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TASTING LICHFIELD, TOUCHING CHINA: SIR JOHN FLOYER'S SENSES*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2010

MARK S. R. JENNER
MARK S. R. JENNER*
Affiliation:
University of York
*
Department of History, University of York, York, YO10 5DDmsrj1@york.ac.uk
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Abstract

Recent years have seen the growth of a new and newly self-conscious cultural historiography of the senses. This article extends and critiques this literature through a case study of the sensory work and worlds of Sir John Floyer, a physician active in Lichfield during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Floyer is best known for his work on pulse-taking, something which he described as contributing to the art of feeling. Less well known is his first book – a discussion of the tastes of the world and their therapeutic possibilities. The article explicates, contextualizes, and relates these two books and uses this analysis to suggest ways of refining and developing the wider historiography of the senses. It demonstrates how they reveal that what Floyer sensed was closely bound up with the changing ways in which he sensed, particularly when he began feeling the pulse in a ‘Chinese’ style. This, the article concludes, suggests that historians of the senses need fundamentally to reconsider the model of culture which underpins their work, focusing less on the ways in which people have interpreted or ordered sensory stimuli, and rather analysing the senses as forms of skill or dynamic ways of engaging with the world.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , September 2010 , pp. 647 - 670
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the audiences in Aberdeen, Leeds, London, and York who listened to and commented on versions of this article. Mike Brown, Karen Buckle, Jenny Ferrando, Laura Gowing, Catriona Kennedy, Kei Nasu, and Helen Smith helped greatly through discussions of these themes – my thanks to them all. I am very grateful to Fay Bound Alberti and Simon Ditchfield who read drafts. My greatest debt, as ever, is to Patricia Greene, for support, critical commentary, and much more.

References

1 J. Floyer, Pharmako-basanos: or, the touch-stone of medicines (2 vols., 1687–90), i, p. 276. All pre-1800 printed works were published in London unless otherwise stated.

2 Ibid., i, sig. a2v-3.

3 Ibid., i, sig. a3. Betts made further contributions, ibid., ii, 409.

4 Ibid., i, sig. a3.

5 Ibid., i, pp. 3–6. In Part v, Floyer listed plants according to eight tastes. His classifications were idiosyncratic: see Burnett, C., ‘Sapores sunt octo: the medieval Latin terminology for the eight flavours’, Micrologus, 10, (2002), pp. 99–112Google Scholar; E. G. Boring, Sensation and perception in the history of experimental psychology (New York, NY, 1942), pp. 449–54.

6 Floyer, Pharmako-basanos, i, pp. 24–9.

7 Ibid., i, pp. 230, 198, ii, pp. 411, 385.

8 Ibid., i, ‘To the Reader’ and Advertisement by the Publishers.

9 Ibid., i, p. 76.

10 J. Floyer, The physician's pulse-watch (1707), pp. 91, 154–5.

11 Wallis, F., ‘Signs and senses: diagnosis and prognosis in early medieval pulse and urine texts’, Social History of Medicine, 13, (2000), pp. 265–78CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; C. R. Sherman, Writing on hands: memory and knowledge in early modern Europe (Seattle, WA, 2000), pp. 262–6; L. S. Dixon, Perilous chastity: women and illness in pre-Enlightenment art and medicine (Ithaca, NY, 1995), pp. 79–86.

12 These qualities were described by Galen. C. R. S. Harris, The heart and vascular system in ancient Greek medicine (Oxford, 1973), ch. 7, outlines his voluminous writings on pulse-taking and pulse-lore. Evan Bedford, D., ‘The ancient art of feeling the pulse’, British Heart Journal, 13, (1951), pp. 427–8Google Scholar gives a clear summation of them. The pulse for beginners is in Galen, Selected works, trans. P. N. Singer (Oxford, 1997), pp. 325–44. See also S. Kuriyama, The expressiveness of the body and the divergence of Greek and Chinese medicine (New York, NY, 2002), chs. 1–2.

13 There was keen intellectual interest in the pulse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but early modern medics relied less upon pulse-taking than on urine analysis or discussion with the sick person. I. Maclean, Logic, signs and nature in the Renaissance: the case of learned medicine (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 283–4; J. J. Bylebyl, ‘Disputation and description in the Renaissance pulse controversy’ in A. Wear, R. K. French, and I. M. Lonie, eds., The medical Renaissance of the sixteenth century (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 223–45; M. Pelling, Medical disputes in early modern London (Oxford, 2003), pp. 292–3; B. Nance, Turquet de Mayerne as Baroque physician (Amsterdam, 2001), pp. 76–7.

