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Letter 0048

Posted on August 2, 2016 by -

Robert Holdsworth to Hans Sloane – January 22, 1722/23


Item info

Date: January 22, 1722/23
Author: Robert Holdsworth
Recipient: Hans Sloane

Library: British Library, London
Manuscript: Sloane MS 4075
Folio: ff. 246-247


Original Page


Transcription



Patient Details

  • Patient info
    Name: Mrs. Holdsworth
    Gender:
    Age:
  • Description

    Of a hot humour and salt humour. "Deplorable condition & anguish of pain."

  • Diagnosis
  • Treatment
    Previous Treatment:
    Ongoing Treatment:

    He wanted to know if she should have tea or coffee as they increased her internal heat. Sloane had previously prescribed an unknown treatment (in response to f. 252), which she followed. See ff. 246-256 for the whole case.


    Response:

    He described her as being in pain day and night, unable to pass any "stone" or "gravel" but instead phlegmatic and congealed substance. She urinated frequently and with great pain. He wanted to know if Sloane has a prescription to make his wife to have bowel movements again.

  • More information
  • Medical problem reference
    Urinary, Constipation, Genitals, Stone

The Problem of Mad Dogs in the Eighteenth Century

Posted on January 27, 2014 by - Early Modern History, Environment History, Hans Sloane, History of Medicine, Philosophical Transactions

Surgeon John Burnet shared “a very strange account” with Sir Hans Sloane in March 1720. The tale, sent to the French Académie des Sciences, had come straight from the Czar of Muscovy (Peter the Great) himself. Apparently,

a Man was bitt by a Mad-dog & that he lay with his wife the same night & after three fitts dyed, but that his wife was brought to bed nine weeks afterwards of five puppies.

Curious, indeed. Did this mean that rabies (or hydrophobia, as it was called) might be spread like a venereal disease? Or that the dog-bite had transmitted canine qualities into the infected man, which he then passed on to his offspring? Burnet was sceptical about account, noting “how far this is true, I know not”, but similar stories could be found in the Philosophical Transactions.

Rabies: Slaying a mad dog. From Dioscordes, Acera de la materia medicinal y de los venenos, 1556. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Physician Martin Lister, for example, wrote “An Observation of Two Boys Bit by a Mad Dog” (1698). Back in 1679, two boys aged nine and ten washed the head wounds of a dog that had been bitten by a mad dog. The injured dog was saved, but several months later, the boys became ill with stomach pains and convulsions.

What suggested a diagnosis of hydrophobia was that, by August 1680, the boys feared the water and had become, well, a bit dog-like. They regularly went into simultaneous fits that would last an hour, during which time “the Eldest especially, snarled, barked and endeavoured to bite like a Dog”. By September, “they became more wild” and, even after the fits had passed, could not endure the company of people. They had become more animal than human. The case seemed dire, but the boys were on the mend by the end of September.

Clergyman and antiquary, Abraham de la Pryme, wrote to Sloane in 1702 about a 1695 case from his brother’s household (see also Phil. Trans. 23, 1702-3). De la Pryme noted the regularity of timing in several cases, but was particularly intrigued by the way that tiny “Particles of this Poyson” could spread to infect a “mass of particles millions of times bigger”.

This case started with a “pretty grey-hound Bitch that had Whelps” being bitten by a mad dog. Three weeks later, the greyhound also went mad and had to be put down. The puppies appeared well and were looked after, but (again) three weeks later, “all pull’d out one anothers throats except one”. This one continued to eat, but would drink no liquid. Two servants caring for the puppy stuck their fingers into its mouth to check for a blockage, but there was none. The puppy soon went mad.

Three weeks later, both servants became ill. One, “a most strong and laborious Man”, managed to sweat off his symptoms: acute headache, tightened throat and red eyes (which makes me think of Black Shuck’s fiery eyes). But the fourteen-year old apprentice was much sicker. He became so savage that it took four adult men to hold him down

and all his discourse was of fighting, and how if that they would but let him alone, he would leap upon them, and bite, and tear them to pieces.

He soon lost his ability to speak altogether (one of the marks of humanity), then died.

The economic problem of the disease was obvious, as it could easily spread to livestock. In George Dampier’s recipe for rabies (published in the Phil. Trans.), Dampier reported that his remedy “did [his neighbours] a Hundred Pound’s Worth of Good” during a local outbreak when it saved their cattle.

