The Ghost of Galileo

by J. L. Heilbron

  Williams allowed himself to assent to the proposition that the heart is the “fountaine of native heat.” That suggested the classical analogy, which Williams drew from Philolaus the Pythagorean, between the sun in the macrocosm and the heart in the microcosm. Although Williams could not “place fire in the middle of the universe as the center of nature” or identify this fire with solar heat, he accepted that the heart’s power and empire did indeed make it function as the body’s sun. Therefore, Harvey might well be right. Further judicious inquiries will tell: for the proper way to investigate the body is “to expresse Mechanicallie what is done within us.” Perhaps we are no more than manikins, assemblies of wheels put in motion by the heart’s heat.

  [A] fire placed by some new Prometheus in a hart from whence the arteries and veins branch might diffuse some spirituous vapores; and steame out its hot parts on one side; and on the other side sucke up matter for it, to nourish it self out of the adjacent parts soe passing and returning forge as wel a perpetual motion in art as in nature.56

  A speculation wilder than a moon man: a man machine! Williams did think for himself.

  Where would the soul dwell in a man who is not a machine? The question did not fall in the domain of doctors of the body, who held that “nature makes things either for necessitie or because ’tis better soe,” but of doctors of divinity. Williams did not think much of their methods. “Religious mysteries have heretofore bin veyled for a more awful regard to be had of them.” This remark introduces a lecture by Williams on the male reproductive system, whose “naturals soe too might be kept from sight; or the speaker of them covered (as anciently the orators were, when they spoke of Love).” In both cases, public interest and noble minds are best served by anatomy, openness, and naturalization. As a cure for inability to see pudenda for what they are, without mystification or cover up, Williams suggested doing as “the chast Roman matrones who meeting naked men, conceived them only to be statues.”57

  Royal Doctors

  The practice of a royal physician-in-ordinary could be exciting. Suspicious Puritans saw political murder in the sudden death of young healthy Henry, Prince of Wales. Perhaps his doctors, suborned by Catholics who feared he would reverse James’s Spanish policy did him in. Or perhaps Mayerne, who was the chief of the attending doctors, made a mistake by bleeding the prince against the advice of the others.58 To defeat the repetition of such charges, Mayerne drew up a protocol for treating royal persons: all the attending physicians must agree in writing to the actions taken; the medicines prescribed must be prepared by the royal apothecary; and no one other than the physicians should administer anything to the patient. Mayerne gave these instructions to James’s five other physicians-in-ordinary when he left England in 1624 for a brief visit to the Continent. He added that James was increasingly prone to the deep depression that he had suffered after the deaths of Prince Henry and Queen Anne. James fell ill during Mayerne’s absence. The doctors agreed that he suffered from a tertian fever that did not threaten his life.59

  Mayerne’s colleagues continued to follow his protocol as James’s condition worsened. Then Buckingham broke the rule against unauthorized physicking. With his mother’s help, he administered a plaster and a cordial to the dying king. Did it matter? The doctors could detect no sign of poison when they opened the body, only blood “wonderfully corrupted with melancholy.” Nonetheless conspiracy theorists returned to their earlier insight, although with reversed political polarity: this time the royal person was removed because of fear he might return to a pro-Spanish policy and readmit Gondomar to England. Charles’s first parliament examined the charges and decided that Buckingham was at least guilty of an act “[of] transcendent presumption and of dangerous consequence.”60 We know the next step. Charles dismissed parliament and forfeited the grant he needed.

  The most famous of royal physicians, William Harvey, had known James almost from the beginning of his reign in England, for Harvey’s father-in-law was one of the physicians James brought with him from Scotland. In 1618, around the time Harvey began to lecture publicly on the circulation of the blood, James made him an extraordinary physician royal.61 Ten years later, Harvey renewed the connection by dedicating the definitive exposition of the theory, De motu cordis, to Charles. The dedication plays on the usual parallels among heart, king, and sun. The heart is the sovereign power of animals, “the sun of their microcosm,” the king the foundation of his kingdom, “the sun of the world around him.” Since a monarch acts, sometimes, according to his heart, he should know how his heart acts; contemplating together “the prime mover of the body of man, and the emblem of [his] own sovereign power.”62 Two years later Charles appointed Harvey one of his physicians in ordinary at the attractive retainer of £300 a year.63