14 Floyer, Physician's pulse-watch, p. 13.Whereas Galen had argued that the arteries and heart contracted and dilated together, Harvey demonstrated that the beat of the pulse coincided with the contraction of the heart.

15 Ibid., p. 13.

16 Ibid., sig. A4.

17 Gibbs, D. D., ‘The physician's pulse watch’, Medical History, 15, (1971), pp. 187–90CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; J. Wiltshire, Samuel Johnson in the medical world: the doctor and the patient (Cambridge, 1991), p. 71. On Watson, who originally worked in Coventry but had moved to London, T. Birch, History of the Royal Society (4 vols., 1756–7, facs. repr. Brussels, 1967–8), iv, p. 406; E. S. de Beer, ed., The diary of John Evelyn (6 vols., Oxford, 1955), iii, p. 112n.

18 Floyer, Physician's pulse-watch, pp. 306–7.

19 Ibid., pp. 317–21.

20 Ibid., pp. 245, 336. On Floyer and medical contacts between East and West, see Szczesniak, B., ‘John Floyer and Chinese medicine’, Osiris, 11, (1954), pp. 127–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bivins, R., ‘Expectations and expertise: early British responses to Chinese medicine’, History of Science, 37, (1999), pp. 459–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; eadem, Acupuncture, expertise, and cross-cultural medicine (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 29–34.

21 J. Nieuhof, An embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham or Emperor of China, trans. J. Ogilby (1673), p. 155. Floyer refers to this passage, Physician's pulse-watch, p. 229.

22 The Queen's College, Oxford (QCL) HS b.322, annotation on titlepage.

23 Floyer obtained it from Charles Hatton, QCL NN s.62, annotation on flyleaf.

24 H. J. Cook, Matters of exchange: commerce, medicine, and science in the Dutch golden age (London and New Haven, CT, CT, 2007), pp. 361–77, judiciously reviews its authorship.

25 John Floyer, The pulse watch, ii (1710), chs. 6–29.

26 Ibid., pp. 255–90, 329–48; Townsend, G. L., ‘Sir John Floyer (1649–1734) and his study of pulse and respiration’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 22, (1967), pp. 286–316CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, at pp. 303–5.

27 Floyer, Physician's pulse-watch, Preface.

28 E.g. S. J. Reiser, Medicine and the reign of technology (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 96–8.

29 D. Howes, Sensual relations: engaging the senses in culture and social theory (Ann Arbor, MI, 2003), p. 235; idem, ‘Charting the sensorial revolution’, Senses and Society, 1, (2006), pp. 113–28.

30 M. M. Smith, Sensory history (Oxford, 2007); R. Jütte, The history of the senses (Oxford, 2005); C. M. Woolgar, The senses in late medieval England (New Haven and London, 2006); S. G. Nichols, A. Kablitz, and A. Calhoun, eds., Rethinking the medieval senses: heritage / fascinations / frames (Baltimore, MD, 2009). Journal fora offer overviews: ‘The senses in American history: a round table’, Journal of American History, 95, (2008), pp. 378–451; ‘Forum on the history of the senses’, American Historical Review, forthcoming (April 2011).

31 E.g. A. Cowan and J. Stewart, eds., The city and the senses: urban culture since 1500 (Aldershot, 2007); M. M. Smith, How race is made: slavery, segregation, and the senses (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006); D. S. Barnes, The great stink of Paris and the nineteenth-century struggle against filth and germs (Baltimore, MD, 2006); E. D. Harvey, ed., Sensible flesh: on touch in early modern culture (Philadelphia, PA, 2002); R. C. Rath, How early America sounded (Ithaca, NY, 2003).

32 E.g., E. Cockayne, Hubbub: filth, noise, and stench in England, 1600–1770 (New Haven, CT, 2007).

33 S. Clark, Vanities of the eye: vision in early modern European culture (Oxford, 2007), p. 6.

34 B. Smith, ‘Hearing green’, in G. K. Paster, K. Rowe, and M. Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the early modern passions: essays in the cultural history of emotion (Philadelphia, PA, 2004), pp. 147–68; P. Camporesi, The incorruptible flesh: bodily mutation and mortification in religion and folklore, trans. T. Croft-Murray (Cambridge, 1988).

35 The Oxford dictionary of national biography (Oxford, 2004) (ODNB), s.n.; D. Gibbs and P. K. Wilson, eds., ‘Advice to a young physician’ by Sir John Floyer of Lichfield in Staffordshire (York, 2007), pp. xii–xviii, 1–25. Lichfield contained c. 3000 people, G. King, ‘LCC Burns journal’, in P. Laslett, ed., The earliest classics (Farnborough, 1973), p. 90.

36 J. Floyer, A treatise of the asthma (1698), pp. 213–15, 177ff; J. Floyer and E. Baynard, Psychrolousia: or, the history of cold bathing (1702).

