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During the
17th century in England an explosion of thought dominated. King
Charles II blessed the establishment of the Royal Society after his Restoration
and men enthusiastically dove into scientific experiments.
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| Plague Doctor's Headgear |
For medicine, plague doctors almost had it when they said all dogs and cats
must be killed to stop the spread of plague. They just did not realize rats
that penetrated wattle and daub walls, women’s kitchens and family bedchambers
might also carry the disease. Physicians bold enough to enter a plague house
wore protective coverings made of soft leather or canvas when visiting the sick,
their bird mask beaks filled with disease preventative spices, the types
generally unspecified. One master of his house contrived a system of pulleys
and tubes that would bring food and stuffs up to a family, with a blast of
gunpowder at the onset of sending or receiving goods. The wise patriarch quarantined
his family in their upper rooms and barred their doors in June of 1665. They
did not leave for months, even as the plague died down with colder weather. My
sources say the family lived to write of their experiences.
Women’s
reproductive process provided enthusiastic discourse. If virgins were pale and
listless, they had the green sickness, and the only cure, according to a 16th
century German physician, was to have sex. Once they conceived, their ailment would
go away.
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| Robert Hooke's Microscope |
If a woman was
sexually active and did not conceive, physicians considered her womb had lost
purchase and wandered about her body. One learned fellow declared a female
patient came to him complaining of severe headaches. He determined her womb had
wandered and lodged in her brain. He performed surgery on the luckless lady,
cutting into her skull. There is no evidence she survived.
When one
fell into an epileptic fit, the best way to revive him was to bend back their
fingernails.
For Science, the Royal Society provided a plethora of opportunities to study
nature and how things worked. There were lectures and experiments.
One such
experiment dealt a transfusion of blood between two dogs. Samuel Pepys wrote of
it in his diary: Nov 14, 16666: “A pretty experiment of the blood of one dogg
let out, till he died, into the body of another on one side, while all his own
run out on the other side.1 The
first died upon the place, and the other very well, and likely to do well.”
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| Boyle's Air Pump |
Robert Boyle
was a brilliant man, and the intellect behind Boyle’s Law: a law stating that
the pressure of a given mass of an ideal gas is inversely proportional to its
volume at a constant temperature. He created an air pump, which Robert Hooke
enhanced and performed experiments at the Royal Society.
From my
novel, The Barbers:
A tubular, metal vat sat on a tripod of sorts, and atop it was a
round glass chamber. Inside the chamber a little chick sat on the bottom,
looking bewildered. Its beak opened and closed but Celia did not hear it chirp.
To see if it was strangely dead, she tapped the glass. Its head moved.
Robert Hooke said, “Air is very important for all creatures to
live. See this here handle?”
Celia felt Deeping nod, and she did too.
“The base of it is attached to the metal cylinder. If you turn
this forward, it sucks air out of the glass chamber. Watch.”
He turned the handle, and the chick fluttered its wings a little.
As Hooke turned the crank, the chick’s beak opened and closed. The poor, little
bird sagged to the bottom of the glass, then it fell over, its little chest
pumping up and down. Soon, the chick stilled.
Hooke pointed at the glass globe. “The air has been pumped out of
the chamber. Now, I’ll reverse the action.”
He turned the handle backward, and the chick stirred. Its chest
went in and out, its breathing less labored. Hooke cranked the handle backward
until the chick gathered its wits, gained its feet, and perched once again on
the bottom of the glass chamber. It looked around, and chirped.”
NOTE: The animals used in most of these experiments died, their
carcasses thrown into the muck pile in the street.
~*~*~*~
Many thanks
to: The Barbers, Erasmus T. Muddiman by Katherine Pym, Samuel Pepys’ diary, and
Wikicommons Public Domain.
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