewhurst, 'Locke's contribution to Boyle's researches on the air and on human blood', Notes and Records of the Royal Society (hereafter NRRS), 1962, 17: 198-206, on pp. 201-2 and plate 12. Some of Dewhurst's inferences on the significance of the notebook are questioned by Guy Meynell, 'Locke.
26. Boyle and Peter Stahl', NRRS, 1995, 49: 185-92 on p. 185. Locke's investigation of blood, as evidenced by his notebooks, is also discussed by Frank, op. cit., note 7 above, pp. 186-7 and 337.
27. Birch, op. cit., note 9 above, vol. 2, pp. 235-7, 241, 250, 255-6, 259, 261, 274, 281, 288, 296, 306, 312, 316, 339, 341, 356-8.
28. Ibid. pp. 216-7, 224-5, 273-4, 276. Cf. pp. 283. 285, 287, 298, 312, and Works, vol. 6, pp. xi, xv-vi. For year-by-year details of Boyle's attendance at the Royal Society and his absences (including July 1667-April 1668, Aug. 1668-Jan. 1669 and July 1669-March 1670).
29. see Michael Hunter, 'Robert Boyle and the early Royal Society: a reciprocal exchange in the making of Baconian science', Br. J. Hist. Sci., 2007, 40: 1-23, on p. 3.
30. Philos. Trans., 1674, 9: 23-5, 121-31.
31. Birch, op. cit., note 9 above, vol. 3, pp. 374-5. 379-80, 383.
32. Ibid., pp. 233-41.
33. Works, vol. 14, pp. 337-9.
34. Ibid., p. 340.
35. BP 18, fols. 43-4; Unpublished material, pp. 20-1 (this publication provides an edition of all of these lists, and a table collating the main versions). On the variety of hands in the Boyle archive and their significance in aiding dating,
36. see Works, vol. 1, pp. c-cii, and The Boyle Papers: understanding the manuscripts of Robert Boyle by Michael Hunter with contributions by Edward B Davis, Harriet Knight, Charles Littleton and Lawrence M Principe, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, ch. 1.
37. BP 18, fol. 48; Unpublished material, pp. 21-3.
38. BP 36, fol. 95.
39. For Experimenta et observations physiciae, see Works, vol. 11, pp. 367-426. The other item in the BP 36, fol. 95 contents list that was ultimately published elsewhere is 'Vitiated sight', published with Final causes in 1688;
40. Works, vol. 11, pp. 153-66.
41. See Works, vol. 11, pp. liv-lxi.
42. These are itemized in Hunter, et al., op. cit., note 25 above, p. 187, n. 31.
43. Works, vol. 10, p. xxix,
44. See also, for example, Works, vol. 7, pp. xi-xii, xviii, 5-6, 77, 334; vol. 8, p. xv.
45. See Works, vol. 1, pp. Ixxvi-lxxxi;
46. Michael Hunter, Robert Boyle (1627-91): Scrupulosity and science, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2000, pp. 137-8, 219-21.
47. There are two states of the title-page of Human blood, one, identified by Fulton as the original issue, dated 1684 (Fulton 146A) and the other with a cancelled title-page, which differs only in being dated "1683/4". Fulton proposes the latter as the preferred state on the basis that it is the version used in the copy presented to Newton by Boyle; that this is correct is suggested by the fact that the copies presented to the Royal Society and Bodleian Library (80 N 50 Med) and Martin Lister's copy (Bodleian Library Ashm. C 38) all share this state.
48. See Works, vol. 10, p. xvi, and Fulton, op. cit., note 1 above, pp. 100-1.
49. For the possible significance in this connection of Philip Guide's De la vertue singulièr? du vin rouge, pour guerir le retention d'urine (1684),
50. see Works, vol. 10, p. xvi n. In his book (which takes the form of a letter to Boyle dated 2 March 1683/4), Guide acknowledges receipt of a copy of Boyle's work.
51. See Works, vol. 10, pp. xii, 5-6, 97 (it is worth clarifying that these references suggest that the initiative on the part of Locke was a recent one, as against the alternative possibility that Boyle was attributing his initial investigations in the 1660s to Locke's interest in the topic).