37 R. Plot, Natural history of Staffordshire (1686; facs. edn, Manchester, 1973), Plate 25. Floyer subscribed to a copy: see the subscription list bound into British Library (BL), Eve c 2.

38 R. T. Gunther, Early science in Oxford, iv:The philosophical society (Oxford, 1925), p. 193.

39 Royal Society, Early Letters and Classified Papers, vol. 15 (60); Floyer, John, ‘A relation of two monstrous pigs, with the resemblance of humane faces, and two young turkeys joined by the breast’, Philosophical Transactions, 21, (1699), pp. 431–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. Floyer, ‘Observations on the class of sweet tastes, made by comparing the tastes of sweet plants with Monsieur L’ Emery's chymical analysis of them, in his treatise of drugs', ibid., 23 (1702–3), pp. 1160–72.

40 M. W. Greenslade, ed., Victoria county history of Staffordshire, xiv:Lichfield (Oxford, 1990), p. 79.

41 J. Floyer, An exposition of the Revelations, by shewing the agreement of the prophetick symbols with the history of the Roman, Saracen and Ottoman empires, and of the Popedom (1719); idem, The prophecies of the second book of Esdras (1721). J. Gabbay, ‘Asthma attacked? Tactics for the reconstruction of a disease concept’, in P. Wright and A. Treacher, eds., The problem of medical knowledge (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 23–48, and M. Jenner, ‘Bathing and baptism: Sir John Floyer and the politics of cold bathing’, in K. Sharpe and S. N. Zwicker, eds., Refiguring revolutions: aesthetics and politics from the English revolution to the Romantic revolution (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and London, 1998), pp. 197–216, link Floyer's politico-religious and medical writings.

42 Cook, H. J., ‘Good advice and little medicine: the professional authority of early modern English physicians’, Journal of British Studies, 33, (1994), pp. 1–31CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, at pp. 15–16; A. Wear, Knowledge and practice in English medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 169–84, 203–7.

43 M. Pelling, The common touch: sickness, medical occupations and the urban poor in early modern England (Harlow, 1998), ch. 2; B. Cowan, The social life of coffee: the emergence of the British coffeehouse (New Haven, CT, and London, 2005), ch. 2

44 B. W. Ogilvie, The science of describing: natural history in Renaissance Europe (Chicago, IL, 2006), pp. 135, 205.

45 J. Schröder, The complete chymical dispensatory (1669), p. 283. Floyer's copy is QCL HS.B.586. See also J. De Renou, A medicinal dispensatory (1657), pp. 36–40.

46 W. Coles, The art of simpling (1655), p. 44 and ch. 14 passim; T. Moffett, Healths improvement (1655), p. 39. More generally, Worth Estes, J., ‘The medical properties of food in the eighteenth century’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 51, (1996), pp. 127–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 133–7.

47 P. Wallis, ‘Medicines for London: the trade, regulation and lifecycle of London apothecaries, c. 1610–c. 1670’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, 2002), pp. 108–20; Teigen, P. M., ‘Taste and quality in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Galenic pharmacology’, Pharmacy in History, 29, (1987), pp. 60–8Google Scholar.

48 J. Bravus, De saporum et odorum differentiis, causis, & effectionibus (Salamanca, 1583), p. 1 (my translation).

49 K. Albala, Eating right in the Renaissance (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and London, 2002), ch. 3; G. Harig, Bestimmung der intensität im medizinischen system Galens (Berlin, 1974), pp. 79–83; Estes, ‘Medical properties’.

50 Floyer, Phamako-basanos, i, pp. 222–3; ii, p. 92. The dispensatory which Floyer drafted in the early eighteenth century included bitter animal-based medicines prepared from the ‘skins of ye Gizerne or livers of animals’, QCL MS 565, fo. 18.

51 Floyer, Phamako-basanos, i, pp. 154–5, 276; ii, p. 89.

52 Ibid., i, sig. a2–2v sets out this manner of proceeding.

53 Power, D'Arcy, ‘The Oxford Physic Garden’, Annals of Medical History, 2, (1919), pp. 109–25Google Scholar; R. T. Gunther, Early science in Cambridge (Oxford, 1937), ch. 14; BL MS Sloane 163. This interest can be seen in other catalogues of the virtues of herbs, e.g., BL MSS Sloane 877 and 880 and in annotations to copies of J. Ray, Catalogus plantarum Anglicae (1670), e.g., BL 968, fo.1, and 968, fos. 4 and 5.