But the social consequences of transmission was even more worrying. Rabies was, after all, considered a type of poison (see here and here), but so too was venereal disease, which could also be passed to one’s offspring. The real fear? That the mad animal’s qualities might be passed on to the human—or, worse yet, the victim’s children.

As De la Pryme concluded in his account, it was a pity “that the most Noble of creatures lyes at the Mercy of the most ignoble of particles”, but a wonder “that a few Atoms should be able to destroy a whole world”.

Doctor Sloane and His Patients in Eighteenth-Century England

Posted on June 12, 2013 by - Databases, Early Modern History, Family, Gender History, Hans Sloane, History of Medicine, Letter-writing, Networks, News, Patients, Research and Writing

In April, I received the good news that the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada had decided to fund my project “Reconstructing the Lives of Doctor Sloane and His Patients in Eighteenth-Century England” for three years.This may have resulted in an impromptu dance around the room, but fortunately the walls won’t talk…

The dance of death. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

The dance of death. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

This is in many ways a project born of snoopiness. I have always loved to read about the mucky details of daily life, and the letters written to Sloane offer much by way of gore, suffering and family quarrels. But one thing has always frustrated me in my research: the size of Sloane’s correspondence (upwards of forty volumes, depending on what is counted). So many letters, so many stories, so often hard to find!

The goal of this phase of the project is to complete the database, Sir Hans Sloane’s Correspondence Online, and to produce a series of microhistories about Sloane and his patients. While the collection remains indexed only by author (as it largely is still), it is difficult to navigate. The purpose of my database is to make it possible to search Sloane’s correspondence for details, such as people mentioned, social occasions, or specific illnesses. The database also makes it easier to find all references to a patient, whether made by a medical practitioner, friend or parent. This is when, to my way of thinking, things start to get really interesting.

The family records of the Newdigates, for example, show that Sloane treated several members of the family. Elizabeth Newdigate’s letters to Sloane reveal a troubled young woman, beset by family strife that included two siblings with insanity, a lawsuit by the eldest son, and the daughters’ mysterious suit before Parliament (which was dropped) for their father’s “unnatural acts”. Reading the family references in Sloane’s letters alongside the Newdigate papers will be useful in uncovering the family’s dysfunction and the wider context of Elizabeth Newdigate’s illness letters. Gender, age and status all played key roles in the disputes. By reading cases like these alongside available family archives, I can use the medical letters as a point of entry into understanding the moments of illness within the wider context of patients’ and families’ lives.

The database can also be used to trace relationships. Consider, for example, Sloane’s relationship with the Duchess of Albemarle.  Although Sloane went to Jamaica with the Duke of Albemarle, he remained the Duchess’ household physician when he returned to London and even after the Duchess remarried the Duke of Montagu. The Pierreponts were the Duchess’ birth family, while the Cadogans were related to the Duke of Montagu: both families were regular patients of Sloane’s. In 1719, Sloane’s daughter even married into the Cadogan family. The letters from this group of related families provide insight into the workings of patronage, kinship, and Sloane’s career, as much as their collective health.

Sloane himself is a fascinating subject of study. There are only a handful of letters about Sloane’s family and business in the correspondence, but there are also many small bits of scattered information: what he prescribed, others’ attitudes toward him, references to his opinions, details about property management, clues to his family and social life…  His family life, too, was important for his career. He married Elizabeth Rose (née Langley), who was from a well-to-do London family and a widow of a wealthy Jamaican landowner; her wealth aided his ability to maintain the appearance of a gentleman (important in attracting wealthy clients) and to collect objects from around the world (which reinforced the image of him as a man of science). At the height of his career, Sloane was President of the Royal College of Physicians, President of the Royal Society and a royal physician—a man very much at the centre of the medical and scientific community, with opportunity to influence the health of the nation.

Case histories such as these will allow me to examine the way in which social and political networks, state-building and power structures were reinforced in the everday life of the early modern household.

And, of course, maximise my snoopiness.

Eighteenth-Century Pain and the Modern Problem of Measuring Pain

Posted on April 12, 2013 by - Early Modern History, Experimentation, Hans Sloane's Personal Life, History of Medicine, History of Science, Letter-writing, Patients, Remedies

The offending machine. A Saskatchewan example. Image credit: Daryl Mitchell, Wikimedia Commons.

I read the news about the recent study using fMRI to measure physical and emotional pain intensity right after a visit to the physiotherapist for help with my migraines. (I’ve been a migraineur since the age of eleven when a Tilt-a-Whirl ride gave me a case of whiplash.) Although there is not always a close relationship between life events and scholarly work, my migraines have shaped my interest in patients’ illness narratives. It is as both scholar and sufferer that I am troubled by the fMRI study’s implications.

