Volume 42, Number 18 · November 16, 1995
Strange and Desperate Cures
By Anthony Grafton
Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution
by William R. Newman
Harvard University Press, 348 pp., $49.95
In March of 1665 the Great Plague arrived in London. The traditionalist doctors of the London College of Physicians fled the city, leaving their buildings at Amen Corner to be pillaged by thieves. By contrast, a number of radical doctors, men who prescribed the modern chemical medicines of Paracelsus and later medical alchemists, remained at their posts and continued to work. Thus George Thomson, who rejected the classical methods he had studied at Leiden in favor of the divinely revealed cures of true medical chemistry, refused to panic. He hung around his neck 'a large Toad dried, prepared not long before in as exquisite a manner as possibly I could, with my own fingers.' He took the powder of another toad, prepared by his friend George Starkey. And he thus found the strength not only to stay in London but even to dissect the corpse of a plague victim, and lived to tell the story.
Review, 3701 words
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