54 Frank Jnr, R. G., ‘The John Ward diaries: mirror of seventeenth century science and medicine’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 29, (1974), pp. 147–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 154–5. See also Gough, J. W., ‘John Locke's herbarium’, Bodleian Library Record, 7, (1962), pp. 42–6Google Scholar; Anstey, P. R. and Harris, S. A., ‘Locke and botany’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 37, (2006), pp. 151–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Ray, Catalogus; Floyer, Phamako-basanos, i, sigs. a2 and a4v. His copy of Ray's Catalogus plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium (1660) with notes about the categorization of plants by taste on the front endpaper survives: QCL NN q.80.

56 In 1675–6, around the time that Floyer began practising in Lichfield, Ray lived near by in Coleshill and Sutton Colefield, but there is no evidence that they met, E. Lankester, ed., The correspondence of John Ray (London, 1848), pp. 116 and 121–3; R. W. T. Gunther, ed., The further correspondence of John Ray (London, 1928), pp. 135–6 and 158.

57 Floyer, Phamako-basanos, i, sig. a4v; QCL MS 562, fo. 2.

58 Floyer, Phamako-basanos, i, sig. a4v. Floyer did value information from other senses, even noting the utility of visual signatures, ibid., i, pp. 74–5.

59 [C. Merrett], The character of a compleat physician (1680?), p. 3. Phamako-Basanos sought to buttress the physician's authority against quacks, but, in Staffordshire's less competitive medical market, Floyer had none of Merrett's hostility to apothecaries. Merrett – a member of the College of Physicians and the Royal Society – published a catalogue of British botany, Pinax rerum naturalium Britannicarum (1666). On him, H. J. Cook, ‘Physicians and the new philosophy: Henry Stubbe and the virtuosi-physicians’, in R. French and A. Wear, eds., The medical revolution of the seventeenth century (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 256–62; ODNB s.n.

60 D. B. Meli, ‘The new anatomy of Marcello Malpighi’, in idem, ed., Marcello Malpighi: anatomist and physician (Florence, 1997), p. 39; The collected letters of Anthoni Van Leeuwenhoek (11 vols., Amsterdam and Lisse, 1939–), i, pp. 303–17, and v, pp. 31–3; T. Willis, Two discourses concerning the soul of brutes (1683; facs. edn, Gainsville, FL, 1971), pp. 62–88 (recte 68), quotation at p. 63.

61 Floyer, Phamako-basanos, i, p. 2, ii, sig. a.

62 Ibid., i, p. 6. Floyer considered that taste perception derived from the way in which the impressions of the particles which made up a substance affected the animal spirits, ibid., i, pp. 41, 59. However, he showed little interest in this process, a theme much discussed in recent scholarship, e.g. A. Johns, The nature of the book: print and knowledge in the making (Chicago, IL, 1998), ch. 6; G. K. Paster, Humoring the body: emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago, IL, 2004); B. R. Smith, The key of green: passion and perception in Renaissance culture (Chicago, IL, 2009).

63 Floyer, Phamako-basanos, i, ‘To the Reader’.

64 Ibid., i, sig. a3.

65 Ibid., i, pp. 73–4, 83.

66 M. Foucault, The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences, Eng. trans. (London, 1970), pp. 132–3. Recent work has also highlighted the importance of acoustics to early modern natural philosophy and the uncertainties about visual perception that bedevilled many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers, Gouk, P. M., ‘Acoustics in the early Royal Society, 1660–1680’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 36, (1982), pp. 155–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; eadem, Music, science and natural magic in seventeenth-century England (New Haven, CT, and London, 1999); Clark, Vanities.

67 J. Aubrey, Brief lives, ed. A. Clark (2 vols., Oxford, 1898), i, p. 181.

68 E.g. Birch, History of the Royal Society, i, pp. 42, 150–1, 156–61, 353, 359, 375; ii, p. 10.

69 R. Boyle, ‘Experiments and observations about the mechanical production of tastes’ (1675), in M. Hunter and E. B. Davis, eds., The works of Robert Boyle, viii (London, 2000), pp. 363–75.

70 Ragland, E. R., ‘Experimenting with chymical bodies: Reinier de Graaf's investigations of the pancreas’, Early Science and Medicine, 13, (2008), pp. 615–64CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; C. Hopton, Osteologia nova: or, some new observations of the bones (1691), pp. 201, 222. Such work provides the context for Floyer's The preternatural state of animal humours described by their sensible qualities (1696) which advocated the tasting of bodily fluids.

71 R. Hooke, A general scheme … of natural philosophy, in The posthumous works of Robert Hooke (1705, facs. edn, Hildesheim, 1970), p. 36. He recommended systematic comparison of common and less common tastes and smells, ibid., p. 37.

