‘The wary and evading assertor’
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
IN 1879, AFTER years of research, Leslie Keeley, a former surgeon for the Union Army in the American Civil War, and John Oughton, a pharmacist in the little town of Dwight, Illinois, declared that they had developed a treatment for alcoholism. ‘Drunkenness is a disease and I can cure it,’ Keeley told the local newspaper. The two men opened a sanatorium in Dwight, where sufferers could check in for the month-long course of treatment, which involved the gradual withdrawal of rations of whiskey and injections four times a day with the ‘gold cure’.
Keeley’s programme proved popular because it saw alcoholism as a disease rather than a moral weakness. It promised caring treatment in place of ineffectual quack remedies or incarceration in an asylum. The Keeley Institute expanded to more than 200 franchises throughout the United States and in Europe. When the last one closed, as late as 1965, 400,000 people had taken the cure, including ‘17,000 drunken doctors’.
The medical profession, however, was always sceptical of Keeley’s methods, and the composition of his brightly coloured injection liquids – said to be ‘bi-chlorides of gold’ – remained secret. Today, some historians believe that more gold was administered in the name of medicine by the Keeley institutes than at any time in history; others claim that no gold was ever involved.
From long before the time of Thomas Browne, and sporadically ever since, gold has been thought to possess health-giving properties. Once, alchemists hoped to convert its incorruptible essence into the elixir of life, and even now it is tempting to believe that this unique and precious substance, found rarely but always in its pure state, must have some practical benefit to offer man.
Does gold have any efficacy as a medicine? Did it ever? It is an ideal topic for Browne: it is believed by many that it does, but not by all, and it is hard to establish the truth of the matter by experiment. Browne’s discussion of the medicinal merits or otherwise of gold in Pseudodoxia Epidemica sets out as the rational enquiry of a physician, but soon expands to allow for a prodigious display of classical and Renaissance learning and fertile philosophical speculation.
Pseudodoxia Epidemica is a long work – some 200,000 words – and it tackles hundreds of vulgar errors. Some Browne discusses at length, others he dispatches in little more than a sentence. His discussion of gold is exemplary. In its six paragraphs, it shows his logical and rhetorical methods to fine effect. Although Pseudodoxia Epidemica is written in Browne’s plainest English, the rich topic of gold also tempts him to a few enjoyable touches of literary ormolu. All this makes it a rewarding text for close analysis.
I recommend that you read this passage – or any of Browne’s writing – out loud. Only then can you feel properly the rhythm of the prose that propels Browne’s argument. The sentences are often long, and appear at first to be broken up with many subordinate clauses and much punctuation, but these are aids and not impediments, put there to enhance the metre for the greater pleasure and better comprehension of the reader.
He begins plainly enough with a bald statement of the claim that is popularly made:
That Gold inwardly taken, either in substance, infusion, decoction or extinction, is a cordial of great efficacy, in sundry Medical uses, although a practice much used, is also much questioned, and by no man determined beyond dispute.
Browne takes care to include all the ways he can think of in which gold might be ingested, as a solid (in substance), in dissolved form in water or some other liquor (infusion), as a concentrate stirred up in hot water (decoction), or as the liquor that results when the hot metal is quenched in a liquid (extinction). He signals that he will not prejudge the matter at the outset by giving conspicuously equal weight to both practitioners (much used ) and sceptics (much questioned ).
Medieval alchemists believed they could exploit the link between the energy-giving sun, its symbolic metal gold, and the human heart (a cordial is a liquor thought to be good for the heart, the Latin stem cor meaning heart). They made preparations of ‘potable gold’ by heating gold utensils and then quenching them in wine, although later chemistry has shown that no gold is in fact dissolved by this method. Paracelsus and his followers in the sixteenth century, knowing the secret of aqua regia, the unique mixture of acids that does dissolve gold, promoted remedies that truly did contain the metal (and the charlatans of the day made a killing by pretending the same). Along with other new chemical medicines, gold began to find a place in the pharmacopoeias. Its medicinal utility is thus a matter of some controversy by the time Browne enters the debate.
He proceeds to scope out the range and strength of people’s views. By establishing these limits, he opens up a middle ground, where we can already sense that he might settle:
There are hereof I perceive two extream opinions; some excessively magnifying it, and probably beyond its deserts; others extreamly vilifying it, and perhaps below its demerits.
He is assiduous in maintaining the symmetry of the previous sentence that vouches for his impartiality (excessively magnifying, and probably . . . / extreamly vilifying, and perhaps . . .). This symmetrical device is deployed once more in the sentence that follows (Some / others):
Some affirming it a powerful Medicine in many diseases, others averring that so used, it is effectual in none:
The repeated use of these balancing phrases does more than advertise Browne’s own balance. It also shows the hand of a skilled rhetorician, with his use of the ‘rule of three’ bringing this opening to a satisfying caesura.
Now we turn a corner:
and in this number are very eminent Physicians, Erastus, Duretus, Rondeletius, Brassavolus, and many other; who beside the strigments and sudorous adhesions from mens hands, acknowledge that nothing proceedeth from Gold in the usual decoction thereof.
For the first time, Browne invokes a number of authorities on one side of the argument only. Often in Pseudodoxia Epidemica he will line up appropriate experts whom he respects (from antiquity as well as the Renaissance) on both sides before picking his way through their logic, usually onto some middle ground. Perhaps he is preparing to do the same here. Erastus was a student of Plato; the others are French and Italian physicians of the sixteenth century. Will Browne side with them? He’ll need to be persuaded:
Now the capital reason that led men unto this opinion, was their observation of the inseparable nature of Gold: it being excluded in the same quantity as it was received, without alteration of parts, or diminution of its gravity.
