Robert Boyle (1627-91): Scrupulosity and Science (review)

Michael Hunter. Robert Boyle (1627-91): Scrupulosity and Science. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2000. ix + 293 pp. $90.00 (0-85115-798-X).

In recent years, Michael Hunter has become the leading authority on Robert Boyle, who has in turn become one of the foremost representatives of the practitioners of the new and experimental philosophy of seventeenth-century England. Hunter has headed projects that have led to an important new edition of Boyle's printed works and a complete edition of his manuscripts, and has explored in detail many aspects of his life and thought. This volume brings together many of Hunter's most important papers on Boyle published during the 1990s: it lightly edits them for style and consistency, adds three new essays and several appendices, resets them all as chapters, and concludes with a common bibliography and index. The title reflects Hunter's view that Boyle's exacting moral correctness and active investigations into nature are tightly interwoven; several of the chapters, therefore, probe Boyle's writings to explore his sense of conscience, and his transition from moral philosophy to a natural philosophy embedded in a deeply held religious and moral sensitivity. Hunter also reflects on previous views of Boyle and the problems of trying to compose biographical accounts of seventeenth-century figures.

Among the essays in this book are four that will be of particular interest to historians of medicine: two on alchemy and the occult ("Alchemy, Magic and Moralism in the Thought of Robert Boyle" and "Magic, Science and Reputation: Robert Boyle, the Royal Society and the Occult in the Late Seventeenth Century"--one of the new pieces), and two on medicine ("Boyle versus the Galenists" and "The Reluctant Philanthropist"). In the first, Hunter shows how Boyle feared that a wholehearted pursuit of alchemical transmutation would entail the danger of communing with demons, which led him to go only so far as to produce chemical medicines. In the second, Hunter discusses in detail the differences between Boyle's personal reflections and the published work, showing that his deep concern about the activities of demons would have been laughed at among the coffeehouse wits, causing him to withdraw from public writing on the subject for the sake of "reputation." The essay on Boyle versus the Galenists reconstructs his medical outlook, which Hunter notes "was integral to [his] vision for natural philosophy" (p. 157). Many of Boyle's private views about medicine were repressed in what he allowed to be printed, but his public hints and private expressions all point to his keen support for medical reformers, and even empirics, in a period of intense controversy. Indeed, he may have been even more radically opposed to the medical establishment than Hunter suggests here. The fourth of the chapters details Boyle's interest in the collecting and dissemination of useful medical recipes. He dispensed medicines to friends, relatives, and dependents, and worked for more than fifteen years on a book of simple medicines for the public that was not published until after his death (as Medicinal Experiments).

Boyle's private and public medical activities underline Hunter's major contention that he had a terribly convoluted and fearful conscience that caused him both to reach bold conclusions and simultaneously to seek the avoidance of confrontation. It makes him both admirable and pitiful. If Boyle had been bolder in public, it might have been easier for earlier generations of scholars to recognize the central importance of medicine in his naturalist agenda. But with new work on Boyle now appearing regularly, much of it stimulated by Hunter's work and interpretation, it should be clear how fundamentally the new philosophy was bound up with discussions about life, disease, and the soul.