72 Willis, Two discourses, pp. 63–7.

73 N. Grew, The anatomy of plants (1682), p. 279. My thanks to Anna Marie Roos for assistance with Grew's work.

74 Ibid., p. 282. The various types are set out on pp. 280–2 and tabulated on pp. 294–5.

75 Floyer thought it unnecessary ‘to make some nice distinctions he has taken notice of’, Phamako-basanos, ii, p. 108.

76 See also Jankovic, V., ‘The place of nature and the nature of place: the chorographic challenge to the history of British provincial science’, History of Science, 38, (2000), pp. 79–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Floyer, Phamako-basanos, ii, sig. A2. Although this volume was dedicated to William Digby, 5th Baron of Gleashill, Floyer was probably attending the family of William's brother Simon, who died in 1686. On the family, H. Erskine-Hill, The social milieu of Alexander Pope (New Haven, CT, and London, 1975), pp. 132–9; for Floyer's continued contacts with Digby, QCL MS 569, fos. 39–66.

78 Fleeman, J. D., ‘Michael Johnson: the “Lichfield librarian”’, Publishing History, 39, (1996), pp. 23–44Google Scholar.

79 Floyer, Phamako-basanos, i, sigs. a 2v–3.

80 Ibid., i, sig. a2.

81 Ibid., ii, sig. A2v, i, sig. a3. Many of the exotics that he tasted were from the gardens of Sir Richard Newdigate, who bought plants from Jacob Bobart in Oxford but had dealings with Lichfield tradesmen, Warwickshire County Record Office, Warwick, CR136/V130, pp. 29, 35, 45, 70. On the garden, E. Gooder, The squire of Arbury (Coventry, 1990), pp. 48–55, 204–9; J. H. Ellis, ‘A Warwickshire baronet: Sir Richard Newdigate: politics, influence and estates management, 1678–1710’ (M.Phil. thesis, Warwick, 1985), pp. 117–18, 120–2.

82 Floyer, Phamako-basanos, i, sig. a3. Floyer noted that women's perception of tastes was more acute than men's because the latter dulled their perceptions with ‘Intemperance and Tobacco’.

83 Ibid., i, p. 189.

84 Ibid., ii, p. 303.

85 Ibid., i, p. 200. For Plaxton, Walker, E. M., ‘Letters of the Rev. George Plaxton, M. A.’, Thoresby Society, 37, (1945), pp. 30–104Google Scholar; ODNB, s.n.

86 Cf. the global network of informants cited in the London apothecary, James Petiver's, Musei Petiveriani centuria prima, rariora naturae continens (1695).

87 J. M. Shuttleworth, ed., The life of Edward, first Lord Herbert of Cherbury written by himself (London, 1976), p. 23.

88 E.g. J. S. L. Gilmour, ed., Thomas Johnson: botanical journeys in Kent and Hampstead (Pittsburg, 1972); A. H. Ewen and C. T. Prime, trans. and ed., Ray's flora of Cambridgeshire (Hitchin, 1975), pp. 23–4.

89 Further information about his social circle can be gleaned from his ‘Countrey receipts’, Lichfield Cathedral MS 21.

90 In 1687 Floyer wrote of the ‘many long and frequent Interruptions’ he had had ‘by a Country-Practice’, Pharmako-basanos, i, ‘To the Reader’. See also Gibbs and Wilson, ‘Advice to a Young Physician’, p. 30; QCL MS 559, fo. 1 and MS 562.

91 Nehemiah Grew was disconcerted by his drop in income when he moved from being a Coventry physician to working with the Royal Society, Hunter, M. C. W., ‘Early problems in professionalizing scientific research: Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712) and the Royal Society, with an unpublished letter to Henry Oldenburg’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 36, (1982), pp. 189–95CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Grew probably left Coventry before Floyer settled permanently in Lichfield. On provincial physicians, G. Holmes, Augustan England: professions, state and society, 1680–1730 (London, 1982), ch. 7; Harley, D., ‘“Bred up in the study of that faculty”: licensed physicians in north-west England, 1660–1760’, Medical History, 38, (1994), pp. 398–420CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 409–10; I. Mortimer, ‘The rural medical marketplace in southern England, c. 1570–1720’, in M. S. R. Jenner and P. Wallis, eds., Medicine and the market in England and its colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850 (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 69–87.

92 His comparative affluence came at emotional cost. See, Gibbs, D., ‘An unhappy household in Lichfield cathedral close in the early eighteenth century: Sir John Floyer's second marriage’, Friends of Lichfield Cathedral Annual Report, 68, (2005), pp. 22–30Google Scholar; The National Archives, London, PROB11/631, will of Dame Margaret Floyer.