In addition to his appeal to authority, he now offers the additional evidence of experiment. This will allow us to deploy our own sense of reason in weighing the case. Gold is indeed profoundly unreactive, as Browne says. Observed not to undergo change in the world (inseparable), why should it then be believed that it undergoes change in the human body? And if it does not change, then surely it cannot exert a change on the body in return. Browne’s scientific mind here anticipates certain basic principles of physics and chemistry which will not be clearly set out for another century or so, such as the law of conservation of mass and the rule that one chemical element cannot be changed into another.
With his next paragraph, Browne prepares us for the fact that he will not be aligning himself precisely with the scholars he has cited, even though he agrees with them as far as their observation goes that gold is not altered by the human digestive system:
Now herein to deliver somewhat which in a middle way may be entertained; we first affirm, that the substance of Gold is invincible by the powerfullest action of natural heat; and that not only alimentally in a substantial mutation, but also medicamentally in any corporeal conversion.
It is notable, in the light of Browne’s careful symmetry earlier on, that he does not stop to name these opposing voices who are now pulling him away from Erastus and the rest towards his middle way. Paracelsus’s ideas of chemical medicine were still considered radical at this time, and it may be that Browne does not wish to ‘out’ himself to his fellow physicians as a Paracelsian.* Instead, we will shortly be asked to think of gold in a more subtle way, distinguishing between its substance and other, more tenuous qualities. First, though, Browne piles on more evidence that gold is not altered by passage through the body:
As is very evident, not only in the swallowing of golden bullets, but in the lesser and foliate divisions thereof: passing the stomach and guts even as it doth the throat, that is, without abatement of weight or consistence. So that it entereth not the veins with those electuaries, wherein it is mixed: but taketh leave of the permeant parts, at the mouths of the Meseraicks, or Lacteal Vessels, and accompanieth the inconvertible portion unto the siege. Nor is its substantial conversion expectible in any composition or aliment wherein it is taken.
Browne cannot resist deploying his physician’s jargon in this bravura display of his own expert knowledge (an electuary is a medicinal paste; the Meseraicks are the intestines). After blinding his readers with science, he quickly lifts their spirits with a joke and an entertaining reminder of the consequences of his reasoning for some familiar stories of golden transformations:
And therefore that was truly a starving absurdity, which befel the wishes of Midas. And little credit there is to be given to the golden Hen, related by Wendlerus.
He now concludes his opening argument with a clear restatement of the part of the problem that he has chosen to isolate – that gold is essentially immutable – and the barest hint that there might nevertheless be other ways that it can exert an effect on the body without chemical transformation. This is something that his readers who are up to date with the latest science may already have begun to guess:
So in the extinction of Gold, we must not conceive it parteth with any of its salt or dissoluble principle thereby, as we may affirm of Iron; for the parts thereof are fixed beyond division, nor will they separate upon the strongest test of fire.
The comparison with iron is carefully chosen. It is not only that this metal provides a chemical contrast with gold: iron readily forms compounds likely to have an effect on the body, for example. He has chosen iron (and not, say, copper) for a specific reason that his scientifically educated readers may once again be able to guess.
This second paragraph ends with a coda that further serves to put us on our guard:
This we affirm of pure Gold: for that which is currant and passeth in stamps amongst us, by reason of its allay, which is a proportion of Silver or Copper mixed therewith, is actually dequantitated by fire, and possibly by frequent extinction.
In other words, all that glisters is not gold, and Browne’s arguments apply to pure gold only, not to baser materials that might be called gold in casual discourse, or hawked as gold by charlatans, or naively thought to be gold by ordinary people.
With his third paragraph, Browne now reveals the dramatic twist to which he has been leading:
Secondly, Although the substance of Gold be not immuted or its gravity sensibly decreased, yet that from thence some vertue may proceed either in substantial reception or infusion we cannot safely deny.
This is new. Now he tells us that he believes – or at least does not wholly disbelieve – that gold might exert an effect after all, even if it is itself unchanged. It seems like a direct contradiction of what he has already told us. But he has evidence that such may be the case in principle: the ‘vulgar errors’ that precede this one in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, ‘the Loadstone’ and ‘Bodies Electrical’, concern the new phenomena of magnetism and electricity. The section on the lodestone is the longest of all, a veritable essay on the mysteries of magnetism. If iron can exert strange forces, cannot gold too?
For possible it is that bodies may emit vertue and operation without abatement of weight; as is evident in the Loadstone, whose effluencies are continual, and communicable without a minoration of gravity.
If crystals and amber can do this, can gold too?
And the like is observable in Bodies electrical, whose emissions are less subtile. So will a Diamond or Saphire emit an effluvium sufficient to move the Needle or a Straw, without diminution of weight. Nor will polished Amber although it send forth a gross and corporal exhalement, be found a long time defective upon the exactest scales. Which is more easily conceivable in a continued and tenacious effluvium, whereof a great part retreats into its body.
With these two examples of weird physical phenomena where the substance exerting the effect does not appear to change, Browne throws open the doors of possibility. How wide dare he push them? Do even the amulets that the superstitious wear to ward off evil have some real action?