Running through much of the pain scholarship is the assumption that it cannot be adequately represented by language or truly understood by others.[1] Chronic pain’s invisibility makes it difficult even for people close to a sufferer to sympathise. There has been a recent shift to trying to understand pain holistically, with the development of pain clinics where sufferers can receive treatment from a variety of health practitioners and the focus is on mind-body integration. But scientific studies of pain still often come down to one question: can you tell how much pain a patient is experiencing, either in relation to his own pain, or that of others? To this end, many have tried to find ways of measuring pain.[2]

The news is all abuzz, with headlines such as “Study shows pain is all in your head, and you can see it”. Like many previous studies, the latest attempts to provide, as Maggie Fox at NBC News puts it, an “objective way to measure pain”. Researchers applied heat-based pain to volunteers, then measured the changes within the brain using fMRI. They were able to identify a person’s relative pain, such as when one burn feels worse than another, as well as the influence of painkillers. The results of this study have the potential to be very useful when treating patients who are unable to talk or unconscious.

But there is an unsettling aspect to the study—or at least to the way in which it is being reported—in that it tries to distinguish between a real, objective pain and the experienced pain. According to the lead researcher Tor Dessart Wager quoted in the above article, the tests reveal that people really do feel pain differently: “Let’s say I give you a 48-degrees stimulus and you go ‘This is okay; I can handle it’ and I might say ‘Oh, this really hurts’… My brain is going to respond more strongly than yours. We are using this to track what people say they feel.” In other words, some people are wimps and some are stoic—and patients cannot be trusted to report the truth.

An unhelpful distinction at best: it misses out the psycho-social experience of pain of why one person might feel the pain more keenly. Age, ethnicity, status and sex all play an important role not just in a sufferer’s experience of pain, but in how others perceive what the experience should be and the trustworthiness of a sufferer’s account of pain.

It is also a potentially dangerous distinction, reinforcing as it does the idea that pain needs to be measured objectively and that technology provides the answers. The problem, as Daniel Goldberg tweeted yesterday, is that:

A report in Scientific American explains the study’s implications for chronic sufferers. The fMRI was also used to measure coping tactics for the heat-induced pain, such as mindfulness, meditation, imagination or religious belief, revealing that such methods reduce pain. Pssssst… about that: we’ve known this for a while. These sorts of methods were used long before we had effective painkillers and are frequently used by modern chronic illness sufferers.

Will measuring pain ‘objectively’ really benefit the sufferer? The use of technology for chronic pain provides a mere (if very expensive) bandaid and, to make matters worse, undermines one of the most important elements in a successful doctor-patient relationship: trust. Sometimes looking at a historical case can pinpoint the modern problems.

Lady Sondes just before her marriage. Miniature of Lady Katherine Tufton by Peter Cross, 1707. Image Credit: Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Catherine Watson, Lady Sondes, wrote to Sloane several times between 1722 and 1734 about an unspecified illness.[3] Although she was in her late 30s, she had a litany of complaints that made her feel as “old and decayed” as someone aged fifty or sixty. Her pains ranged from headaches, gnawing leg pains, and “fullness” in her head to a stiff lip, constant fear, memory loss and “rising nerves”. She described the ways her daily life was affected. Besides being constantly distracted by pain, she worried about her legs giving out from under her or losing her memory so she would be unable to do the household accounts. These were problems for a woman who prided herself on running a large household successfully. Her descriptions were circular and repetitive, even boring, but reflected her ongoing experience: the physical pains, often not severe, nagged constantly at her throughout the day, and the fear and anxiety of what the pain might mean was all-encompassing.

Her symptoms did eventually pass, allowing her to once again go “about Busiynesse”, but the treatment had been difficult. Lady Sondes began to consult Sloane by letter when she disagreed with her regular physician’s diagnosis of hysteria. While Dr. Colby considered her ailment to be hysteria, Lady Sondes did not feel that she could trust her full story to him. Hysteria was associated with overly delicate women and a mixture of imagined problems alongside real ones, suggesting that such a diganosis may have predisposed Colby to disregard her accounts of pain. She wrote instead to Sloane who treated her “with great kindness and care”. It was not until Colby rediagnosed her as having a blood condition that she began to trust him again. A large part of Lady Sondes’ healing came from the ability to express her narrative. Sloane was not physically present; the greatest therapy he could have provided was reading her letters and answering her specific, stated concerns.