52. See also ibid., pp. xliv-xlv, and J L Axtell, 'Locke's review of the Principia', NRRS, 1965, 20: 152-61, on p. 152. It is perhaps worthy of note that 1683 was the publication date of the only example of a second edition of a work by Boyle with a substantive appendix, his New experiments touching cold.
53. See Works, vol. 4, pp. xxi-xxii, 543-75.
54. For all this, see Hunter, Scrupulosity, op. cit., note 32 above, ch. 8 (incl. pp. 196-8 on the abuse of bleeding; though see also p. 194).
55. Works, vol. 10, p. 5.
56. BP 18, fol. 48; Unpublished material, pp. 21-3.
57. See also ibid., p. xii, and Hunter, Scrupulosity, op. cit., note 32 above, pp. 166-7.
58. Works, vol. 11, pp. 397-8;
59. Hunter, Scrupulosity, op. cit., note 32 above, pp. 172-4. For the list (from MS 186, fols. 19v-20),
60. see B B Kaplan, 'Divulging of useful truths in physick': the medical agenda of Robert Boyle, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, pp. 152-3. It seems unlikely that Trallianus could be Locke (b. 1632).
61. Hall, op. cit., note 3 above, p. 447. Boyle's apologetic tone in this preface is indeed characteristic. The question of how literally to take Boyle's apologetic prefaces has been frequently addressed, with Shapin and Schaffer reading them as careful constructions designed to present Boyle as the model experimental philosopher, and Johns on the other hand reading them as literal accounts of the problems of the seventeenth-century book trade: Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the experimental life, Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 63-6;
62. Steven Shapin, A social history of truth, University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 175-80;
63. Adrian Johns, The nature of the book: print and knowledge in the making, University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 504-10. For the negotiation of a further position, which attempts to do justice to both conscious and less conscious motives on Boyle's part,
64. see Hunter. Scrupulosity, op. cit., note 32 above, ch. 7, while for a further account which seeks to link Boyle's statements with the rationale of his publications, see Harriet Knight, 'Organising natural knowledge in the seventeenth century: the works of Robert Boyle', University of London, PhD thesis, 2003. ch. 4.
65. Works, vol. 10, pp. 5-6.
66. Ibid., pp. 12-13.
67. Ibid., pp. 6, 17 and passim.
68. Ibid., p. 6.
69. Ibid., pp. 30, 39ff., 78ff. It is perhaps also worth noting here that, although Boyle states in Part 1 that he had decided to omit consideration of the urine and other bodily fluids (see below, pp. 162-3), he nevertheless attaches a list of heads for a natural history of urine: ibid., pp. 14, 15-16.
70. Ibid., p. 9; Correspondence, vol. 3, pp. 170-5. For an elucidation of and commentary on this text,
71. see Peter Anstey and Michael Hunter, 'Robert Boyle's "Designe about natural history'", forthcoming.
72. Works, vol. 10, p. 9.
73. See Hunter, 'Robert Boyle and the early Royal Society', op. cit., note 19 above. For an edition of such heads as have survived only in manuscript form,
74. see Michael Hunter (ed.), Robert Boyle's 'Heads' and 'Inquiries', Robert Boyle Project Occasional Papers, No. 1, Birkbeck, University of London, Robert Boyle Project, 2005 (available at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/boyle).
75. See also Peter Anstey, 'Locke, Bacon, and natural history', Early Sci. Med., 2000, 7: 65-92, esp. 79-81 on Human blood.
76. Works, vol. 10, pp. 9-10.
77. It is perhaps also worth noting Boyle's suggestion in ibid., p. 11, that a "middle Order, or Classis", between the "First" and the "Last" might be appropriate for topics that are "very comprehensive or very Difficult", examples of which he then gave, though the implication is that blood was not one of these, since Boyle did not in fact use this intermediate category in Human blood, and it may be that this represents un otherwise lost remnant of the 1666 letter to Oldenburg on which he states that he here drew.
78. Ibid., p. 11.
79. ibid., p. 12.
80. Ibid., p. 6.
81. Ibid., pp. 95-6.
82. d 1691', ibid., p. 351.
83. BP 19, fols. 194-5, a quarto bifoliate in Greg's hand: the passage relating to blood appears on fol. 194, with the material relating to porosity on fol. 195.