93 There is no record of his attendance and he does not feature in its surviving correspondence, Gunther, Early science in Oxford, iv, idem, Early science in Oxford, xii. On Midlands cultural life, see P. Borsay, ‘Warwickshire towns in the age of Dugdale’, and V. Laraminie, ‘Gentry culture in the seventeenth century’, in C. Dyer and C. Richardson, eds., William Dugdale, historian, 1605–1686: his life, his writings and his county (Woodbridge, 2009).

94 With two booksellers and the cathedral library, Lichfield was not a complete cultural desert, Gunther, Early science in Oxford, xii, p. 219. Later in his life some medical men came to Lichfield to visit Floyer, P. Blair, A letter from Dr. Patrick Blair (1717), sig. A2.

95 Floyer, Preternatural state, Epistle Dedicatory. Floyer continued contacts with Holt until the latter's death, Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, p. 404; QCL MS 569, fo. 1v. See also, O. Fairclough, The grand old mansion: the Holtes and their successors at Aston Hall, 1618–1864 (Birmingham, 1984), pp. 37–40.

96 Floyer, Pharmako-basanos, ii, p. 413. Floyer also used chemical samples from the furnace of Humphrey Jennens near Aston, a neighbour and associate of Digby and Holt, ibid., ii, p. 399; Birmingham City Archives, Birmingham, MS 3888/A 1593; A. Davidson, A history of the Holtes of Aston (Birmingham, 1854), p. 34.

97 Floyer, Pharmako-basanos, i, pp. 236, 124, 113, 138–9; 184–6; Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, pp. 346–7. He also opened live carp and frogs, ibid., pp. 339 and 346.

98 Floyer, Preternatural state, pp. 59, 112–13, 123; Floyer, Asthma, pp. 239–47; Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, p. 339; Society of Antiquaries of London, London, MS 202(69); QCL MS 565, fos. 39v–42 and 51r–v; Floyer, ‘A relation’.

99 Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, p. 464. Twenty years earlier he could not ‘procure the opening’ of a gentleman whom he had treated for gout and who had finally died of convulsions, Floyer, Preternatural state, p. 160. A generation later Erasmus Darwin had few such problems around Lichfield, J. Uglow, The lunar men: five friends whose curiosity changed the world (New York, NY, 2002), pp. 40 and 44.

100 Floyer, Physician's pulse-watch, pp. 25–6.

101 Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, p. 313.

102 QCL MS 559, fos. 1 and 6–31v, MS 562, titlepage, MS 563, fo. 1 and passim. He also discussed diet according to taste, QCL MS 565, esp. fo. 7.

103 Floyer explained that the effects of Jesuits' Bark led him to start ‘inquiring into the Tastes of the Barks of Trees in our own Country’, Pharmako-basanos, I, sig. a2. For his results see ibid., i, pp. 154–5.

104 Ibid., p. i, Epistle Dedicatory. For other examples of Floyer's rhetorical use of the bodily practices of native Americans, QCL MS 562, fo. 2; Jenner, ‘Bathing’, p. 214.

105 QCL MS 569, fo. 20v. See also Floyer, Physician's pulse-watch, p. 337. More generally, Jenner, ‘Bathing’; V. Smith, ‘Physical Puritanism and sanitary science: material and immaterial beliefs in popular physiology, 1650–1840’, in W. F. Bynum and R. Porter, eds., Medical fringe and medical orthodoxy, 1750–1850 (London, 1987), pp. 177–81.

106 Floyer, Pharmako-basanos, i, Epistle Dedicatory, pp. 87–201. Floyer was commended on these grounds by the physician Robert Pitt, The craft and frauds of physick expos‘d (1703), p. 74. On suspicion of “exotic” drugs and some practitioners’ attachment to therapies springing from the nation's soil, Wear, Knowledge and practice, pp. 72–8; A. Cunningham, ‘The transformation of Hippocrates in seventeenth-century Britain’, in D. Cantor, ed., Reinventing Hippocrates (Aldershot, 2002), p. 94.

107 Wear, Knowledge and practice, p. 46; Gibbs and Wilson, ‘Advice to a young physician’, pp. 33–40.

108 Floyer, Pharmako-basanos, ii, sig. a4.

109 QCL MS 579, fo. 21.

110 Ibid., fos. 21v–22v. Comparable thoughts are explored in Royal Society, London, Boyle Letters, 7·10 1A–B, transcribed on the Hartlib Papers CD-Rom (Sheffield, 2002).

111 QCL MS 579, fo. 1.

112 Floyer, Pharmako-basanos, i, Epistle Dedicatory.

113 Floyer, Physician's pulse-watch, Preface; R. G. Frank, Harvey and the Oxford physiologists: a study of scientific ideas (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and London, 1980).

