You, Me and the Moon Magic, Medicine and the History of Science

Lauren Kassell

This lecture was delivered on 28 June 2019 to mark my promo-tion to Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Cambridge and to celebrate the completion of the work of the Casebooks Project.

Introduction

Here is an astrologer at work around 1620 (fig. 1). He is drawing a horoscope for his client. Their gesturing hands suggest that they are in conversation about the stars and planets in the distance. This image was first published in a monumental book by Robert Fludd, who worked as a physician in London in the first half of the seventeenth century. He is remembered today not for his medical practices, but for his big Latin books. The image is one of hundreds in his Utriusque cosmi ... historia (History of the two worlds). Here is the much reproduced title page (fig. 2). It depicts the connections between the two worlds that the book explores, the macrocosm (the universe) and the microcosm (human life). Here is another astrologer at work, from 1620 (fig. 3). To find him, you followed a gaggle of women down the back streets of London. Once you arrived, you could ask questions about lost and stolen property, how many children you would have, how many husbands, and which would love you best. This image, and the accompanying description, is from John Melton’s Astrologaster, or the figure-caster, a rollicking little book that condemns astrol-ogers as opportunistic fortunetellers and dismisses their clients as gullible, ignorant, and superstitious. Here is another astrologer at work, twenty-five years earlier (fig. 4). He sits at a table, on the left, with his client (or another astrologer) on the right, discussing something in writing. They are joined by a third being, the devil. This should be the first time you’ve seen him today. On the far right a fourth figure, who is probably the same astrologer as seated on the left, stands out in the cold, observing the heavens. This image is less fa-mous than the other two. It comes from a twelve-page political pamphlet, A most strange and wonderfull prophesie upon this troublesome world (1595). When this pamphlet was published the Company of Stationers, the guild that

2

3

1

4

regulated printing and bookselling, declared it ‘lewd’, confiscated all copies (not quite), and the printer’s press was destroyed. I am showing you these three images of astrologers at work because I want you to be looking not at me stand-ing on this stage, but at them. I want you to imagine that you are trying to observe and understand the conversa-tions taking place across their desks. As some of you may have noticed, I am taking liberties with these images. These depictions of astrolo-gers at work relate to those of lone scholars, modelled, for instance, on St Jerome in his study (fig. 5); to astrono-mers talking to other astronomers (astrology and astron-omy were two parts of the same thing at the time) (fig. 6); and to doctors talking to patients and their families and friends (fig. 7). You need to take my word for it that astro-logical and medical encounters were overlapping con-cerns. I have shown you these three images because they function as devices for understanding what’s at stake when we try to understand encounters between astrol-ogers and their clients, and doctors and their patients, 400 years ago. This, in some way or another, has been my project for the past 25 years. Historians generally agree that in Europe some-time between 1100 and 1800 the relationships between magic, science and religion changed. Humans sought to master the natural world rather than observe the wonders of God’s creation; reason, in due course, would triumph over superstition. There is much truth in these accounts, but they are part of a history of science and medicine that relies on over-simplified and intellectualised understand-ings of the history of magic. What is magic? Historically, magic has three mean-ings. First, magic is the work of the devil, in the form of trickery, delusion or possession. This definition is as ancient as recorded history. So I made sure the devil appeared in one of these images, as you see in the strange prophecy (fig. 4). Second, magic is the use of techniques to control natural and spiritual powers, often through occult and sympathetic properties. This definition dates from classical antiquity, was revived by some Renaissance scholars, and is often associated with shifts in attitudes to the natural world that occurred in the centuries around 1600. So I showed you Fludd’s image of the astrologer at work situated against a diagrammic backdrop that in-cludes night and day, fortress and dwelling (fig. 2). Third, magic, historically, is also something in which ignorant people believe, as alleged by the people calling them superstitious. It is the opposite of reason, rationality and enlightenment. It is variously associated with a lack of learning, blind belief and susceptibility to the delusions of the devil. As a category of opposition, it explains away

5

6

7

2

the first definition of magic, as the work of the devil: it demonises one’s ‘ignorant’ opponents, which is what Mel-ton’s Astrologaster does (fig. 3). This definition of magic positions astrologers and their clients as marginal and abberant, their critics as mainstream and normal. At risk of exhausting my triptych (figs. 1,3, 4), in or-der to understand the dynamics between astrologers and their patients and the worlds they inhabited, I have read some big, enduring books like Fludd’s; demotic texts like Melton’s, ranging from the satirical to the instructional; and ephemeral trash like the strange prophecy. I espe-cially like trash. On the back of the copy of the strange prophecy in the Bodleian Library we find a few sentences written upside down, beginning, ‘Loke where the moon is when one sickneth …’. What is this? It’s a quick note, scrawled by an astrologer on the back of this pamphlet, as though it was wastepaper, and given to another astrologer. More on them in a minute. Here is me at work (fig. 8). The job of an inaugural lecture is to position oneself in relation to all those who have held one’s title in the past and will hold it in the future. My title is professor of history of science and med-icine, but it is not an established, named professorship. It has been hardwon nonetheless. I could tell a story about my intellectual lineage that begins with me as an undergraduate. I was study-ing social anthropology at Haverford College, went to Wadham College, Oxford as a Junior Year Abroad stu-dent, fell in love with Elias Ashmole’s manuscripts and escaped into the archives. I read Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Airpump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (1985) for a sociology class in which I got a B because I didn’t know how to think so-ciologically. I read Keith Thomas’s Religion and the De-cline of Magic (1971) to understand how historians used anthropology, and I argued with every page, except the section on astrology which I skipped because I wasn’t interested in astrology. I read Michael MacDonald’s Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seven-teenth-Century England (1983), was enchanted with the world it described, and followed its footnotes into the library. I ignored Margaret Pelling—who supervised my graduate work with enormous tolerance—when she told me to read Frances Yates’s Giodano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), only to wonder, when I finally read Yates, why I hadn’t read her sooner. The same goes for Barbara Duden’s Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (1987). Then I walked into a research fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge and, two years later, a permanent post in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. I have worked here ever since. My career has been much more personally and intellectually complicated than this.