84. Works, vol. 10, p. xxii.
85. Birch, op. cit., note 9 above, vol. 4, p. 274.
86. See Howard B Adelmann, Marcello Malpighi and the evolution of embryology, 5 vols, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1966, vol. 1, esp. pp. 267-8 (see also pp. 497, 500-1);
87. John M Forrester, 'Malpighi's De polypo cordis: an annotated translation', Med. Hist., 1995, 39: 477-92;
88. and Domenico Bertoloni Meli, 'Blood, monsters, and necessity in Malpighi's De polypo cordis', Med. Hist., 2001, 45: 511-22.
89. Fulton suggests that the London Latin edition (Fulton 146B) is very rare. The first Geneva edition is dated 1685 (Fulton 147); this was twice reissued dated 1686 (Fulton 148, 148A) Fulton, op. cit., note 1 above, pp. 101-2.
90. The correspondence of Marcello Malpighi, ed. Howard B Adelmann, 5 vols. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1975, vol. 3, pp. 1105-6: "Hò veduto il libro del Sig. Boyle stampato in Ginevra intitolato Apparatus ad Historiam Naturalem Sanguinis humani; non sò se quello, ch'ella hà sia la storia per extensum promesa nel suddetto libro, quando ciò fosse non recusarei le sue gratie." For Borghese, see ibid., vol. 3, p. 919n. Borghese had visited the Royal Society on 29 Nov. 1682: see Birch, op. cit., note 9, vol. 4, pp. 167, 169-70).
91. Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi, op. cil., note 61 above, vol. 3, p. 1133: "Del. Sigr, Boyle altro non è uscito ehe l'apparato alla storia naturale del Sangue ben vero ehe mi presuppongo anche in Inglese sia uscita la storia medesima."
92. ibid., pp. 1135-6. For Ronchi,
93. see ibid., vol. 2, p. 790n. He had been a physician before becoming a priest.
94. Ibid., p. 1141.
95. Ibid., p. 1158.
96. Ibid., p. 1171.
97. BP 18, fol. 31; Unpublished material, p. 13. The book cited is Pancratius Eunonymus, Pyretologia mystica, Padua, prelo Academico, 1686.
98. MS 185, fol. 56; MS 189, fol. 149; Unpublished material, pp. xiii, 31. These notebooks can be dated by internal dates and other clues.
99. WD 37-81, 99a.
100. WD 38-1, 16, 25, 81, 130. Other materials may also have been lost from the archive: for example, BP 35, fols. 127-8, which comprises the index to a section of a workdiary which no longer survives (probably part of Workdiary 29) shows that this, too, contained various experiments on blood, including the following entries: "117 Blood swimming in water. 118 Experimt. of cogulating [sic] humane blood. 119 Other Exp. with hum. blood. 120 Another, with spirit [of sal ammoniac]."
101. Workdiary 21-205 is recopied in Bacon's hand with corrections by Greg (giving a date in the 1680s) in BP 18, fol. 18; Unpublished material, p. 5.
102. Unpublished material, pp. 1-2. Two copies of this survive in the Boyle archive, a draft at MS 185, fols. 15-16, and a fair copy at BP 18, fol. 11 from which the quotations here are taken. For the full text of the prefatory material,
103. see Unpublished material, pp. 1-3.
104. This figure is tentatively identified as Malpighi by Hunter and Davis in The works of Boyle although no letter of relevant date from Malpighi to Boyle survives (Works, vol. 10, p. xvii). As we have seen, this anomaly is caused by Malpighi's use of Ronchi as an intermediary, and the identification can therefore be confirmed.
105. BP 18, fol. 12, and BP 19, fol. 194; Unpublished material, p. 2. The BP 19 version contains corrections which are incorporated in the fair copy in BP 18.
106. Works, vol. 10, p. 96.
107. BP 18, fol. 13; Unpublished material, p. 3. Further copies (both with insertions and corrections) exist at BP 18, fol. 14 and BP 19, fol. 194.