Chronic pain, with its messy emotional bits and day-to-day dullness, is encompassed within an entire life, not just a few moments spent inside a machine while clutching something uncomfortable. A crucial component of effective therapy is the trust between doctor and patient, allowing the patient to create a narrative, to be heard and to be understood. If a physician is primed to distrust a patient’s account, whether through a diagnosis or reliance on technology, the healing process will be thwarted. Sure we can measure pain, but when it comes to chronic pain, it’s not really the question we should be asking.

[1] This comes from Elaine Scarry’s influential book, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

[2] For example, the famous McGill Pain Questionnaire. See R. Melzack, “The McGill Pain Questionnaire: Major Properties and Scoring Methods”, Pain 1, 3 (1975): 277-299.

[3] I discuss this case and others from Sloane’s letters in my article, “ ‘An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper’: The Experience of Pain in Early Eighteenth-Century England and France”, Eighteenth-Century Studies 41, 4 (2008): 459-480.

Choosing the Countryside: Women, Health and Power in the Eighteenth Century

Posted on March 8, 2013 by - Early Modern History, Family, Gender History, History of Medicine, Patients

To honour International Women’s Day today, I have decided to return to my roots as a women’s historian. I first became a historian for feminist reasons: to recover women’s past and to understand the relationships among culture, body, gender, and status.

The control women had over their bodies has often been a staple topic of feminism and women’s medical history. We love to dig out (largely nineteenth and twentieth century) stories about the horrors inflicted upon women’s bodies: clitorodectomies, forced sterilisation, and more. They make for chilling telling. Or perhaps we look back to Antiquity: women as monsters or inferior, inverted men. We find the tales about menstrual blood being poisonous. It’s easy, surrounded by such stories, to assume that the goal of medicine has been about controlling women.

But the reality is far more complicated.

In the early eighteenth century, the misogynistic medical theories of inferiority, for example, were seldom practiced. All bodies were treated as humoral bodies, with specific temperaments that were individual to a patient. Medicine was highly interventionist (and often ineffective) for both sexes. And, more to the point, medical practitioners were dependent on their patients for success. This was not just in terms of payment or patronage.[1] . In an age before anaesthesia, or even stethoscopes, doctors and surgeons were unable to look inside the living body: patients’ stories were invaluable tools in diagnosis. Women could have much control over their own health.

Promising? Not exactly. These women’s choices were still limited in a multitude of ways. The ability to make decisions about one’s own body, whether historically or today, is an important marker of women’s equality. An old argument, perhaps, but one that is as true now as ever. When talking about control in the modern world, it often comes down to topics such as abortion or female genital mutilation. The dullness of day-to-day inequality is easy to overlook when there are more pressing issues.

Back in the eighteenth century, the fundamental inequalities within society can often be seen within the household. Women might, for example, have been well-treated by physicians–but, as letters to physician Hans Sloane show, their ability to make medical decisions was limited by something even more fundamental: access to money.

John Constable, Wivenhoe Park, Essex (1816). From: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA (Wikimedia Commons).

A husband could decide when and how a woman saw a doctor. In 1715, physician William Lilly commented that his patient Lady Suffolk was well enough to travel to London from her countryside residence in order to see Sloane, but only “if my Lord thinks fitt to bring her”.[2] Even when a  woman was pleased with her medical care, her husband might choose another course of treatment, as one unnamed doctor complained. He had been treating Lady Salisbury in 1727, who agreed with his recommendation that she should go to the countryside while she recuperated. Lord Salisbury, however, had other ideas. He dismissed the unnamed physician, instead turning over his wife’s care to Dr. Hale. No reasons were given for the change.[3]

Whether or not a woman received care was also up to her husband. Although the head of a household was obliged to provide medical care for everyone within it, the extent of the care needed was open to dispute.[4] Mrs A. Smith, for example, found that her treatments in Bath were useful, but her husband refused to continue paying. Someone, she believed, “has told Mr Smith that I am very well and I only pretend illness to stay in Towne”. Her dependence on Mr Smith’s decisions was clear. She noted that she was unhappy, since “all my Ease depends a pone Mr Smith’s opinion of me”. Worried that she would become more ill if her husband sent her to the countryside, she begged Sloane to intervene by “tell[ing] him how you thinke me”.[5]

Family members might try to help if they believed a woman’s health was being affected by her husband’s choices, but this was complicated and not always successful. The law, after all, ultimately upheld the power of a husband over his wife. Jane Roupell wrote to Sloane about her daughter, Lady Anne Ilay, on the grounds that her son-in-law had weakened her daughter’s health through his lack of care. Mrs. Roupell asked if Sloane might visit before seeing her daughter, so she could “tell you somthings that she is ashamed to tell her selfe”. It would be best, she thought, if her daughter could recover away from her husband–perhaps, she suggested, Sloane might recommend that Lady Ilay be sent to the countryside.[6]

The countryside in these four letters becomes alternatively a place of health, a place of isolation or a place of refuge. Although we’ve moved on a lot since the eighteenth century, there are two basic women’s health issues that underpinned these seemingly simple disputes about going to the countryside: access to health care and finances.

