Robert Boyle’s Medicinal Experiments, first published in 1692, offers treatments for a variety of ailments. Some conditions are chronic, and evidently serious, others are medical emergencies in the modern sense, and others still are more matters of daily health management. For instance, he provides ‘a good medicine to increase milk’ during wet nursing.[1] Boyle even offers treatment for those animals that have been ‘bitten by a Mad-Dog’, noting proudly that treated animals ‘have been all of them preserv’d’.[2] Efficacy claims of this type are common in texts from this period.[3] Treatments are tiered according to efficacy, with each listed as A, B or C in descending order of quality. This system of categorisation was Boyle’s own creation and was, Michelle DiMeo argues, ‘a revolutionary approach’ to the documentation of medicines.[4] There is also a deliberate focus on simple treatments. In requiring relatively few ingredients, Boyle ensured that his recipes were sufficiently cheap and accessible to appeal to the poor and isolated country dwellers.[5]

The author’s preface provides important insights into the work. In it Boyle states that he published this set of Recipes out of Christian duty and philanthropy. ‘Though Physick be not my Profession’, he was ‘induc’d to what I had done by the Dictates of Philanthropy and Christianity’.[6] For the most part the Recipes included have been given to Boyle, with few original treatments included. The work is targeted to country folk and the poor, both unlikely to have ready access to physicians and apothecaries. Thus, the treatments discussed are eminently accessible and practical. Despite the alleged accessibility of the ingredients, a few are decidedly exotic. Boyle’s treatment ‘to mitigate Pains in the Kidneys’ is in large part derived from ‘oyl of Scorpions’.[7]Students may question, therefore, whether some early modern publications were as aimed at the poor as they allege to be. 

Where treatments are for obviously serious conditions, for instance for ‘incipient gangreen’, students may wish to read Medicinal Experiments alongside Seth LeJacq’s work on domestic healing.[8] As he suggests, popular fear of the surgeon’s knife may well be at the heart of the demand for a compilation such as Boyle’s.[9] Some treatments are known only by the names of their creators, for instance ‘The Lady Fitz-harding’s Eye-Water’.[10] This should be seen as evidence of compilers wishing to stake a claim for themselves in the medical marketplace, or as evidence of the deeply social nature of recipe-exchange by lay men and women.[11] Note also that Medicinal Experiments may be compared stylistically to the handwritten sources of private individuals, evidencing Boyle’s ambition to provide a usable text.

[1] Boyle, R. Medicinal Experiments (Second Edition, 1693), 117.

[2] Boyle, R. Medicinal Experiments (Second Edition, 1693), 168.A.

[3] For discussion of ‘efficacy claims’ see LeJacq, S. ‘The Bounds of Domestic Healing: Medical Recipes, Storytelling and Surgery in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine (2013).

[4] DiMeo, M., ‘Communicating Medical Recipes: Robert Boyle’s Genre and Rhetorical Strategies for Print’, The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science (2017), 220.

[5] Boyle, R. Medicinal Experiments (Second Edition, 1693), F.a.

[6] Boyle, R. Medicinal Experiments (Second Edition, 1693), A3.

[7] Ibid., 114.

[8] Boyle, R. Medicinal Experiments (Second Edition, 1693), 88; LeJacq, S. ‘The Bounds of Domestic Healing: Medical Recipes, Storytelling and Surgery in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine (2013).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Boyle, R. Medicinal Experiments (Second Edition, 1693), 67.

[11] Leong, E., Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2018).

Bibliography

Boyle, R. Medicinal Experiments (Second Edition, 1693)

DiMeo, M., ‘Communicating Medical Recipes: Robert Boyle’s Genre and Rhetorical Strategies for Print’, The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science (2017)

Hunter, M., ‘Boyle, Robert’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2015)

Jenner M. & Wallis, P., ‘The Medical Marketplace’, Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c.1450-c.1850 (2007)

Jones, G.W., ‘Robert Boyle As A Medical Man’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1964)

LeJacq, S. ‘The Bounds of Domestic Healing: Medical Recipes, Storytelling and Surgery in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine (2013)

MacIntosh, J., ‘Robert Boyle’, The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (2013)

Pennell, S. & Dimeo, M., Reading and writing recipe books (Manchester, 2013)