ABSTRACT
Robert Boyle, the renowned scientist, has been largely forgotten in the usual histories of medicine, according to Michael Hunter, "arguably the most influential figure in the emerging culture of late seventeenth century Britain" and the main patron of the Scientific Revolution in England. He is emerging as an important, powerful, early medical scientist who was also a patient. He brought together the Cartesian rationalist picture of the body as a machine with the more experimental Paracelsian view of the chemical nature of the body. After Boyle, the scientific understanding of the mechanical patient became the objective of medical research. Boyle is the perfect person to introduce us to the growing complexity surrounding the understanding of health during the Scientific Revolution and the changing relationship between patients and scientific medicine. Boyle contracted a case of the ague from which he almost died and from that point on he suffered ill health.