Thirdly, If amulets do work by emanations from their bodies, upon those parts whereunto they are appended, and are not yet observed to abate their weight; if they produce visible and real effects by imponderous and invisible emissions, it maybe unjust to deny the possible efficacy of Gold, in the non-omission of weight, or deperdition of any ponderous particles.
Steady, Tom. Elsewhere, Browne has given short shrift to amulets when they are falsely sold as cures for diseases and have no effect at all. Now, he uses this vulgar error as grist to his own mill: if you believe in amulets, he says, you must at least stop to consider the possibility that gold might act by means of similar imponderous and invisible emissions.
Browne’s open-mindedness is not only commendable, it also seems remarkably foresighted. We are now accustomed to the use of radioactive isotopes in cancer therapy – ‘powerful Medicine’ acting without ‘diminution of its gravity’. Indeed, metallic gold-198 has been used against some tumours because its short radioactive half-life of 2.7 days in combination with its chemical inertness means it is safe to leave in the patient’s body.
Browne’s final analogy bears up less well to twenty-first-century scrutiny, however:
Lastly, Since Stibium or Glass of Antimony, since also its Regulus will manifestly communicate unto Water or Wine, a purging and vomitory operation; and yet the body it self, though after iterated infusions, cannot be found to abate either vertue or weight: we shall not deny but Gold may do the like, that is, impart some effluences unto the infusion, which carry with them the separable subtilties thereof.
It is known now that a tiny quantity of antimony does dissolve in such infusions even though the regulus, the crystal of the pure element, from which it comes appears unchanged. Antimony was widely used in medicine in medieval and early modern medicine; physicians even prescribed pills made of it as reusable laxatives because so little was lost on each use. Browne now moves to his summing up:
That therefore this Metal thus received, hath any undeniable effect, we shall not imperiously determine, although beside the former experiments, many more may induce us to believe it.
Clearing the brushwood of caveats and double negatives in this sentence, we discover that Browne basically wishes to reserve judgement: he’s not prepared to say that gold isn’t effective as medicine; but neither, on the strength of these analogies and experiments, can he assert with complete confidence that it is. It is a typical (or perhaps I should say not untypical) Brownean conclusion, open-minded to a fault, but also intriguingly open-ended. Now, he has more practical advice to impart:
But since the point is dubious and not yet authentically decided, it will be no discretion to depend on disputable remedies; but rather in cases of known danger, to have recourse unto medicines of known and approved activity.
It is the standard advice of doctors down the ages: stick to the tried and trusted medicine. But Browne also has a more far-reaching point to make:
For, beside the benefit accruing unto the sick, hereby may be avoided a gross and frequent errour, commonly committed in the use of doubtful remedies, conjointly with those which are of approved vertues; that is to impute the cure unto the conceited remedy, or place it on that whereon they place their opinion. Whose operation although it be nothing, or its concurrence not considerable, yet doth it obtain the name of the whole cure: and carrieth often the honour of the capital energie, which had no finger in it.
That is to say, there is a danger that, if enough people start taking gold, then gold comes to be seen as a ‘cure’ even if it actually has no effect: so many people can’t be wrong. Except, of course, they can. And their persistence in being wrong then blocks the introduction of genuine remedies. This gross and frequent errour is still with us, seen for example in the indiscriminate prescribing of antibiotics in response to public demand.
Browne ends with a sentence that seems very familiar to us now – the scientist’s habitual refrain that ‘more research is needed’. But he is once again in the vanguard of what seventeenth-century medical practice might be. This is nothing less than a call for clinical trials of potable gold:
Herein exact and critical trial should be made by publick enjoinment, whereby determination might be setled beyond debate: for since thereby, not only the bodies of men, but great Treasures might be preserved, it is not only an errour of Physick, but folly of State, to doubt thereof any longer.
What kind of reader does Browne have in mind here? Make no mistake: he is serious about his mission. To Browne – and especially to Browne the medical materialist, mindful that there are always people on the streets of Norwich hawking false remedies – errors are worse even than heresies because they can do real harm to other people. Yet he is moderate in his argument. He is open to all possibilities and even-handed in his consideration of them. He makes it clear that he is drawing upon his learning, both general and as a medical specialist, but is not academic. He gives his reasoning and cites his sources. He takes the occasion to enlighten his readers in regard to some new science and even throws in some amusing sidelights that may cause them to think more critically about some popular fables.
Here, as in most of the vulgar errors that he addresses in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Browne appeals to authority, ancient and modern, to the powers of reason and reasonableness, and to the power of deductive logic. Such a combination could be very dry, but Browne takes care to ensure that it is not so. A favourite example of mine is his examination of the legend reported by Herodotus that Xerxes’s army during its eastward march into Greece in 480 BCE ‘drank whole rivers dry’. A plodding mind might have demanded to know the size of this army, the volume of these rivers, and so on, before calculating an answer. But Browne cuts straight through the problem with unassailable logic, finding it ‘wondrous strange, that they exhausted not the provision of the Countrey, rather then the waters thereof’.
Browne is always aware of the requirements for scientific proof – that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, that a single contrary demonstration is sufficient to demolish a hypothesis – but this burden is lightly borne, often expounded with a story rather than a lecture. Disproving the unlikely belief that lions are scared of cockerels, for example, Browne simply cites a story he has heard recently that when a lion belonging to the Prince of Bavaria escaped into a neighbour’s yard it ate his cockerels and hens too, notwithstanding their bravery.