Most often, the Sloane correspondence provides examples of women’s families wanting the best for their wives and daughters, but women were always in precarious positions. Each woman came from a wealthy background and had doctors (such as Sloane) who were potential allies, but as the cases show, women could not simply choose what treatment they wanted without consulting their families. One thing was clear: it was ultimately up to their husbands what a woman’s medical treatment should be.


[1] See for example, Wendy Churchill, Female Patients in Early Modern Britain (Ashgate, 2012).

[2] British Library Sloane MS 4076, f. 14, 28 July 1715.

[3] British Library Sloane MS 4078, f. 304, 26 March 1727/8.

[4] Catherine Crawford, “Patients’ Rights and the Law of Contract in Eighteenth-century England”, Social History of Medicine 13 (2000): 381-410.

[5] British Library Sloane MS 4077, f. 37, n.d.

[6] British Library Sloane MS 4060, f. 203, f. 204, n.d.

A longer version of this argument appears in: L.W. Smith, “Reassessing the Role of the Family: Women’s Medical Care in Eighteenth-Century England”, Social History of Medicine 16, 3 (2003): 327-342.

Domesticity and Astronomy in Eighteenth-Century England

Posted on February 17, 2013 by - Databases, Early Modern History, Environment History, Family, Gender History, History of Medicine, History of Science, Patients, Philosophical Transactions, Religion

This past week has been an exciting time for portents! What with a meteor blasting into Russia, an asteriod passing close to earth, St. Peter’s Basilica being struck by lightning, and the Pope resigning, early modern people would have been getting a bit nervous…[1] As it is, some people believe that the lightning strike was a sign that God approves the Pope’s decision. Perhaps we live in a more optimistic era.

There are several letters in the Sloane Correspondence database about early modern astronomy, although only two that mention comets.[2] By the eighteenth century, there was a growing shift away from seeing dramatic astronomical events as portents. Clergyman William Derham (1657-1735), for example, wrote to Sloane regularly about natural philosophy and his letters (dated 28 March 1706) reveal a careful attention to matters of fact rather than a concern with religious signs.[3]

“Part of a Letter from the Reverend Mr W Derham, F.R.S. Concerning a Glade of Light Observed in the Heavens”. Philosophical Transactions, vol. 25, no. 305 (1706), p. 2221.

In one of Derham’s letters, which also appeared in the Philosophical Transactions (vol. 25, 1706), he described his star-gazing just before Easter. While observing the satellites of Saturn, he spotted a “glade of light” in the constellation of Taurus. The light had a tail like a comet, but a pointy upper end instead of a rounded one. This, Derham was certain, was similar to what Joshua Childrey and Giovanni Domenico Cassini had observed. When the following nights were cloudy, Derham was unable to spot the glade again–and, although Easter Day was fair, he “forgot it unluckily then”. By the time he was next able to look at the skies, the glade of light was gone.

This was the only bit of Derham’s rather long letter that was published in the Phil. Trans. this time. In the letter, Derham also dicussed sunspots and requested advice about his wife’s eye problems. This was typical of many of Sloane’s correspondents, whose letters blurred the boundaries between scholarly, social and medical matters.

Anna Derham, aged about 31, was suffering from eye problems. Sloane had recommended that she take a variety of medicines, including a purge (and rather revoltingly, woodlice), in addition to eye drops. The eye drops, Derham reported, did not agree with his wife and had caused an inflammation. The purge, moreover, had left Mrs. Derham with violent pains spreading from above her eye to throughout her head and face. Derham believed that the eye medicine had resulted in his wife’s cornea wasting away. The outcome of the eye problem was not noted, but a letter from later that year (30 August 1706) mentioned Mrs. Derham’s increasingly severe headaches, which worried both her and her husband. Whether her health improved (or Derham simply distrusted Sloane’s advice in this case) is unclear, but Derham did not mention his wife’s health again until November 1710 when he feared that she might die from peripneumonia. (Mrs. Derham didn’t, managing to outlive her husband.)