108. For Hunter and Davis' analysis, see Works, vol. 10, p. xii. For the lists which appear to predate publication (BP 18, fols. 43-4, 48),
109. see Unpublished material, pp. 20-3. Two copies of the list as published in Human blood survive at BP 18, fols. 42 and 54. There are three copies of the "expanded" list at BP 18, fols. 45v-46; BP 18, fols. 49v-50; and BP 26, fol. 46;
110. Unpublished material, pp. 28-31. In the latter, the items are unnumbered. The process whereby Boyle expanded the printed list to reach this version is elucidated in BP 18, fols. 56-7;
111. Unpublished material, pp. 25-8. This lists "Primary Titles Additional", which are titles not present in the printed list which do appear in the longer list prepared for the second edition. The "Subtitles" listed here were originally referred to the relevant head in the printed list, using the numbers established there. These numbers were subsequently replaced with a series which refer the subtitle to the relevant category in the second edition list. In only one case was the printed list more extensive than the 2nd edition version: Item "7. Of the Specifick Gravity of Humane Blood entire" and "8. Of the Specifick Gravity of the two obvious Parts of Humane Blood, the Red (and Fibrous) and the Serous" in the printed edition are condensed in the second edition into " 13. of the Specific Gravity of entire Human Blood & that of its Consistent Part and of its Serum". For a table collating these lists, see Unpublished material, pp. 33-50.
112. Needham in Birch, op. cit., note 9 above, vol. 3, p. 237. For a discussion of Needham's insistence on the potency of serum, see Hall, op. cit., note 3 above, p. 446.
113. See also Allen G Debus, The chemical philosophy: Paracelsian science and medicine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 2 vols, New York, Science History Publications, 1977, vol. 2, p. 517, who tails to take seriously Boyle's claims that his published book was the result of earlier research, instead using it as evidence that van Helmont's ideas were still current in the 1680s, and that Boyle continued to support them despite the work of Hooke, Malpighi and Needham.
114. Philos. Trans., 1674, 9: 23-5, on p. 23.
115. See also van Leeuwenhoek's further article: ibid., 121-31.
116. BP 18, fols. 18-39; Unpublished material, pp. 5-17, Those entries which deal with topics which occur in both the printed and second edition list are keyed to both, using roman numerals for the relevant head in the second edition, with arable for the first.
117. Experiments III-IX in Boyle's Appendix: Works, vol. 10, pp. 81-2.
118. For the connection of this title with Boyle's published works on phosphorus, see also Works, vol. 10, p. xii n.
119. For a full account of the experiments on phosphorus, see I V Golinski, 'A noble spectacle: phosphorus and the public cultures of science in the early Royal Society', Isis, 1989, 80: 11-39. For the development of Boyle's interest,
120. see Works, vol. 9, p. xxiii; for his earlier interest in luminous substances,
121. see ibid., vol. 6, pp. 3ff., vol. 7, pp. 457ff.
122. Unpublished material, p. 28;
123. Works, vol. 10, p. 7.
124. Works, vol. 10, p. 7.
125. Unpublished material, p. 28;
126. Works, vol. 10, p. 7.
127. Unpublished material, p. 28;
128. Works, vol. 10, p. 7.
129. See Hunter. Scrupulosity, op. cit., note 32 above, ch. 8, passim.
130. See Büttner, op. cit, note 4 above, p. 195.
131. See above, p. 158.
132. Philos. Trans., 1674, 9: 23-5, 121-31.
133. Boyle Works, vol. 10, pp. 14, 15-16, and see above, p. 153;
134. Hunter, Scrupulosity, op. cit., note 32 above, pp. 177-81. A list of twenty-five heads relating to the Gall also survives in the Boyle Papers: BP18, fol. 47;
135. Unpublished material, p. 32.
136. Works, vol. 10, pp. 9, 29, 36, 39, 65.
137. This is borne out by his lists of his writings from the 1660s onwards, perhaps especially "The Order of My Severall Treatises' and the verse mnemonic based on it: see Works, vol. 14, pp. 331-2, 335-6. Cf. ibid., pp. 345-6, which similarly mingle published and unpublished material.
138. Johns, op. cit., note 40 above, see index sv 'fixity ', criticizing Elizabeth L Eisenstein, The printing press as an agent of change, Cambridge University Press, 1979, 2 vols.
139. See further Knight, 'Designed instability', op. cit., note 5 above.
140. See Works, vol. 1, pp. xxxvii-xxxviii;
141. Knight, 'Organisingnatural knowledge', op. cit., note 40 above, pp. 183ff.
142. Works, vol. 10. pp. 6-7, 96-7.