Though he does not on this occasion imbibe a cordial of gold, Browne performs his own experiments, as we have seen already with the unbooming bittern and the kingfisher weathervane. Do earwigs have wings? He prises aside the wing case to prove they do. Do flies buzz by some means other than using their mouths? He decapitates flies and finds that they buzz still. ‘[D]iscursive enquiry and rationall conjecture’ are all very well, he writes at the end of The Garden of Cyrus. But ‘sense and ocular Observation’ are what’s needed to strike the ‘dispatching blows unto errour’. Although it is Francis Bacon who is usually credited with the invention of the experimental method in science, it is likely that Browne did more actual experiments, and he even dares to refute Bacon when he repeats an investigation in which iron is dissolved in aqua fortis (nitric acid). Bacon finds that the overall weight of the reactants remains constant, even though copious noxious fumes are given off, but Browne correctly records a loss in weight. Browne’s experiments were in turn occasionally repeated by notable successors, such as Robert Boyle, the first modern chemist, who took three attempts to confirm Browne’s claim that aqua fortis can cause oil to coagulate. Browne’s standing as an experimental scientist should need no greater confirmation than this.
Sometimes, an experiment fails, and Browne endears himself to the reader by saying so. His candid reporting brings a fresh kind of authority to his resolution of vulgar errors. These are experiments any reader can imagine doing for himself – or can now that Browne has put the idea in his head, for it almost certainly will not have occurred to him before. The very idea of an experiment designed in order to establish a scientific fact is quite new. Yet Browne is offering a life lesson here. Some of his harshest criticism in Pseudodoxia Epidemica is reserved for those who persist in believing dubious things even though they possess the power of reason and the wherewithal to do the experiment that would establish the truth of the matter; these people, says Browne, fail ‘in the intention of man it self’. Man, in other words, has a God-given duty to experiment.
Unpublished notes provide raw details of many more experiments that Browne conducted lifelong. They range widely and wildly in their topics, showing evidence of the curious mind more than any ordered proto-scientific drive to pursue an investigation to its conclusion. All is urgency, but which way to go? Browne is conscious of the opportunity, after centuries of ignorance, ‘to erect a new Britannia ’, and that it is scientific knowledge that will help to do this, though as a believer in the End of Days he is aware too that ‘time may be too short for our designes’. This sense of a race against time – a race with the hurdles of people’s wilful ignorance in the way – is widely shared among the curious elite. John Evelyn, for example, hails Browne as one of the ‘society of learned and ingenuous men...by whome we might hope to redeeme the tyme that has bin lost, in pursuing vulgar errours’.
Some of these hatchling ideas Browne nurtures for later inclusion in essays for publication. Others find their way into correspondence with the more professional set of natural philosophers of the Royal Society in London or with like-minded gentleman-scholars on their Norfolk estates. The traffic is two-way: Browne keeps abreast of the latest scientific developments, learning promptly, for example, of Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of spermatozoa, ‘finding such a vast number of little animals in the melt of a cod, or the liquor which runnes from it...that they much exceed the number of men upon the whole earth at one time’.
Most, though, are extempore notes for his own education. One important recurrent theme is the generation of plants and animals. Browne notes with wonder the ability of plants to regenerate from their roots or even ashes. But his most significant contribution to scientific knowledge may come from his experiments on eggs. Living in Norfolk rather than in London, he was arguably better situated than fellows of the Royal Society to procure a variety of live eggs for experimental purposes. Browne studied the effect of heat and the action of substances such as vinegar and saltpetre on the eggs of chickens, frogs and skates. Joseph Needham’s view was that these first explorations of the chemical constitution of eggs
show Sir Thomas to have been more than simply the supreme artist in English prose, which is his common title to remembrance...The only conclusion that can be drawn from these remarkable observations is that it was in the ‘elaboratory’ in Sir Thomas’ house at Norwich that the first experiments in chemical embryology were undertaken. His significance in this connection has been quite overlooked, and it is time to recognise that his originality and genius in this field shows itself to be hardly less remarkable than in so many others.
In these enquiries into the nature of materials and what passes between them, Browne takes us back to a period in science when unknowns were all around and yet could be probed with relative ease. We too easily forget this today, and allow ourselves to think these enquiries silly. Yet how would we set about one of these investigations even now if suddenly obliged to unlearn so much of what we have learnt since the seventeenth century?
How are vulgar errors handled in the twenty-first century? Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science is arguably the most constructive among a rash of books that have recently sought to shine the light of reason and science on some of the popular misunderstandings to which we are still alarmingly prone. He does not detain his readers on the medicinal merits of gold cordial, although he does take thirty-five pages to deal with the scientifically simpler, but presently hotly contested, question of homoeopathy.
He declares at the outset that he is ‘not desperately interested’ in alternative medicine. Instead, he wishes to use homoeopathy as a kind of case study to examine how it is in science and medicine that we know if an action produces the results claimed for it. This has relevance beyond the eccentric backwater of homoeopathy because mainstream drug-based medicine – ‘big pharma’ – surrounds itself with a similar mythology of miraculous pills that may be nothing like as effective as even doctors are led to believe. Goldacre wishes to give us the critical faculties to appraise claims made for health-giving properties whatever their provenance.
