Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Medicine, religion and the puritan revolution
- 2 Harvey in Holland: circulation and the Calvinists
- 3 The matter of souls: medical theory and theology in seventeenth-century England
- 4 Mental illness, magical medicine and the Devil in northern England, 1650–1700
- 5 Passions and the ghost in the machine: or what not to ask about science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany
- 6 Thomas Sydenham: epidemics, experiment and the ‘Good Old Cause’
- 7 The medico-religious universe of an early eighteenth-century Parisian doctor: the case of Philippe Hecquet
- 8 Isaac Newton, George Cheyne and the Principia Medicinae
- 9 Physicians and the new philosophy: Henry Stubbe and the virtuosi-physicians
- 10 The early Royal Society and the spread of medical knowledge
- 11 Medical practice in late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century England: continuity and union
- Index
8 - Isaac Newton, George Cheyne and the Principia Medicinae
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Medicine, religion and the puritan revolution
- 2 Harvey in Holland: circulation and the Calvinists
- 3 The matter of souls: medical theory and theology in seventeenth-century England
- 4 Mental illness, magical medicine and the Devil in northern England, 1650–1700
- 5 Passions and the ghost in the machine: or what not to ask about science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany
- 6 Thomas Sydenham: epidemics, experiment and the ‘Good Old Cause’
- 7 The medico-religious universe of an early eighteenth-century Parisian doctor: the case of Philippe Hecquet
- 8 Isaac Newton, George Cheyne and the Principia Medicinae
- 9 Physicians and the new philosophy: Henry Stubbe and the virtuosi-physicians
- 10 The early Royal Society and the spread of medical knowledge
- 11 Medical practice in late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century England: continuity and union
- Index
Summary
The emergence of Isaac Newton as an intellectual force, as a patron and as a focus for social and political ideas strongly affected both medical theory and the medical profession. The influence of Newton's ideas, particularly his theory of matter on physiological theory, recast iatromechanism. Their effects ranged from chemical notions based on attracting atoms earlier in the eighteenth century, to attempts in the 1730s to resolve the mind–body relationship by means of a Newtonian ether.
The Scottish physician Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713) and his students and disciples at Edinburgh, Leiden and Oxford envisaged a medical theory on the same level of certainty as Newton's theory of the world, which they referred to as a ‘principia medicinae theoreticae mathematicae’. Indeed, they considered the two systems to be strictly analogous. Their work stemmed from the atomistic theory of matter Newton had outlined in the essay ‘De natura acidorum’ and from queries added to the 1706 Opticks. In 1713, the year of Pitcairne's death, the second edition of Principia appeared, with hints of a change in Newton's thoughts. This change became far more apparent in his 1717–18 revisions of the Opticks, in which Newton's previous reliance upon atomistic explanations of chemical and related phenomena shifted towards a theory relying upon various ‘subtle fluids’ or ‘ethers’. This change, which appeared fundamental to observers although it may not have seemed so to Newton, quickly manifested itself in works on medical theory, often by the same men who had written thoroughly atomistic treatises some twenty years earlier.
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- The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century , pp. 222 - 245Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989
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