What strikes me as particularly interesting in Derham’s account is the small detail that he forgot to look at the skies on Easter Sunday. As a clergyman, he was no doubt very busy in the week leading up to and including Easter. It would be entirely understandable that he might forget… but he did manage to look out his telescope in the nights prior to Easter.

The rather pressing matter of his wife’s health, on the other hand, is the most likely reason. It’s clear that her symptoms were alarming and disabling (as would have been the treatments, as purges kept one very close to the chamberpot). To compound the domestic disruption, the couple had four children between the ages of two and six in 1706. At the very least, Derham was monitoring his wife’s health and overseeing her medical care.[4] Even with domestic help, Mrs. Derham’s poor health would have posed a challenge for the household at the best of times, but even more so at the busiest time of year for a clergyman’s family.

Early modern scientific endeavours often took place within the early modern household, meaning that these activities were inevitably subject to the rhythms and disruptions of daily life. With his ill wife, several young children, and Easter duties, Derham simply did not have time to remember.

 

[1] For other recent blogging on historical comets, see Darin Hayton on “Meteorites and Comets in Pre-Modern Europe” and Rupert Baker on the comets in the Philosophical Transactions (“Watch the Skies“).

[2] The other letter was from Leibniz (5 May 1702), which was an account in Latin of a newly discovered comet.

[3] On Derham and his family, see Marja Smolenaars, “Derham, William (1657-1735)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004. [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7528, accessed 7 June 2011.]

[4] For more on men’s medical caregiving roles within the family, see my article “The Relative Duties of a Man: Domestic Medicine in England and France, ca. 1685-1740”, Journal of Family History 31, 3 (2006): 237-256.

Letter 3838

Posted on August 2, 2016 by -

Caleb Lowdham to Hans Sloane – November 25, 1730


Item info

Date: November 25, 1730
Author: Caleb Lowdham
Recipient: Hans Sloane

Library: British Library, London
Manuscript: Sloane MS 4051
Folio: ff. 136-137


Original Page


Transcription

[fol. 137] Excester in Devonsh: Nov. 25. 1730 Hon’d S’r I hope ye communicative Genius will excuse the freedom of beging ye Opinion ab’t a shield; Whether they are all more or less Curv’d towards the person that bears it as I have often observed in Coins & other figures, or Whether some may have the concave hold towards ye Enemy; as this Clypous or Parma (w’ch I met with at Smith’s shop in a sea-port-town near this place) seems to indicate as much (perhaps it may be Spanish, but cannot guess at it’s Age) it is ab’t 12 Inch: diam: whose convex is cover’d with Leather, & where is the remains of a Manubrium for the Sctuifer to take hold of the concave is 2 Inches, and ye Unbo wch is 4 Inch: diam: & hollow, on it’s top is a piece of solid Brass 1/2 Inch thick, wch exceeds ye Cavity by 2 Inches more, & probably a point or Dart on ye top of it, wch seems broken off that may be some Inches longer; there are 60 plates of Iron from the Umbo to ye Circumference, & 9 Circular ones, wch are fastned together by 60 Nails in each Circle where the plates intersect, whose heads are all as round as Pease, of the smaller size, but in ye other Circle ye Nails touch each other, & are in Number 150 from whence I conclude that from ye Nails, Umbo, &c. that ye concave part was held outward, wch makes this Armour Offensive as well as Defensive, however shall be determined by ye greater Judgem’t if you please to fav’r me with a Line, shall take it as an hon’r done to ye very humble ser’t Caleb Lowdham

Lowdham describes a shield.