I won’t deconstruct the whole of Goldacre’s argument as I have done for Browne’s gold. He continues with a brief history of homoeopathy, together with a statement of its principles – that ‘like cures like’, and that very great dilutions of the supposedly active ingredient are more effective than a concentrated dose. Goldacre debunks the dilution principle using simple arithmetic to expose its absurdity. Then he comes to the nub: homoeopathic patients say the treatment makes them feel better. The truth of this claim is almost impossible to assess (as it is for some conventional medicines) because of the placebo effect and because patients may simply get better anyway. In the end, Goldacre surprises us and concedes, Browne-like, that ‘going to see a homeopath is probably a helpful intervention, in some cases, for some people, even if the pills are just placebos’, although he remains far less forgiving of the pseudoscientific folderol with which the homoeopathy industry defends its interests.
The major difference in the way that Goldacre tackles this example of twenty-first-century pseudoscience lies in his tone. Beneath his rigorous dismantling of the ‘science’ of homoeopathy, there is a sharpness that edges into superciliousness. Although he tries hard to maintain a dispassionate balance, he cannot altogether disguise his impatience with the whole enterprise, and occasionally a mocking undercurrent cannot help but break the surface. ‘This is another universe of foolishness,’ he explodes at one point.
Goldacre is a model of restraint compared to some other champions of reason. Simon Singh was taken to court for libel by the British Chiropractic Association when he wrote in an article in the Guardian in 2008 (promoting his newly published book Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial ) that the organization ‘happily promotes bogus treatments’. In the hearing, the judge ruled that the word ‘bogus’ had been used as a statement of fact rather than being fair comment, and that it could be taken as meaning ‘deliberately false’, and was therefore defamatory to the BCA.
Others judge that open ridicule is the best weapon. Francis Wheen includes homoeopathy in a very British attack on dodgy ideas ranging from structuralism to religious fundamentalism. His title says it all: How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. But impatience with the world’s foolishness quickly becomes intolerance. Sense about Science, a lobby group which campaigns for better presentation of scientific evidence, has a subsidiary group called Voice of Young Science, whose bright idea it was a few years ago to style themselves ‘warriors against claptrap’. Richard Dawkins rails that the irrational views of ‘dim losers’ now find a ready outlet on the Internet. Mark Henderson’s bestselling polemic The Geek Manifesto, which argues for a greater role for science in policymaking, is predicated on a tribal world of ‘geeks’ who find it ‘cool to think’ and everybody else who apparently doesn’t. The Twitter biography of Adam Rutherford, a science writer and broadcaster and one of the editors of the journal Nature, is: ‘Back off. I’m a scientist.’ Even allowing for a degree of ironic self-awareness, it’s hardly an invitation to dialogue.
My difficulty is not with the substance of the topics that these and other scientists choose to debate. I am a supporter of evolutionary theory, I think horoscopes are nonsense, I think manufacturers who make fallaciously scientific claims for their products should be restrained from doing so, and I am sceptical in various degrees towards homoeopathy, chiropractic, reflexology and acupuncture.
My problem is with the tone – arrogant yet embattled, pious yet aggrieved, seeking to sound authoritative yet coming out so shrill. Why, I ask Mark Henderson, has science come to speak like this? The author of The Geek Manifesto is also head of communications at the Wellcome Trust, which annually disburses more than £1 billion in medical and bioscience research funding. Sitting in the atrium of its sleek modern headquarters, it is absurd to believe that science is on the back foot. Mark nevertheless defends the present rhetoric. ‘The more strident end of the standing-up-for-science spectrum, while not always helpful, has its uses,’ he tells me. ‘They’ve had an important influence in changing the centre of gravity. They’ve made it easier for more moderate voices themselves to be seen as not extreme.’ Maybe. I have a feeling that a more civil tone might have got us all here sooner.
The difference between pseudoscientific claims made in Thomas Browne’s time and those made today does not primarily lie with the improbability of the phenomenon described, or in the plausibility of the claimants, but in the certitude with which the basic science is known. Scientists can now show, for example, that a homoeopathic remedy diluted in the approved manner – thirty times by a factor of a hundred each time – will contain not even one molecule of the supposed active compound. This confidence leads some into arrogance, whereas when less was known – or less was thought known – there was both greater ignorance and greater humility. Browne dare not aver that gold has no effect on the human body, even though the metal passes unchanged through it, because he has learnt of recent discoveries where strange effects are observed without substantial change to the thing exerting the effect. In the circumstances, he reserves making final judgement.
In a climate of more certain science, it seems it is less easy to forgive those who cannot be bothered to understand some of the basics or who purposely ignore the facts and prefer to believe something else entirely. And because foolish beliefs these days are spread not only by harmless gossips, but also by powerful vested interests and by a press whose journalists should (and often in fact do) know better, this merely adds to the frustration. This might still matter little if it were only an ignorable minority of eccentrics who held erroneous thoughts and a minority of quacks who preyed on them. But it is not this way. The fact that the UK National Health Service funds some homoeopathy centres, for example, takes public money away from treating patients with conventional medicines. This gives us all a stake in the matter whether we want it or not.
The word that early modern historians favour to describe the growing discourse between like-minded intellectuals at this time is ‘civility’. Hobbesian civility sought a utopian remodelling towards a society in which deference and politeness and sound government would be guarantees against violence and disorder. Baconian civility extended these ideals to the community of natural philosophers as the best means of assuring the furtherance of knowledge and its dissemination in the wider world.
