Millennium
Page 22
These men were polymaths. They were interested not only in optics, physics and mathematics but many of them enquired into chemistry, biology and botany too. Robert Boyle, who in 1675 extended Gilbert’s work on electricitas by showing that electrical forces could pass through a vacuum, experimented with gases and formulated Boyle’s Law: that the volume of a gas varies in inverse proportion to its pressure. Advances in telescope design were matched by the development of microscopes. Galileo took the idea for the microscope from Lippershey and his colleague Zacharias Jansen, and developed a better version that he called his ‘little eye’. Robert Hooke reproduced large-scale depictions of plant ‘cells’ (as he called them) and flies in his Micrographia (1665). The Dutch microbiologist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek surpassed all others in his microbiological explorations. Using microscopes that magnified up to 200 times, he discovered bacteria, sperm cells, blood cells, nematodes, algae and parasites. Where some small creatures had previously been thought to replicate themselves by merely duplicating their own forms, now it became clear that even the smallest life forms were capable of sexual reproduction. The application of magnifying lenses made an enormous difference to mankind’s appreciation of the natural world.
All this pioneering work on scientific knowledge reached its apogee in Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). Although it took some time to be widely accepted, the book was later hailed as one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time. It outlined Newton’s theory of gravity – which according to legend first occurred to him when an apple fell on his head – and thereby ended the debate about what kept the planets in their orbits. It supplied ratios by which the forces of gravity could be calculated, so they could be studied quantitatively, not just understood qualitatively It supplied the means to measure the relative densities of the planets and the Sun, confirmed Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, and explained the motion of the Moon and how the tides on Earth are affected by it, and why comets follow their paths. It also contained Newton’s three famous laws of motion. Alongside his work on optics, which he began in the 1670s and finally published in 1704, these discoveries overturned much of Aristotle’s erroneous reasoning about the natural world, and presented a framework for a more rigorous testing of natural phenomena.
A critical factor that makes all the above work so important is that the findings were quickly shared between natural philosophers so that one could build on the knowledge of another. With very few exceptions, these were not quiet discoveries by semi-reclusive mystics who copied them into manuscripts that slipped almost unseen into the archives, of science. They were paraded in publications and talked about throughout Europe. Educated men were expected to have a knowledge of the latest scientific debates. Encyclopedias were expected to be up to date with them. A series of finely executed prints of tiny organisms could become a best-seller – as Hooke’s Micrographia showed. The leading natural philosophers of the day also started a whole series of national scientific organisations. In Venice, the Accademia dei Lincei was founded in 1603, with Galileo as a member. The Academia Naturae Curiosorum (later the Leopoldina) was established in Bavaria by a group of natural philosophers in 1652, and received imperial recognition in 1677. The Royal Society of London was founded in 1660, and received its first royal charter in 1662. In France, the Académie des Sciences was founded by Louis XIV in 1666. These societies started circulating to their members and other subscribers regular publications of new discoveries: the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions began to appear in 1665; the Leopoldina’s Ephemeriden was first published in 1670. It became widely accepted that there was an infinite set of discoveries to be made; it was patently not the case that, after a few breakthroughs, a new stability would assert itself. From now on, scientific knowledge would forever be in a state of flux.
It goes without saying that scientific discoveries had a huge impact on the philosophy of the time. For a start, there was the empirical nature of the scientific method. Francis Bacon was not the only one to realise that empiricism nailed the lid on the coffin of theology-based science, in which the causes and meaning of natural phenomena were interpreted in accordance with holy scripture. No less significant was the rise of rationalism – the philosophy that knowledge could be attained by reason alone. The most famous exponent of this way of thinking, René Descartes, is to this day associated with the deductive formula ‘I think therefore I am’. But Descartes and later rationalists, such as Leibniz, were men of science as well as philosophers. Hence there remained a close link between those doing the scientific research and those formulating the processes by which scientific knowledge could be attained and validated. This helped to maintain the links between empiricism and rationalism – people naturally wanted to test empirically any knowledge attained by rational means. Only occasionally does one find a major thinker allowing his rationalism to run away with his imagination. Christiaan Huygens’s last book, Cosmotheoros (1698), is partly given over to discussing the living conditions on Jupiter and Saturn, and whether the inhabitants of those planets lived in houses and had water, plants, trees and animals. He reasoned that they did. With the benefit of 300 years’ more research, it seems to us that his conclusion rather casts doubt on his rationalism. Nevertheless, at the time it was acceptable for well-qualified men to speculate on scientific matters, and reasonable for less highly qualified people to believe them.
This gets us to the crux of the matter. It was not only the new knowledge that marked a major change: it was the shift of authority in determining that knowledge. While in the medieval period Church leaders and purveyors of community folklore had enjoyed that authority, from the mid sixteenth century natural philosophers took over. Consider Galileo’s case. In 1613, he responded to an invitation to write a letter explaining Copernicus’s heliocentric theory to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. The letter was published and Galileo was accordingly brought before the Roman Inquisition in 1616. He was informed that to talk of a heliocentric universe was both absurd and heretical, and that the idea that the Earth was revolving on a daily basis was preposterous. On that occasion he got off with a warning but in 1633 he was charged with teaching heliocentrism again, and this time Pope Urban VIII imprisoned him for life. Yet within a few decades, papal opinion on scientific matters became inconsequential: people looked to the authors of scholarly papers to advise them, not theologians. This is the real Scientific Revolution. In 1633 authority in scientific matters was still exercised by the Church; by 1670 it lay exclusively with the scientific community.