  Harvey’s duties extended to accompanying royal relatives and royal emissaries abroad. From 1630 to 1632 he toured the Continent with Charles’s 18-year-old cousin, the Duke of Lennox. It was not a pleasant trip. War had so ravaged the countryside that Harvey could scarcely find a healthy animal to anatomize. In compensation, he had fresh carcasses in abundance whenever he traveled with Charles on royal hunts. In 1636, Harvey was again abroad, keeping Arundel healthy on his hopeless mission to Prague to negotiate a restoration of the Palatinate. Harvey took the occasion to debate with doctors who doubted his theories and to revisit Italy, which he had not seen since earning his medical degree in Padua in 1602.

  On the outward journey Arundel picked up an artist to illustrate his progress from Cologne to Prague. This was Wenceslas Hollar, who recommended himself to Arundel not only as a meticulous draftsman but also as a Catholic or proto-Catholic and, what was unusual for an artist, as a gentleman, for he was a son of a knight of the empire.64 Hollar specialized in designing and engraving street scenes and townscapes, almost always of a peaceful character, even when drawn in the midst of the devastation through which Arundel passed. An account left by one of the earl’s party describes burnt and pillaged villages, starved peasants “found dead with grasse in their mouths,” gallows with corpses still dangling from them, and a village reduced to coals on which Arundel had his supper cooked. None of this, apart from some peculiarly bloodless executions, did Hollar depict. He returned to England with Arundel to make engravings of items in the earl’s picture collection. He again had the opportunity of recording grisly events, such as the torture of the Puritan triumvirs and the execution of Strafford, and again rendered them as if viewed by a robot.65 His tranquility and exactness made him a good collaborator. When Civil War released Hollar from his copying and Cleyn from his tapestries, they worked together on book illustrations.66 Hollar could have told Cleyn something about the frontispiece of Galileo’s Dialogue in the edition shown in our painting, for he had worked with its designer.

  Harvey made his side trip to Italy in order to buy paintings for Charles.67 His shopping was not successful. Having traveled to Italy through a plague zone, he spent most of his vacation in quarantine tantalizingly close to Venice. When liberated, he went to Rome, where he enjoyed a warm welcome from Cardinal Barberini and a dinner with congenial colleagues at the English College.68 Perhaps the Jesuits put on a play for him, as they often did for distinguished travelers; he and Arundel sat through several during their excursion to Prague. One of these, staged by students at the Jesuit college there, deserves resurrection for its high compliment and poor prophecy. Neptune has taken Peace to England to escape the wars in Germany, while Ceres, Bacchus, and Apollo bewail their fates under Mars’s dominion on the Continent. Neptune discloses that he has also given “the Imperiall government of the sea” to King Charles and that the other gods should apply to him to restore peace to the world. Mercury observes that they need not trouble themselves: Charles’s envoy Arundel would soon arrange for Peace’s return. That did not happen. Like Harvey, Arundel returned to England with his mission unaccomplished.69

  Although Charles enjoyed good health, he had at least eighteen doctors, five surgeons, and four apothecaries
, who were also available to Henrietta Maria, for whom, in addition, he maintained a midwife and three French physicians.70 By 1641, Harvey had reached the top of this heap of health-givers as the chief of three physicians designated for “the person of his Ma[jes]tie.” The others were Matthew Lister, who had a good record of polishing off Stuarts, having assisted at the deathbeds of Henry, Anna, and James, and Mayerne, who, when relinquishing the primacy to Harvey, gave him the friendly counsel to “take care not to be alone.”71 Among the colorful colleagues on whom Harvey could call for concerted action after Charles set up in Oxford late in 1642 were Edward Greaves, trained at Padua and Leyden, whose brother, John Greaves, was the Savilian professor of astronomy; Walter Charleton, brought up in the new astronomy at Oxford by John Wilkins; and, as reinforcement, a living link to John Dee of Mortlake.72