During the English Civil War, when Pseudodoxia Epidemica was first published, and afterwards, during the years of the Commonwealth and into the Restoration, when it appeared in five subsequent editions, the notion of civility in general society was tested almost to destruction. For Browne, intellectual chaos and the social chaos were tellingly linked. The times made manifest the confusion and decline that can follow from believing the wrong things. He finds solace in the order displayed in the germination of ‘the first two seminall leaves’ of plants, but is disturbed that it is so soon lost in the chaotic tangle of their later growth. Even the possibility of knowing has been compromised. England is now the garden after the Fall where ‘a Paradise, or unthorny place of knowledge’ can no longer be hoped for or achieved.
Yet Browne is interested in thorns, too. His roving mind at first seems rather different from scientists’ minds now. Scientists are specialists, and to be a specialist you must focus very narrowly within your chosen field. The greatest scientists, however, are still those with hungry eyes and an omnivorous appetite, curious about everything, keen to find connections. Browne’s experiments and observations encompass botany, zoology, biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, archaeology and anthropology. But, because these disciplines of science are not yet defined, he is also at liberty to range well beyond any of them into areas that many scientists now would consider unworthy of serious attention. ‘I am, I confesse, naturally inclined to that, which misguided zeale termes superstition’, he writes in Religio Medici. What does he mean? Who are these misguided zealots? There must already be persons more outspoken than he against superstitious beliefs, men who are in fact rather more like many of today’s scientists. Unlike them, Browne is willing – indeed eager – to take the time to consider the nature of superstition and to try to understand those who are superstitious rather than dismissing them as fools.
He cannot resist ‘irregularities, contradictions, and antinomies’. Often, he will let a silly belief go as long as it is one that does not have the full force of an error and does no injury to God. The fact that people believe it amuses him certainly, encourages him in his own sense of superiority perhaps, but more importantly also serves to maintain him in alertness to the real nature of people, which is something that scientists then and now are sometimes apt to forget.
This forbearance is a weakness in the eyes of more rigorous investigators. Browne can never join the emerging community of scientists. He is too much of a prelapsarian: his true wish is not to expand learning but ‘to reduce it as it lay at first in a few and solid Authours, and to condemne to the fire those swarms and millions of Rhapsodies, begotten onely to distract and abuse the weaker judgements of Scholars, and to maintaine the Trade and Mystery of Typographers’.
Are not most of us now scientific rationalists, and inclined in our turn to see Browne as one of those superfluous rhapsodists whose words are at risk of the flames? Yet our newspapers still print horoscopes, our shops sell ‘healing’ crystals, our homoeopaths and chiropractors and reflexologists thrive on the custom they receive from willing clients. Even water divining – ‘Rhabdomancy’ as Browne terms it, ‘a fruitless exploration, strongly scenting of Pagan derivation’ – has been used in the twenty-first century by at least one of Britain’s privatized water companies.
Early on, Browne sees that truth is fundamentally slippery. Comparing historical accounts by different authors, he finds that a true version of events is not to be had. Comparing events he has witnessed with his own eyes against later accounts of the same, he finds them at variance. Nothing can be trusted. The past is no more reliable than the future. There is no simple truth.
Even in science. In his medical practice, he makes do very well with the Galenic concept of the four humours, already 1,500 years old, yet soon after his death to be utterly superseded by new breakthroughs in chemistry and biology. He is aware of the theory of Copernicus, already a century old but slow to spread, that the earth orbits around the sun. The books in his library are all but unanimous, however, that the sun goes round the earth. (He only later acquired Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.) Browne is no Copernican, but nor is he an ‘anti-Copernican’ – he simply has no informed basis for a conclusive view one way or the other.
He certainly has no fundamental religious objection to heliocentrism. He is always more than happy to decentre man in his universe, though he tends to do it not by juggling the solar system, but by drawing on his great knowledge of the natural world. To the vulgar error that man uniquely stands erect the better to behold the heavens, for example, he reminds us of the Uranoscopus genus of fishes, the stargazers, which don’t even have to crick their necks to do this. Though never able to read his own, he credits that palms may be read – and sees no reason why, if so, palm-reading should not be valid for any creature with naked forepaws, such as moles and monkeys.
I am making a postmodern point, maybe, one that many scientists might resist even now. Yet it is worth remembering that great scientists, even whole orthodoxies of science, can turn out to have been wrong.
What are scientists wrong about today? And who can we expect to tell us? For scientists today do not often remind us of their own errors, and are loath to expose the fact that backtracking on a once cherished, now disproved theory can be just as humanly painful for them as it is for those in politics or business.
The civility of Browne’s day that allowed natural philosophers to engage in dialogue with other scholars of all kinds has been superseded by a grammar largely private to science. A scientific communication must establish its priority, persuade others, and undo rivals. It might also have to please funding agencies, demonstrate ‘relevance’, and offer itself up for explication to the public. These rhetorical requirements mean that the open, generous and uncomplicated manner of communicating that is natural to many scientists is being forced out by a language that is carefully calibrated, even ‘spun’. As science has expanded, the community of natural philosophers and gentleman-scientists building knowledge through civil exchange has been superseded by a profession of specialists who spend most of their time communicating with others like themselves, for whom explaining to the world what they do is often seen as a burdensome duty.
This withdrawal from society produces some odd effects. It induces a state of mind in which isolation becomes an ideal rather than an unfortunate by-product, and in which the only conversation that is acceptable is the one that takes place on the scientific plane. It never would have occurred to Browne, as it does to some more sociopathic scientists today, to suggest that only those with scientific training should have the right to comment on science policy, for example. He would have been distressed, I think, to discover there are scientists today who feel no obligation to understand the non-scientific mind, and who will therefore never comprehend – far less forgive – those credulous souls who pursue irrational customs. They will never turn their minds towards these people for long enough even to consider them as a problem in science, let alone to learn that they behave in the way they do often for quite rational reasons (to gain sympathy, to enjoy social contact, to experience touch, to compensate for being failed by conventional treatment).
