Archibald Pitcairne and Newtonian medicine

Abstract

In the spring of 1692, Isaac Newton entertained a visitor in his rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge.This was in itself unusual for the reclusive scientist; and, in addition, he entrusted to the visitor, Archibald Pitcairne, the fruit of his latest work on alchemy, chemistry, and the theory of matter, the essay 'De natura acidorum'.Over a period of several days, the two conversed on topics related to the essay, or, rather, Pitcairne asked questions which Newton answered.Immediately following his departure, Pitcairne sent copies of the essay, including notes of his interviews, to his friends.'Who was Archibald Pitcairne, that Newton should have entrusted such an important document to him?At the time of his visit, he was on his way to Leiden to assume the professorship of the practice of medicine at that city's university.An Edinburgh physician and a prominent member of scientific circles there, Pitcairne was a close friend of the mathematician David Gregory.Although he had published little, the Leiden appointment signalled his growing reputation as a medical theorist.Pitcairne's ideas grew out of the iatromechanical school, but he also explicitly connected his ideas with those of Newton.His successors and followers accepted this connection.In this paper I shall examine the relationship between Pitcairne's ideas on medicine and physiology and Newton's concept of the microcosm before the publication of the Opticks in 1704.I have argued elsewhere that, at least for the period ofthe 1690s, "Newtonianism" should be narrowly defined as an intellectual movement based on the understanding and use of Newton's ideas.2I shall attempt in this paper to measure Pitcairne's work in this period by this criterion.Pitcaime was born in Edinburgh in 1652, the son of a merchant-magistrate who was also a minor laird.He matriculated at the University of Edinburgh in 1668.Soon rejecting the study of divinity, he took the standard arts course, graduating MA in 1671.By then, he had decided to study law, and went to Paris to continue his studies.Apparently he found the law course there not to his liking, for he took up with a group of Scots medical students, and began to accompany them on their hospital rounds.The elder Pitcairne objected to this agreeable activity and called his son home to

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 52 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.