The fact that this shift in authority set religion against science has often been taken as evidence that from then on, the two began to go their separate ways. This is fundamentally incorrect. Almost all the men who made great scientific discoveries were deeply religious: they saw their collective endeavour as a constant enquiry into the nature of God’s Creation. Francis Bacon wrote a scornful pamphlet attacking atheism, and in his Théodicée, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz attempted to reconcile his Christian faith and his scientific philosophy, arguing that in making this world, God had created ‘the best of all possible worlds’. Isaac Newton too was a pious man, who spent his life looking for scientific truths in the Bible – including prognostications of the end of the world. This combination of a religious purpose and scientific investigation proved a heady cocktail in the seventeenth century, and the religious dimension should not be underestimated. This is particularly true in the case of those trying to understand Creation through scientific experimentation, who were keen to combat superstitions, which they thought not only false but ungodly. Whereas religion and superstition had coincided for centuries, now religion colluded with science to drive out irreligious beliefs and to teach the people of Europe the divine truth.
Scientific knowledge soon began to filter into daily life. Superstitious practices such as burying cats in the chimneys of houses fell into abeyance. People stopped using medicines that incorporated ground-up animal remains or excrement
and sought those that had some demonstrable efficacy. Most interestingly, they stopped believing in witchcraft. In the sixteenth century, dozens of witches had been hanged in England and Wales and hundreds burnt elsewhere. (Only in England and Wales and, later, America, was witchcraft a secular crime, punished by hanging, and not considered heresy, which was punished by burning.) In the early seventeenth century, the numbers killed rose into the thousands, however, with a particularly severe spate of persecutions taking place in Germany in the late 1620s. Most notorious of all, the prince-bishop of Bamberg built a witch house where people were imprisoned and systematically tortured until they confessed to acts of witchcraft and implicated others in such acts. The victims would then be burnt at the stake or, if they gave all their possessions to the prince-bishop, decapitated. Across Europe, tens of thousands were horrifically tortured and killed. But the whole structure of witchcraft persecution collapsed in the late seventeenth century. The last burning of witches in France took place in 1679 (Peronne Goguillon and her daughter). The last hangings in England for witchcraft were in 1682 (the Bideford witches). The Salem witch trials of 1692 saw the end of hanging witches in America. The last mass execution for witchcraft took place in Scotland in 1697 (the Paisley witches).
Was the Scientific Revolution responsible for the discontinuation of belief in witchcraft? As one scholar has put it: ‘It is hard to see exactly why Isaac Newton’s thoughts on the paths of moving bodies, as set out in his Principia of 1687, should make assize judges less likely to convict witches, let alone why they should make villagers less willing to launch witchcraft accusations against each other.’7 This point is all the more valid as it has been estimated that only seven people in all of Europe were qualified to understand Newton’s Principia Mathematica when it was published. If scientific knowledge did indeed lead to the decline of superstitions generally and the belief in witchcraft in particular, how did it happen?
The answer lies in why people believed in witchcraft in the first place. Witches had been a feature of European culture for centuries, but at the end of the fifteenth century the connection between witchcraft and heresy led to an increase in witches being brought before the Church courts. The more such court hearings took place, the more the message of witchcraft spread. The news acted like propaganda, alerting people to the potential danger. Although many accusations of witchcraft were motivated by misogyny or plain hatred, the notion that witchcraft was real grew alongside the belief that there were unseen and unaccountable forces in nature. The idea of a heliocentric universe, the discovery of electricitas and other changes in scientific understanding had allowed people to believe that many things existed that the eye did not see. A mathematician like John Dee could still subscribe to alchemy and astrology – and even see potential in experimenting through seances to understand the will of angels. Who really knew what to believe? It seems likely that the plethora of discoveries had left people doubtful that they understood the world at all. This gave room for their fears to circulate and grow, and eventually to seize the public mind. In the mid seventeenth century, however, the scientific community managed to stabilise society’s doubts and provided a new equilibrium. As we have seen, knowledge that the planets were not arbiters of human fortune but orbited the Sun in a predictable manner became orthodox, diminishing that superstition. Scientific organisations, recognised by royal charter, provided a stability that had been lacking since the early years of the previous century. You did not need to understand Newton’s Principia Mathematica to have confidence that Newton himself and other members of the Royal Society understood it, and that they could explain many aspects of the universe that had at first been so disconcerting. With that new-found confidence, the complete lack of empirical evidence for witchcraft was not hard to interpret: the inescapable conclusion was that even self-confessed witches had been burnt or hanged for no reason.
The Medical Revolution
The medical discoveries of the seventeenth century were in many ways a subset of the Scientific Revolution. However, the implications were particularly profound. Everybody had a stake in medical knowledge because, sooner or later, ill health affected everyone. It wasn’t just a case of whether society felt that physicians or Church leaders should be trusted in medical matters; it was a matter of personal faith. What did you really believe? If you or your kin fell ill, should you seek medical help or pray?
