Oxford Medicine THE NEWSLETTER OF THE OXFORD MEDICAL ALUMNI OXFORD MEDICINE . JULY 2011
Oxford Medicine and the Early Royal Society Between c. 1649 and 1670 Oxford was one of the leading European centres for experimental science, and it was in Oxford, and by Oxonians and friends in Gresham College, London, that the Royal Society was founded in late November 1660. Experimental physiology, chemistry, and astronomy in particular were advanced by these men. Yet none of this original research had any formal association with the institutional University, but was the product of a private group of friends: resident dons, Puritan-evicted Royalist High Church dons, scientifically-minded clergymen, brilliant young graduate students, and friends who had come to live as private gentlemen in Oxford. For all of these men – Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, Richard Lower, John Locke, [Sir] Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Seth Ward, and several others – became members of the informal Oxford ‘Experimental Club’ hosted by the Revd Dr John Wilkins in his Warden’s Lodgings in Wadham. Indeed, they came together in equal Fellowship, to try or report experiments, discuss discoveries made abroad, and enjoy each other’s company in much the same way as Oxford men of that time met together to pray or to make music. Of course, one reason why science was so topical by the 1650s lay in the speed of its advancement. First came the great discoveries in global geography. Then telescopes and microscopes after 1609 revealed a hithertounsuspected universe of the vast and the minute. Moreover, magnetic needles, the barometer, the airpump, and other instruments by the 1650s further added to the flood of new knowledge, as their perception-enhancing power opened up realms of knowledge of which the revered ancient Greeks could never have dreamt. Could modern doctors really know more than Hippocrates, and astronomers more than Ptolemy? It appeared so, for the men of 1650 had research tools unimagined in ancient Athens, and it now seemed that instrument-based forensic inquisition into nature yielded incomparably more fruits than did philosophical systems. Post-Galenic comparative anatomy had been pioneered by Vesalius in Padua in the 1540s, but it
Painting by Rita Greer depicting Boyle and Hooke's laboratory in the High circa 1660. Allan Chapman is portrayed as the assistant carrying the bowl.
was that painstaking sequence of experiments undertaken by William Harvey, and published in 1628 in De Motu Cordis, that created a whole new agenda for physiology. For Harvey, a Cambridge man and adopted Oxonian through his Wardenship of Merton, 1645-6, had effectively ‘re-plumbed’ the living body. Instead of moving in a one-way direction from the furnace-like heart to the extremities through the veins, the blood was now seen to move first into the lungs and arteries (always puzzling to Greek anatomists), and then into the veins under the mechanical action of the heart, in a ceaseless circulation. Harvey had many critics, but when Marcello Malphigi in Bologna in 1661 discovered the capillaries with the new microscope, the circulation theory received a huge boost. The Oxford medics within Wilkins’s Wadham Club were all circulationists. Yet what was the blood’s relationship with the lungs and respiratory process? For the ancients appeared to have got it wrong. Working at his lodgings in Deep Hall on the High, in the house of the apothecary John
Contents Letter from the President . .3 A Profile of John Ledingham . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 Frith photography prize 2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5 People in the News . . . . .6 “Oxford University Hospitals” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 Obituaries
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Mentorship Programme 14 Alumni weekend
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Forthcoming Events . . . . .16