Lauren Kassell

Magic, Alchemy and the Medical Economy in Early Modern England: The Case of Robert Fludd’s Magnetical Medicine

This chapter is about the commerce between physicians and patients, angels and demons, and the living and the dead. In 1656 Nicholas Culpeper, the prolific medical author and audacious critic of the College of Physicians, spoke from the grave. He had been dead for two years, and his voice issued from a brief, satirical pamphlet called Mr Culpeper’s Ghost.1 His ghost affirms that alchemy provides a key to understanding natural philosophy and to preparing medicaments. He also wonders whether chymical remedies are appropriate for all cases, or whether conventional Galenic and Hippocratic ones are more reliable.2 He began to have these doubts when on a walk through heaven he bumped into Robert Wright, former apothecary to Robert Fludd. Fludd was an eminent London physician and prolific philosophical author who had died in 1637. ‘[T]hough a Trismegistian-Platonick-Rosy-crucian Doctor’;, Wright reported of his employer, he ‘gave his Patients the same kind of Galenical Medicaments, which other Physitians in the Town ordinarily appointed’. Even when he himself was ill, Wright insisted to the ghost, Fludd only used Galenic therapeutics.3

SECRETS REVEALED: ALCHEMICAL BOOKS IN EARLY-MODERN ENGLAND

In 1688 William Cooper, a London bookseller, published A catalogue of chymicall books. For two decades he had collected these titles, locating, identifying and recording details of 422 English books. This list documents one component of the history of alchemy. It also provides a measure of the vitality of alchemical pursuits in Restoration England. The number of titles listed in Cooper’s Catalogue are plotted by year in Figure 1. Cooper lists several dozen alchemical books printed in London in the second half of the sixteenth century, with a concentration of activity in the 1590s. The first decade of the new century was relatively quiet. Production then rose slightly and ran at a relatively even pace through to the 1640s. It increased tenfold in the 1650s. After the Restoration, production continued at this elevated level until trailing off at the end of the century. These books present historians of science with two apparent paradoxes. The first is that they made secret knowledge public. Alchemy was an arcane art. Its traditions were learned through divine inspiration, instruction by a master under an oath of secrecy, and the study of esoteric texts. These texts encoded the procedures to make the philosophers’ stone. In prose and verse, paradoxes, digressions, erroneous quantities, numerical encodings, metaphors and allegories concealed secrets from the uninitiated reader. Some works bore the name of a mythical or pseudonymous

Paper Technologies, Digital Technologies: Working With Early Modern Medical Records

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Edinburgh University Press via https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-edinburgh-companion-to-the-critical-medical-humanities.html