ABSTRACT
The social history of the seventeenth-century ‘Scientific Revolution’ tends to focus on the activities of the Royal Society and Stuart patronage of virtuosi culture in England immediately after the Restoration. Less attention has been paid to Stuart patronage of scientific activity beyond London, and the subsequent impact of the Revolution Settlement of 1688-89 with regard to changes in patterns of private and institutional patronage. This chapter considers virtuosi medical culture in Edinburgh, in particular after the distinctive terms of the 1689 Settlement in Scotland established the Presbyterian Kirk and inaugurated an associated purge of Episcopalians from the Scottish universities. This reopening of old sectarian wounds took place within an increasingly more organised, professional and academic medical context in which personal and political rivalries generated rancorous debates over medical theory and practice. We are reminded of Roy Porter’s observation, as quoted by Claire Jowitt and Diane Watt in their introduction to the present volume, that attention to seventeenth-century scientific culture reveals the co-existence of ‘all manner of rival knowledge claims, and multiple models of epistemological legitimacy’, behind which lie ‘rival ideologies’ promoted by disparate religious, national, and factional interests. In the same place my editors note Charles Webster’s observation that ‘any understanding of the seventeenth-century world view necessitates attention to the character of religious motivations … and of involvement in contemporary political affairs’.1 In the light of such approaches, those historians of science who have already begun to explore the ideological nature of the factionalism between the medical virtuosi of late seventeenth-century Edinburgh have drawn attention to the social context of such rivalries as illustrative of how the highly rhetorical claims amongst natural philosophers for epistemological
authority were deeply interested. As Anita Guerrini remarks, we find that ‘intellectual questions are intimately bound up with questions of status and behaviour, and these problems are revealed in a debate over language’: Are physicians scholars or artisans? Should they have medical degrees and be licensed? Should they write in Latin or English?2 As we shall see, in this contest for scientific authority the charge of being irreligious served all sides as a convenient means of demonising one’s professional opponents.
