October is the month of Halloween, and this Halloween is the latest one in the long reign of magic and mysticism in popular entertainment. You know, spells and potions and strange animals and wizards and witches and the rest of the cast. Zombies, too. Don’t forget the zombies. And Vampires. These last two are really big right now. It’s timely that our Library should host an exhibit on the inflluence of magical ideas on medicine and the care of the sick in the pre-scientific era. Certain animals and minerals were thought to have healing powers. Herbalism was important and is undergoing a revival today. The exhibit makes use of some books from our Rare Book collection to illustrate these points. Alchemy was a major element in traditional medicine. Pursuing the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher’s Stone consumed the lives and fortunes of countless persons, each one betting on success where others had failed. Still, alchemy’s legacy to modern science was considerable, in the form of equipment, techniques and new materials produced, as Dr. Edward Randall stressed in his welcoming address to UTMB’s new medical students of 1897, calling on them to show the same diligence and perseverance in study: “As time went on the alchemists in their efforts to create gold found in their crucibles many substances and compounds before unknown, which were destined to work much good for the healing of the nations”.
Visit the Library and enjoy the exhibit. Think how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go.
PS: Newton and Boyle were both alchemists, adepts even. So were many other workers in the hazy and undefined period before and just around the advent of the Scientific Revolution. This shouldn’t surprise anybody, really. Looked at from their point of view, alchemy had a lot going for it, and “science” was something they had never heard of. They were “natural philosophers”. The clear divisions of our era didn’t exist then. When the economist John Maynard Keynes bought a big passel of Newton’s papers from Sotheby’s auction house and began to edit them, both he and other researchers were astonished to find so much of Newton’s work devoted to alchemy. And to Biblical numerology too. He had some idea about the proportions of Solomon’s temple, as given in the scriptural account, being the key to understanding many other things. There was a lot of shock and head-shaking about what a waste it all had been, and how Newton could have discovered a whole lot more, had he not wasted his time on this stuff. But, he wasn’t wasting his time, or at least he didn’t think so. He thought he was hot on the trail of something really big. That was then, and this is now.