  The link was Dee’s son Arthur, as good an astrologer as his father and a better alchemist, and formerly physician to Queen Anna. After her death, James dispatched Dee to Russia to answer the Tsar’s request for a competent doctor. Dee got along with his employer but not with some employees of the English Muscovy Company, one of whom, it is said, he tried to murder, most incompetently, with a knife and poison. The charge did not bother King Charles, who invited Dee back to England in 1633, “preferring our deare Father’s servants, to the attention of our owne person and our children…and to take away any suspicion that a gentleman of Doctor Dee’s merits by his long absence from our presence, should be forgotten by us.” Mayerne advised Dee against accepting the royal offer. Long experience had shown him that serving impoverished princes like Charles was slavery. In Russia, he told Dee, you have an exalted position; in England you would be the junior among seven royal physicians, and an irritant to the mob of doctors hoping for similar preferment. Dee decided to enter Charles’s service; it left him time for alchemy.73

  Royal doctors were usually fellows of the Royal College of Physicians, established under Henry VIII with a monopoly to grant licenses to practice medicine in and around London. Fellows of the college examined candidates viva voce in Latin to check their ability to consult the dead if not to cure the living. Passing might not result in a license, however, since the college restricted the number of physicians competing within its jurisdiction. Nor did a degree in medicine from a good university, foreign or domestic, guarantee a pass. For example, in 1606 the college refused a Cambridge graduate, Thomas Bonham, a license after testing his Latin; he practiced anyway; the college, acting within powers delegated from the royal prerogative, fined him, and, after additional infractions, jailed him. The episode became a test case: Bonham went to Common Pleas, which found for him by declaring unlawful the college’s powers to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury in cases involving its own monopoly. The court held further that the college should not be testing Latinity but detecting quackery; and that even there it did not deserve a monopoly, since any well-educated university graduate knew enough about medicine to expose a charlatan.74

  Even a royal physician might have trouble obtaining a license. Thus Arthur Dee, who took his degree at Basle, may never have had one, and Mayerne waited until 1616, five years after his arrival in England, for election to a fellowship. He then entered cheerfully into the spirit of monopoly, joining with others to free apothecaries from the Grocers’ Company and charter them under the supervision of the college. The supervision, which extended to the standardization of drugs in the London Pharmacopoeia of 1618, tightened in 1624, when a servant used a poison bought from an apothecary to cure all the ills of his master. The college continued to divide and conquer by promoting divorce of the distillers from the apothecaries. Mayerne and another royal doctor, Thomas Candeman, who, though an MD from Padua, had had trouble obtaining his license to practice in London, were the moving spirits in procuring the divorce.75

  The recusant Candeman entered the queen’s service in 1626. One of his jobs was to write certificates of illness to procure the release of sick Catholics from jail. Another was to run a still, a line of work that interested Mayerne as chemist and boozer. Together the royal doctors obtained the patent, mentioned earlier, on a means of obtaining alcohol and vinegar from cider, perry, and, improbably, buckwheat, and led the agitation for the creation of a Company of Distillers of which Mayerne would be Founder, Candeman Master, and the College Overseer. To meet the new company’s need for a parallel to the apothecaries’ Pharmacopoeia, the Founder and Master received a charter from Charles (via Attorney General Bankes) to compile a manual of potable drink. They assembled recipes and avouched, after swallowing hard, their safety and reliability.76 Naturally they died, though not immediately. Mayerne passed out in 1655. Candeman had gone in 1651, as a senior fellow (an “elect”) of the college. His place went to Maurice Williams.77

  Melancholy

  Disease of the Age

  Melancholy suffuses our painting, most conspicuously in the pasty face, uncommitted gaze, and listlessness of young John Bankes. The boy was ill. We can infer as much from the sympathetic expression of Dr Williams in the picture and from the special diet served to John at Oriel.78 We can also guess that his general complaint was melancholy, the disease of the age, from which, in one form or another, everyone suffered at least occasionally. Medically speaking it arose from either a passing putrefaction of the black bile present, along with the other humors blood, phlegm, and choler, in all of us; or from an innate predominance of the melancholic humor over its companions. Both types could be treated medically, but the second sort, being imposed by nature, could not be cured. That was not altogether bad. Although innate melancholy, if strong enough, caused madness, it might, if muted, produce scholars, statesmen, artists, indeed, according to an opinion long attributed to Aristotle, everyone who has accomplished anything notable.79 It was said, in explanation of his murder of Buckingham, that John Felton was “a melancholy man much given to reading.”80