As we have seen, surgeons, physicians and apothecaries had existed since medieval times, and medical training had been available since the twelfth century. You might therefore assume that when people fell ill, they sent for the physician or, if they injured themselves, the surgeon. But it wasn’t as simple as that. English probate accounts allow us to measure exactly what people did when faced with terminal illness or injury. Most people did not pay for medical help but sent for the priest for the benefit of their soul, and, if their family was unable to look after them, paid local nurses to alleviate the pain, clean their clothes and bedding, and cook for them. It turns out that in 1600, less than one in fifteen men of moderate means paid for professional medical expertise when they were approaching death. But by 1700, about half did so.
Medical and nursing help purchased by men dying in East Kent with movable goods worth £100–£2008
The chart above is based on the region for which by far the best evidence survives, but other series of accounts for Berkshire and West Sussex show that similar shifts from nursing to professional medicine took place in other parts of southern England. Another study has shown that men of property from all over the country started to pay for medicine much more regularly at about this time.9 Even in remote Moretonhampstead, which was still inaccessible to wheeled transport in the seventeenth century, a medical man set up his practice: Joshua Smith became the town’s first qualified physician when he obtained his licence in 1662.10 Interestingly, while the quality of medical assistance available was obviously related to wealth, the regularity of medical consultation by the prosperous – those with movable goods worth more than £200 – was only a little in excess of the figures displayed in the chart above. At the other end of the spectrum, some of the poor who could not afford to pay for medical help were attended by a physician employed by their parish. It is fair to say that, one way or another, the majority of those who wanted professional medical help could obtain it by 1700.
Underpinning this change in the reliance on medical help was a shift in the nature of medicine itself. If you fell ill in 1600, your mother, wife or nurse would treat you by administering a medicinal diet or a remedy made from herbs, animals and other things that were obtainable locally. If your condition did not improve, you sent next for either the physician or the parish priest. The physician might well be a part-time practitioner. He might also prescribe costly treatments, based on the colour of your urine and the position of the stars at the time you fell ill. As the chart above shows, however, in 1600, over 90 per cent of dying men simply sent for the priest. Christ the Physician was the only medical helper that a dying man needed, or so many people believed. The emphasis was not on recovery, but on redeeming your soul through suffering – dying ‘a good death’, as it was called.
As the century progressed, this started to change: men increasingly sent for both the priest and the physician. The fundamental reason for this change was a more rigorous approach to medicine. Physicians were no longer being taught according to Galenic texts but were taking a much more scientific approach to the human body. William Harvey published his theory of the circulation of the blood, De Motu Cordis, in 1628 – a landmark in the understanding of the human body – and dozens of other medical texts were produced over the course of the century. But the real catalyst for change was an arrogant Swiss genius who had died in 1541. His name was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, but he is better known to history as Paracelsus. In the early sixteenth century he had travelled around Europe practising medicine and astrology, publishing a number of texts that were directly in contra
vention of accepted teaching and advocating the use of metal-based medicines and chemical compounds to treat illnesses. By the 1590s his ideas were beginning to take hold across the whole of the continent. Increasingly, metal-based medicines and natural medicinal substances were stocked by apothecaries throughout Europe. Physicians started to be called ‘doctors’ – as if they all had doctorates in medicine – which clearly denoted an expression of trust in their expertise. Many of them settled in small market towns so that by 1650 almost everyone was within easy reach of a physician. Thus a relatively small number of professionals provided for a massive expansion of medical demand. They dealt with a rapidly increasing number of patients by prescribing effective medicines for specific diseases rather than plotting complex treatments based on astrological observances, superstition, the taste of the patients’ blood and the colour of their urine.
It is important to remember that dying men and women sent for both the physician and the priest. Trust in doctors did not mean a diminished trust in God. Indeed, trust in God was very much part of the Medical Revolution of the seventeenth century. Licensed physicians and surgeons had to be examined as to their morality, to make sure that they were worthy conduits of God’s healing power. Moreover, as more exotic flora and fauna were discovered in out-of-the-way places, the discoveries gave rise to a philosophy that God had nurtured antidotes to all the world’s diseases when he created the world. In 1608, Maria Thynne, wife of Sir Thomas Thynne of Longleat, wrote to her sick husband, ‘Remember we are bound in conscience to maintain life as long as is possible, and though God’s power can work miracles, yet we cannot build upon it that because He can, He will, for then He would not say He made herb[s] for the use of man.’11 The discovery of Jesuit’s bark in Peru in the early seventeenth century seemed to confirm this faith: it provided an effective treatment for malaria, the biggest killer in human history. Then there were those other naturally occurring medicines – pomegranates for digestive problems, and colchicum crocuses for gout. It seemed to be just too great a coincidence that the antidotes for a number of diseases existed in nature. Thus there was a religious context to both the physician who gave you the remedy and the medicine itself. Taking a remedy prescribed by a doctor was not exactly prayer, but it was still putting yourself in God’s hands.