How did we arrive in this unhappy place? The Second World War made plain humankind’s debt to technology and to the science that underpins it. Electronic devices, plastics, antibiotics and much else were the dividend of that war. At the same time, the dropping of the atomic bomb sent a message that scientific advance was not an unalloyed good. The ride since then has been a bumpy one. Many academics have retraced the path in leisurely detail; I can only point out some of the main sights and the potholes along the way.
In Britain, C. P. Snow’s infamous 1959 essay on ‘the two cultures’ sounded the call to arms. Snow was accurate in diagnosing a problem – that the governing classes, largely educated in the humanities, were ill equipped to rule on matters of science. Merely articulating this fact seemed to exacerbate the problem, however, and battle lines soon hardened between science and the humanities. A series of crises – the thalidomide scandal, the poorly judged attempt to introduce genetically modified crops, the MMR–autism scare, waves of food-borne infections – intensified public hostility towards scientific hauteur.
In 1985, a belated initiative of UK national science associations called for greater ‘public understanding of science’. A number of leading universities appointed professors of the public understanding of science, whose pious pronouncements often only antagonized their intended audience. In one memorable outburst, two of these appointees, Richard Dawkins and John Durant, aimed their fire at The X-Files television series, which they felt was a public danger for glamorizing pseudoscience.
This first generation of professors has now been succeeded by a more amiable (and telegenic) crew, and the strategic emphasis has been subtly shifted away from ‘public understanding of science’ to ‘public engagement with science’ (implying that scientists might actually deign to listen as well as pontificate). Lately, too, an unpredicted and improbable alliance has grown up between scientists in the media and celebrity comedians, which has probably done more to improve the image of science than any official initiative ever could.
In the United States, the postwar journey has followed a somewhat similar path, though with its own milestones (Sputnik, DDT, Alar, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the Challenger disaster). Faith in technological progress remains high and the public perception of science has never reached the lows it reached in Britain – thanks in part to charismatic spokesmen such as Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan, who were able to communicate both the wonder of science and the fact that scientists have broader social responsibilities. Nevertheless, American science has had to contend with its own difficulties, chief among them the fundamentalist Christian opposition to Darwinian evolution.
These trials are hardly enough to justify the portrayal of science as threatened or embattled. Science is in fact winning all down the line. Research funding is often protected when other government spending is cut. ‘Popular science’ is a thriving genre in book publishing. Science festivals are proliferating. More television programmes have more science content than ever before – not only those designated as science documentaries, but including many devoted to natural history, archaeology, health and other matters.
Those broadly supportive of science – whether qualified scientists or camp followers – have found a collective voice. Now, when something broadly perceived as pseudoscience is given a platform by an organization ostensibly dedicated to scientific ideas, it is liable to be taken to task for the transgression. The Technology, Entertainment and Design conference franchise discovered this when it scheduled a lecture by the parapsychology theorist Rupert Sheldrake; so did the Royal College of Physicians when it allowed a homoeopaths’ organization to book its conference facilities. An online survey asking for comments on whether an NHS hospital should refer patients for homoeopathic treatment, which once would have been expected to garner mainly supportive responses from healthcare professionals and homoeopaths, is now quickly shared among sceptics and rationalists who respond with a very different message. Sense about Science has been able to move from naming celebrities who believe silly things (Madonna’s valiant efforts to ‘neutralize radiation’; Gwyneth Paltrow’s dedication to ‘biological foods’) to praising them when they say something sensible.
These are small victories, but there are greater gains too. I mentioned that Simon Singh was sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association, but did not add that this case was later overturned on appeal, and became instrumental in securing long overdue reforms of British libel law. Other cases have similarly redounded on the anti-scientific interests that brought them. In short, it is hard to believe that pseudoscience has ever been debunked as thoroughly, enthusiastically and forcefully as it is today.
And yet, are today’s po-faced champions of science missing something? Their hope for a day when we all bask in the light of scientific understanding (and never watch The X-Files) is surely unrealistic. For, like the poor, the credulous are always with us. But do the credulous in fact know something the rest of us don’t? Is a world where some people believe that the stars govern their lives and that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden somehow richer than one where nobody does, where nobody in fact believes anything unless it has a demonstrable base of evidence? Even science cannot advance without that first suspension of rationality needed to admit the imaginative possibility that something unproven might yet be so. They may be foolishly misguided in their specific belief (that diluting something to water intensifies its curative powers, that manipulating one part of the body can heal another), but perhaps they do serve an essential social purpose. Credulousness is surely a natural human behaviour, an expression of empathy at the moment when a myth is passed from one person to another: I wish to understand you, and I am prepared to demonstrate this by first believing you. This cannot be a sham. To pretend to believe would not be an empathetic response. The credulous further remind us that beyond the known lies the yet unknown. Albeit unwittingly, they provide a salutary reminder – one that does not issue often enough from scientists’ mouths – that science does not have all the answers, that it might even in fact have rather few of them. ‘Very beautiful is the Rain-bow’ still, writes Browne, after some sentences in Pseudodoxia Epidemica summarizing the optical conditions that produce it.