Patient Details

Letter 3455

Posted on August 2, 2016 by -

Thomas Dereham to Hans Sloane – May 22, 1728


Item info

Date: May 22, 1728
Author: Thomas Dereham
Recipient: Hans Sloane

Library: British Library, London
Manuscript: Sloane MS 4049
Folio: ff. 165-166


Original Page


Transcription

[fol. 165] Rome 22 May 1728 Sir Whereas I had caused to be sent a long time agoe to Leghorne to be shipt off those books & papers I mentioned to you in a former of mine , & that the shipp has delaied as usuall its departure, I have butt just received the Bill of Ladeing, which you will find herein, & hope it will come to your hands at the same time that you may hear the St Thomas coming up the River, so I entreat to recover the small case, & make acceptable unto the Royall Society the Collection I have made for them of the newest Philosophicalls Lucubrations of these parts. I suppose you will have received long before now the book of Rizzetti which I sent you by a person coming over hence directly for G. Britain, whom I changed also with a letter for you, & relating to the said book, I learn that at Bologna they try over again ye Optick experiments of Sr Issak Newton to confuse ye false suppositions of ye Author. Here enclosed you will find a small dissertation of a curious Apothecary of this Town, that has desired me to present it unto ye R. Society, & if his Hipothesis holds true, there might be found a true Antidote against the Gout. I am promised very soone the answers of the Professors of Padua to Dr Rutty, which I shall duely send him & Monsigr Bianchi is att work to send by my means his Observations upon the Jovial satellites unto Mr Derham, unto whom I entreat you to make my best compliments, & tell him tis the reason why I have not returned yett an answer into his last letter. At the mouth of the River Arno in Tuscany they caught a fortnight ago a Dogfish of 1100 pounds weight in whose belly they found the head of a young stagg with the horns 4 inches long, & all the skin of the body not yet saturated, by the length whereoff they judged [fol. 166] the Animal might have been of about 60 pounds weight & tis supposed that out of the forests of Pisa it went to drink in the river & was swallowd up by the sea monster, a thing that has never happened before in those parts. We have lately in this Town a Woman delivered of a Child by the Navel that is in a fair way of recovering, & you will find amongst the books an account of that by the Anus last year at Venice. I will not give you further trouble, butt Remaine with reall esteem, & trueth Sir Your most Obedient & most humble servant Thomas Dereham

Sir Thomas Dereham (c. 1678-1739) was a British expatriate and Roman Catholic who lived in Italy. He had a close association with the Royal Society (https://collections.royalsociety.org/DServe.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqCmd=Show.tcl&dsqDb=Persons&dsqPos=0&dsqSearch=%28Surname%3D%27dereham%27%29).



Patient Details

Letter 2264

Posted on August 2, 2016 by -

William Beckett to Hans Sloane – February 4, 1717/18


Item info

Date: February 4, 1717/18
Author: William Beckett
Recipient: Hans Sloane

Library: British Library, London
Manuscript: Sloane MS 4045
Folio: ff. 94-97


Original Page


Transcription

Beckett is writing a book on the origins of venereal disease in England. Of particular interest to him is the method by which the authorities identify women suffering from such diseases, as described in one of his sources: ‘The 19th Chapter doth show of Burning of an Harlot, where his notion of Communication the Burning is very particular, he thinks that is the Harlot or Hoore doth hold in her breth and clapse her hands together and toes in like manner that this is sufficient to give the person Burning’. Beckett details his findings and observations. William Beckett was a surgeon, Fellow of the Royal Society, and founding member of the Society of Antiquaries. He presented papers to the Royal Society, published in the Philosophical Transactions, and authored several books (Sidney Lee, Becket, William (16841738), rev. Michael Bevan, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1900, accessed 11 Aug 2011]).



Patient Details

A Most Dangerous Rivalry

Posted on January 22, 2015 by - Collecting, Early Modern History, Hans Sloane, History of Science, Philosophical Transactions, Royal Society, Sociability, Undergraduate Research

By James Hawkes

The Royal Society is in turmoil as competing factions battle for control. Not only is our hero Hans Sloane’s job on the line, but the very existence of the Royal Society hangs in the balance…

Dr. John Woodward (Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Uploaded by: Dcoetzee)

Dr. John Woodward (Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Uploaded by: Dcoetzee)

No this is not the TV Guide summary of a niche costume drama, but the results of a bitter dispute between Dr. Hans Sloane and Dr. John Woodward in 1710. Not only did these men have starkly different visions for the future of the Royal Society, but they were competitors for rare curiosities and specimens. It’s perhaps not surprising that the men became rivals! Woodward launched a concerted campaign to unseat Sloane, which nearly succeeded.

Woodward, professor of Physic at Gresham College, championed a highly empirical and experimental approach for the Royal Society. He resented Sloane’s tendency to publish an increasingly ‘miscellaneous’ assortment of articles in  the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions–particularly those written by Sloane’s friends. (This was, admittedly, a complaint even by men who liked Sloane!) Woodward naturally considered the man most disadvantaged by this unjust state of affairs to be himself.  He made it his mission to save the Royal Society from those he feared would undermine the scientific progress of mankind.

Sloane and Woodward actually had much in common: they were both medical doctors with a deep-seated curiosity about the natural world. They were also active in the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians. Both earned considerable respect for their scholarly endeavours: Sloane, for his botanical work on the West Indies, and Woodward, for his prolific writings, especially on geology. Each man had a circle of scientific contacts across the British Empire and the Continent.