  Levels of melancholy parallel degrees of drunkenness: loquacious, eloquent, bold, amorous, reckless, insolent, frenzied, catatonic. During the amorous stage, the wine bibber is “induced to kiss those whom, owing to their appearance or age, no sober person would kiss.” Just so, nothing is safe from lovesick melancholics, “who are particularly inclined to sexual intercourse.”81 We may suppose that most Oxford undergraduates suffered from this affliction and that it raged around Christ Church, from which the Doctor of Melancholy, Robert Burton, issued five editions of his Anatomy each ending with useful recommendations for deadening lust. And these were not the only handbooks available. The petty canon of Christ Church, Edmund Chilmead, who turned Hues’s tract on the globes into English, translated a French treatise that suggested remedies for concupiscence within the reach of the poorest sufferer: bleed your right arm, swallow a little hemlock, bathe your privates in vinegar, take cold baths, go barefoot; drink only water, eat lettuce, coarse bread, lemons; avoid pine nuts, meat, artichokes, carrots, parsnips, ginger, onions, oysters, chestnuts; exercise, study, pray, fast; sleep not on your back or on a soft bed; have nothing to do with plays, masques, or music.82 If all this does not work, get yourself whipped, have a friend insult your inamorata, and, if all else fails, sleep with her, if you can get your tutor to agree. To prevent the uneducated from discovering this last resort, Chilmead put the details into Latin.83

  A disposition to melancholy could be assessed before any symptoms appeared. It was written in the sufferer’s stars, not so indelibly as to exclude doctoring, for, as we know, sapiens dominatur astris and diseases known to be untreatable brought no fees. The prime celestial agent for melancholy was Saturn, who could signal both the deleterious disease and the touch of genius. As a physical agent he was cold and dry, owing to his distance from the nurturing seats of warmth and moisture, the sun and moon, and he conferred these elemental qualities on native melancholics. But again, because he occupied the highest heaven, between Jupiter and the stars, he could impose genius when he figured favorably in birth charts.84

  Among the few facts about John Ban
kes junior that have come down to us are the date, time, and place of his birth. His horoscope, newly cast using the most reliable early modern rules, shows that he must have been, or thought he was, a grand melancholic of the gifted type (Figure 29). Saturn occupies the ascendant, rising just before John’s birth, while Mercury approaches culmination, shedding his ambiguous rays from the mid-heaven and the sign of Gemini, wherein he has special powers. Mars and Venus are conjoined in Leo in the eleventh house, that of friendship. In short, any apprentice astrologer could see that young John Bankes was a son of Saturn and Mercury and therefore wise, shrewd, thoughtful, prudent, inventive, curious, emulous, covetous, and prone to love melancholy.85

  Figure 29 J. L. Heilbron, John Bankes’s birth chart.

  Chief among the authorities who influenced English melancholic thought was Marsilio Ficino, who interpreted Plato, Hermes Trismegistus, and other ancient sages at the Platonic Academy in Florence in the later fifteenth century. Like John Bankes junior, Ficino had Saturn in his ascendant and, being scholarly and ambitious, celebrated the cerebral aspects of the Saturnine personality. But Ficino kept in mind the proverb, sub Saturno nati aut optimi aut pessimi, “Saturn’s natives are the best or the worst,” and proposed pleasant treatments against the lapse of genius into mystery, magic, superstition, despair, hallucination, and madness. The pasty bookworm should exercise, diet, listen to music, go for a massage, make talismans that concentrate beneficent rays.86 The most famous of all depictions of melancholy derives many of its emblems from Ficino’s therapies, if, as experts assert, the magic square in Dürer’s Melancholia I is a talisman to collect the rays of Jupiter (Figure 30). More obviously, the symbols of hard thought and geometrical tools in Dürer’s print come from Saturn’s cupboard. Dürer made the mathematical element more prominent than Ficino had, thus fusing the paraphernalia of the god of melancholy with those of the muse Geometria (or sometimes Urania), as depicted, to pick a relevant example, in Cleyn’s Seven Liberal Arts (Figure 31).87