114 Reiser, Medicine and the reign of technology, pp. 96–7; D. Stevenson, ed., Letters of Sir Robert Moray to the Earl of Kincardine, 1657–1673 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 189–90, 181.

115 In the mid-1680s Floyer acquired Sanctorii Sanctorii Iustinopolitani … commentaria in primam fen primi libri canonis Avicennae (Venice, 1626), QCL 542 b 545, which depicts and discusses both pulsilogium and chair. On his acquisition of it, Gibbs, D., ‘Dr Anthony Hewett (c. 1603–1684) MD Padua and Cambridge: physician of Lichfield and student of Renaissance Medicine’, Staffordshire Studies, 16, (2005), pp. 113–23Google Scholar.

116 S. Weir Mitchell, The early history of instrumental precision in medicine (1892, repr., New York, NY, 1971), pp. 18–21, 32–9; Kuriyama, S., ‘The forgotten fear of excrement’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 38, (2008), pp. 413–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dacome, L., ‘Living with the chair: private excreta, collective health and medical authority in the eighteenth century’, History of Science, 39, (2001), pp. 467–500CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

117 Floyer first wrote of Sanctorius in An enquiry into the right use and abuse of the hot, cold and temperate baths in England (1697). He made regular measurements of his own weight in 1699 and 1703, QCL MS 565, fos. 37–8. He owned a copy of Martin Lister's edition of Sanctorius, Statica medicina (1701), QCL NN s.1440.

118 Most of the dated pulse observations are from 1705–6, Floyer, Physician's pulse-watch, pp. 149, 156, 185, 302–7, 317–24.

119 Early eighteenth-century English experiments with the Sanctorian chair were often pursued by physicians like Floyer, ‘in provincial towns, … complaining about difficulties they encountered in obtaining exact instruments’, Dacome, ‘Living with the chair’, p. 481.

120 Floyer, Physician's pulse-watch, pp. 73–6, 298–301, 317–24. Floyer's investigations of possible links between the environment and pulse rates can be seen as both ancient and modern. It was an important theme within Galenic pulse texts, and in the Baconian investigations of the Augustan Royal Society, Harris, Heart and vascular system, p. 424; A. Rusnock, ‘Hippocrates, Bacon, and medical meteorology at the Royal Society, 1700–1750’, in Cantor, ed., Reinventing Hippocrates, pp. 136–53.

121 Floyer, Physician's pulse-watch, pp. 149–50.

122 E.g. Worth Estes, J., ‘Quantitative observations of fever and its treatment before the advent of short clinical thermometers’, Medical History, 35, (1991), pp. 189–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 190–1; D. Wootton, Bad medicine: doctors doing harm since Hippocrates (Oxford, 2006), p. 59.

123 Floyer, Physician's pulse-watch, pp. 15, 27.

124 Ibid., p. 153.

125 Ibid., Preface.

126 Royal Society, RBO/9, fo. 153. This is published in Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, ch. 10.

127 Floyer, Preternatural state, pp. 205, 162–3.

128 Floyer, Physician's pulse-watch, p. 154.

129 Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, p. 327; idem, Physician's pulse-watch, p. 425. See also Kuriyama, Expressiveness, pp. 62–3.

130 Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, p. 313.

131 This was how he viewed the prophecies of the Sibylline Oracles, D. S. Katz, God's last words: reading the English bible from the Reformation to fundamentalism (New Haven, CT, and London, 2004), pp. 128–9.

132 Floyer, Physician's pulse-watch, p. 355.

133 Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, p. 313. Scholars of early modern European responses to Chinese medicine have not remarked on this section.

134 Kuriyama, Expressiveness, ch. 1, outlines the apparent similarity and complete incommensurability of these techniques. See also, Hsu, E., ‘Towards a science of touch, Part I: Chinese pulse diagnostics in early modern Europe’, Anthropology and Medicine, 7, (2000), pp. 251–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

135 Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, p. 313.

136 Ibid., p. 311.

137 Ibid., p. 312.

138 Ibid., p. 327; J. Floyer, Medicina gerocomica: or, the Galenic art of preserving old men's healths (1724, facs. edn, New York, NY, 1979), pp. 114–15.

139 Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, pp. 257–8, also p. 272.

140 Floyer, Physician's pulse-watch, pp. 353, 424. Although Floyer revered Chinese practitioners' long experience in pulse-taking, he also considered that their knowledge had declined from earlier stages of wisdom, suggesting, for instance, that they originally knew of the circulation of the blood, ibid., pp. 245, 428. He commended the observations of ancient Greek and ancient Chinese authors, while rejecting their explanations.

141 Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, p. xxvii.