More than a few of Browne’s seventeenth-century pseudodoxies are still unresolved. One puzzle, then already familiar, had been examined by Aristotle, Bacon and Descartes: the belief that hot water freezes faster than cold. Browne is happy to overturn these authorities, and agrees with a more recent experimenter that it does not. Since 1969, it has been known as the Mpemba effect, after Erasto Mpemba, a Tanzanian student who stumped a visiting physics lecturer with the problem when he visited his school. From time to time, somebody is moved to investigate the matter and a paper appears in a scientific journal. Half a dozen explanations have recently been proffered, but none has yet laid the matter to rest. Although it is unlikely that any chemistry is involved, the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2012 announced a competition to find ‘the best and most creative explanation of the phenomenon’ (the correct one would be better, I feel). Twenty-two thousand entries came in. The answer is still not known.
electricity (PE, 1646): Browne’s lithe visual imagination yields him some uncanny insights into these mysterious new phenomena. Drawing an analogy with the circular motion observed when one blows on motes of dust in sunlight, he gives us a compelling picture of electric field lines that would not be properly mapped until Michael Faraday’s work two centuries later. He all but gives a statement of the inverse square law of magnetic and electrical attractions: ‘a tenuous emanation or continued effluvium, which after some distance retracteth into it self’. Ice, he intuits correctly, is generally less transparent than crystals of salt or saltpetre because ‘Its atoms are not concreted into continuity’.
For many of his readers, this is their first chance to understand the new discoveries about magnetism set out (in Latin) by William Gilbert’s De Magnete of 1600. (Indeed, a large part of Browne’s project in Pseudodoxia Epidemica is to present in ordinary English knowledge both ancient and modern previously only available in Latin.) But they have the added spice of Browne’s own confirmatory experiments. One of these Browne devised in order to challenge the belief that two needles stroked with the same magnet would point to the same letter of the alphabet when set to pivot at the centre of respective abecedary circles. ‘The conceit is excellent, and if the effect would follow, somewhat divine,’ Browne marvels. He can see how a pair of such devices might work like a wireless telegraph. But will they? He constructs two circles of wood, which he marks with the letters of the alphabet. He then takes two needles made of the same steel and touched with the same magnet. He places the two wheels close to one another and moves the needle of one of them. The other does not respond; it stands unmoved ‘like Hercules pillars’. He cannot disguise his disappointment. But ocular proof and reason prevail, and he reasons further that the devices would not work for sending messages in any case as the movement of the needle from A to B on one wheel would be echoed by an opposing rotation, that is from A to Z, on the other.
Explaining invisible phenomena is one of the urgent tasks for early modern scientists. In 1646, it is magnetism, electricity, and the worlds at different scales made visible for the first time by the invention of the telescope and the microscope. Soon, it will be Newton on gravity and light.
Browne makes the first use in English of the word ‘electricity’ when he writes that ‘Crystal will calefie unto electricity’, in other words that a suitable material when rubbed and warmed by friction will acquire a static electrical charge. He goes on to puzzle as to why only some materials behave in this way, and what the respective properties are that the attractor and the attracted bodies must possess, and what it is that actually passes between them when this happens.
deductive (PE, 1646): Although he coins the word as a loose synonym for ‘derivative’ or ‘lesser’, its more precise meaning in logic is established in time for the later editions of Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Deductive reasoning proceeds logically from statements of the known truth towards conclusions that must therefore also be true. By contrast, inductive reasoning reaches general conclusions from specific cases, but these can never be certain and are always subject to falsification. Deduction is robust in method, but can yield disappointingly feeble results. Induction is inherently fragile, but capable of leaping to great revelations. Deduction is satisfying to the mind, induction is unsettling.
Aristotle was the father of deductive logic. Francis Bacon founded the inductive method, though he was always dissatisfied with its manifest imperfection. Browne defers explicitly to Aristotle in his writing, but owes more to the experimentalism of Bacon, as his investigations with his bittern attest. Although Browne’s bittern never boomed, he knows that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and so he holds off reporting his experience until a friend – one of a number whom he seems to have commissioned to go about the reed beds of the county – can say that he has seen the bird booming while standing clear of surrounding vegetation. From this trustworthy observation, he was finally able to draw the certain conclusion that bitterns boom without help from the reeds. Deduction wins over induction.
fallaciously (PE, 2nd ed., 1650): In the preface to Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Browne writes: ‘we are not Magisterial in opinions, nor have we Dictator-like obtruded our conceptions; but in the humility of Enquiries or disquisitions, have only proposed them unto more ocular discerners.’ In other words, he stands ready to be refuted by superior observation. Such is his confidence in his own powers that Browne is even prepared to take on any pen ‘that shall fallaciously refute us’. This may be a pre-emptive strike against men such as Alexander Ross, the one-time chaplain-in-ordinary to Charles I, who criticized Browne’s Religio Medici in Medicus Medicatus. The feud would continue in 1652, when Ross responded to the publication of Pseudodoxia Epidemica with a series of absurd counterclaims such as one denying that a magnet attracts iron.
* Kevin Faulkner draws my attention to Browne’s coffin-plate, the last few words of which read: ‘Corporis spagyricci pulvere plumbum in aurum convertit’. Spagyric is a Paracelsian term referring to the manufacture of medicine by (al)chemical methods. Translation might run: ‘By the dust of his spagyric body he converts lead into gold,’ although the auriferous aspect of alchemy would have been the least of Browne’s reasons for interest in it.