Sloane and Woodward also built impressive collections of natural and antiquarian items, preserved for posterity by (respectively) the British Museum and the Woodward Professorship at Cambridge. Woodward is even on record in a letter to Sloane declaring that he thought himself Sloane’s friend… albeit in the context of trying to explain away intemperate remarks about Sloane.

But the Devil is always in the details. Sloane had a reputation for collecting pretty much anything that fell into his hands. Woodward, however, focused on what he thought to be academically useful. These different approaches helped Woodward to drive a  wedge between Sloane and Sir Isaac Newton (then President of the Royal Society), who had little respect for Sloane’s collecting habits.

The situation finally exploded in 1709 when Sloane, as First Secretary of the Royal Society,  published a book review by Woodward’s long-standing enemy Edward Lhwyd. In his review of the work of a Swiss geologist, Lhwyd went out of his way to ridicule Woodward’s theories. Woodward demanded satisfaction. One contemporary said he did not know if the affair would end

whether by the sword or by the pen. If the former, Dr. Mead has promised to be Dr. Sloane’s second.(Levine)

A distinct possibility for resolving the conflict. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Uploaded by Noodleki

One conflict resolution option. Credit: Wikimedia Commons, user Noodleki.

Dr. Mead was, of course, another one of the many enemies that Woodward was so good at making. Indeed, ten years later Mead and Woodward duelled to resolve a dispute on the best way to treat smallpox. There are many versions of what happened. According to one, with Woodward defeated Mead bellowed, “Take your life,” to which Woodward replied, “Anything but your Physic.” But that is another story.

In an attempt to keep the bickering between Woodward and Sloane from escalating into violence, Sir Isaac Newton forced Sloane to publish a retraction, indicating he thought some of Woodward’s ire was justified. Woodward’s plans to overthrow Sloane nonetheless continued apace. Woodward managed to get a friend, John Harris, elected secretary. He then proclaimed in a letter to Ralph Thoresby that:

Dr. Sloane declared at the next Meeting he would lay down…. He guesses right enough that the next step would be to set him aside.

Woodward and his faction were so confident by this point that he criticised Newton as incapable. Harris even invited Newton’s nemesis, Leibniz, to write for the Transactions. Perhaps Woodward’s ambition was becoming so great that he hoped to be Newton’s successor as President of the Royal Society–an honour that would fall to Sloane much later, in 1727.

The power struggle culminated when Sloane was presenting on bezoars to the Society. Woodward attacked Sloane’s thesis and Sloane, unable to come up with a reply, allegedly resorted to making faces at Woodward.  These grimaces were “very strange and surprising, and such as were enough to provide any ingenuous sensible man to a warmth.”

If only we knew what the grimace was... Engraving, c. 1760, after C. Le Brun. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

If only we knew what the grimace was… Engraving, c. 1760, after C. Le Brun. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

The Council was convened to resolve this controversy once and for all. They debated whether Sloane had actually been making faces and whether Woodward’s ire was justified. Woodward seemed on the brink of victory, but then lost his temper when Sloane denied the charges: “Speak sense, or English, and we shall understand you!” Woodward, unwilling to apologize was summarily kicked out. He then claimed that Sloane had packed the Council with his cronies, complaining to no avail of the “Mystery of Iniquity that reigns there.” His friend Harris was soon enough replaced and so his entire revolution fell apart.

Although it may be more amusing to think of these eminent doctors as perpetually busy with childish bickering, they were capable of acting professionally on occasion. Even after this great controversy Woodward was willing to recommend  Sloane to a patient and attempted to enlist Sloane’s support to obtain a lucrative new position. Still, their showdown does appear to have put a bit of a damper on their correspondence, and it would seem that their relationship never entirely recovered.

As it happened, with Woodward gone, Sloane and Newton soon fell to sniping at one another. When Sloane was forced to resign as secretary in 1713, Woodward ended up on the side of Sloane against Newton, who Woodward now saw as an evil tyrant holding the Society back.

The more things change, the more they stay the same?

 

References

Benedict, Barbara. “Collecting Trouble: Sir Hans Sloane’s Literary Reputation in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Eighteenth Century Life, 36, 2 (2012).

Levine, Joseph. Doctor Woodward’s Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977.

MacGregor, Arthur. “The Life, Character and Career of Sir Hans Sloane,” Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary Founding Father of the British Museum. Ed. Arthur MacGregor. London: British Museum Press, 1994.