James Jurin and the avoidance of bias in collecting and assessing evidence on the effects of variolation

Abstract

James Jurin (1684–1750) was an eighteenth century physician and polymath (Rus- nock 2004). As a scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, he became acquainted with the work of Sir Issac Newton, of which he became an enthusiastic advocate. Af- ter leaving Cambridge he travelled with Mordecai Carey, later Bishop of Killala and Achonry, to continental Europe. They attended the lectures of Hermann Boerhaave at Leiden, then Europe’s leading medical school. Jurin later returned to Cambridge to study medicine. Thereafter he practised medicine while continuing to develop his interest in science and mathematics, corresponding with many of Europe’s lead- ingscientists.1 ThiswasfacilitatedbyhispositionasSecretaryoftheRoyalSociety (1721–1727). Under the pseudonym ‘Philalethes Cantabrigiensis’ Jurin engaged in a pamphlet war (the ‘Analyst controversy’) with Bishop Berkeley. Berkeley had ar- gued that Newton’s account of the calculus was incoherent, which prompted Jurin’s defence of Newtonian mathematics. Jurin was held in high regard as a physician (though his treatment of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, was contro- versial). He became president of the Royal College of Physicians shortly before he died in 1750. In this essay I examine how Jurin’s work, in particular his work on variolation, introduces or develops several mechanisms that allow him to make a far more reli- able assessment of a medical intervention than had been hitherto undertaken, and which were subsequently influential.

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