142 Ibid., pp. 263–4, 328. (He noted that in Cleyer's translation this pulse was termed the ‘Via Cordis’.)

143 Ibid., p. 266.

144 Ibid., p. 276. Cf. his earlier comments, Floyer, Physician's pulse-watch, pp. 350–2.

145 Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, p. 312; idem, Physician's pulse-watch, p. 153, preface.

146 E.g. V. Nutton, ‘Galen at the bedside’, in W. F. Bynum and R. Porter, eds., Medicine and the five senses (Cambridge, 1993), p. 13.

147 On active touch, L. E. Krueger, ‘Tactual perception in historical perspective: David Katz's world of touch’, in W. Schiff and E. Foulke, eds., Tactual perception: a sourcebook (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 1–54; Hsu, ‘Towards a science of touch’.

148 Harris, Heart and vascular system, p. 400.

149 Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, p. 326.

150 Here I echo Kuriyama, Expressiveness, p. 55.

151 J. Floyer, A comment on forty two histories discribed [sic] by Hippocrates (1726), pp. 2–3.

152 Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, pp. 119, 123.

153 Floyer, Physician's pulse-watch, pp. 329–35. Other Augustan cabinets of material medica are very different: Gunther, Early science in Cambridge, Appendix D; S. Schaffer and L. Stewart, ‘Vigana and after: chemical enterprise in Cambridge 1680–1780’, in M. Archer and C. Haley, eds., The 1702 chair of chemistry at Cambridge: transformation and change (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 31–43.

154 QCL MS 562.

155 Floyer, Pulse watch, ii, pp. xxv–xxvi; idem, Physician's pulse-watch, preface.

156 Sanctorio Sanctorio, Methodi vitandorum errorum omnium (1630), p. 27; idem, Medicina statica, or, rules of health (1676), sig. A4; Maclean, Logic, signs and nature, pp. 168, 198. For an important account stressing Sanctorius's respect for Galen, A. Wear, ‘Galen in the Renaissance’, repr. in his Health and healing in early modern England (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 250–6. On the lowly status of taste and touch, Nordenfalk, C., ‘The five senses in late Medieval and Renaissance art’, Journal of the Warburg and the Courtauld Institutes, 48, (1985), pp. 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; S. Ferino-Pagden, ed., Immagini del sentire. I cinque sensi nell‘arte (Cremona, 1996).

157 D. Abercromby, De variation, ac varietate pulsus observations, and Nova medicinae tum practicae, tum speculativae clavis (1685). Floyer's copy (QCL NN s.3771) contains notes of pulse types.

158 Grew, Anatomy, p. 285. On how Grew's medical background shaped his research, Hunter, ‘Early problems’.

159 J. Carlisle, Common scents: comparative encounters in high-Victorian fiction (Oxford, 2004); B. R. Smith, The acoustic world of early modern England: attending to the O-Factor (Chicago, IL, 1999).

160 Smith, Sensory history; Jütte, History of the senses; Woolgar, Senses. This is even when Smith highlights the desirability of intersensorial approaches.

161 This echoes M. S. R. Jenner, ‘Civilization and deodorization? Smell in early modern English culture’, in P. Burke, B. Harrison and P. Slack, eds., Civil histories: essays presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford, 2000), pp. 127–44.

162 A. Corbin, The foul and the fragrant: smell and the eighteenth-century French social imagination (Leamington Spa, 1986).

163 For good work in this vein, Corbould, C., ‘Streets, sounds and identity in interwar Harlem’, Journal of Social History, 40, (2007), pp. 859–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; L. Gowing, Common bodies: women, touch and power in seventeenth-century England (New Haven, CT, and London, 2003).

164 N. Bryson, quoted in Clark, Vanities, p. 6; ‘Introduction’, in Bynum and Porter, eds., Medicine and the five senses, p. 2.

165 This section draws heavily on T. Ingold, The perception of the environment (London, 2000), ch. 9.

166 M. Mauss, ‘Techniques of the body’, in his Techniques, technology and civilisation (Oxford, 2006). Floyer's skill in feeling vehement and vermicular pulses might be compared with Laennec's ability to hear the tunes made by the diseased or healthy heart, J. Duffin, To see with a better eye: a life of R. T. H. Laennec (Princeton, NJ, 1998), Part ii, esp. ch. 8.

167 Katz, D., ‘A sense of touch: the technique of percussion, palpation and massage’, British Journal of Physical Medicine, 11, (1936), pp. 146–8Google Scholar.

168 P. Bourdieu, Outline of a theory of practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, 1977), esp. pp. 93–5. See also D. Matless, ‘Versions of animal-human: Broadland, 1945–70’, in C. Philo and C. Wilbert, eds., Animal spaces, beastly places (London, 2000), pp. 115–40.