8

3

What is true about this story is that Elias Ash-mole’s collection of manuscripts has been the single greatest defining force of my research. From the 1640s, Ashmole collected books, manuscripts, paintings, antiq-uities, and curiosities relating to the occult sciences and the history of Britain. In 1677 he donated his collections to the University of Oxford and founded the Ashmolean Museum the following decade. In 1860 his books and manuscripts were moved to the Bodleian Library where they will stay in perpetuity. Ashmole’s manuscripts in-clude hundreds of hefty volumes written and owned by Simon Forman and Richard Napier. These were the as-trologers who shared A most strange and wonderfull profe-sie. Simon Forman was a self-styled astrologer phy-sician of little formal learning and much ambition. He wrote compulsively about astrology, medicine, alchemy, various sorts of magic, his own life and more, but he sel-dom finished anything. He taught his methods to Richard Napier, an Oxford-educated clergyman with a living in Buckinghamshire. Napier was as chaste as Forman was uxorious, but somehow their interests converged in the astrological consulting room. Six years of Forman’s dai-ly records of his medical practices survive, from 1596 to 1603. Napier’s full run is preserved, from 1597 to his death in 1634. Forman was the subject of my doctorate, and I followed his pen across the histories of medicine, astrol-ogy, alchemy, magic, around the streets of London and into his version of the history of knowledge. Driven by questions about the kinds of evidence that we can use to understand past practices of health and healing and their associated ideas, I then embarked on a study of English alchemy, then shifted focus to magical practitioners. As if cursed by a jealous Forman, much of the work for these projects remains heaped in piles in my office. One of the central questions about Forman’s and Napier’s casebooks has always been why so many of their clients were women of childbearing age. When, about fifteen years ago, Nick Hopwood, invited me to be part of a collaborative project on Generation to Reproduction, I decided to return to this question and Forman’s and Napier’s casebooks—and I initiated the Casebooks Pro-ject. The rest of the talk will be about this work, but first I need to say that the culimination of the reproduction project was a big book, Reproduction: Antiquity to the Pres-ent Day, edited by me, Rebecca Flemming, and Nick Hop-wood. Each of its many chapters and exhibits required their authors to maintain an expert focus while consider-ing long-term changes and continuities. I have learned an enormous amount from this work. For me, Reproduction and Casebooks were always intertwined. Or, as one of my people from the sixteenth century might say, without Adam and Eve, there would be no sin, no death, no birth,

4

no illnesses, no medicine, no doctors, no casebooks (fig. 9). Reproduction was published in December 2018 and the final Casebooks site went live the following February and was formally launched in May.

Casebooks and the histories of science and medicine

What do casebooks have to do with the histories of sci-ence and medicine? Here is a page of Richard Napier’s casebooks (fig. 10). Here is the page anatomized (fig. 11). The full page is in thumbnail on the left. A single case is inset on the right. The case is best understood as contain-ing four major classes of information, indicated by letters on the far right: A is the question and personal informa-tion about the patient; B is a chart of the heavens at the moment at which the question was asked; C is the astrol-oger’s judgment of the case; D is extra information. In more detail, category A, the question, reads: Elisabeth Hartwell of Astwood onc[e] Mrs Uvedales servant. 25 y. unmaried. hath clumpers of blood in her mouth 15 Sept die [Saturn] h. 1. 15 pm 1599Each class of data is labeled on the left. That is, the pa-tient is Elizabeth Hartwell. Her address is Astwood, a village ten miles from Napier’s house. She was formerly a servant to Mrs Uvedale (that’s a relation). She is 25 years old (that’s age). She suffered from blood clots (‘clumpers of blood’) in her mouth (that’s a question topic—in this case repeated in the middle of the chart). Her question was asked on Saturday, 15 September, 1599 at 1:15pm (that’s date and time). Beneath this, in category B, the astrological chart is calculated for the moment at which the question was asked—hence the casebook is organized chronologically. This is the only order to these records. Below this, in what we have labelled category C, the astrologer wrote his judgment (that’s the word the astrologers used). Here we learn that Elizabeth Hartwell had been in bed for a week with a fever; it’s caused by the malign influence of Mars and other factors; those around her—it’s not clear who they were—suspected that it was pleurisy, meaning a problem with her lungs or pain in the chest, or an impost, meaning a swelling, and feared that she would die. At the end of the entry, in category D, Napier pre-scribed three sorts of purges and a cooling tincture, and he waived the fee (‘gratis’), labeled as treatment and fee/payment. Forman’s and Napier’s records contain 80,000 cases like this one. Ninety-five percent are for medical questions. They wrote them in notebooks, later collect-

10

11

5

9

ed and bound into volumes by my hero, Elias Ashmole. These 66 volumes contain questions from 65,000 people, some well known, others otherwise lost to the historical record. It’s worth noting three things about these 65,000 people. First, the astrologers were their own best clients. Their casebooks include numerous questions, and oth-er incidental notes, about themselves and their families and friends. Second, these records represent the work of other medical practitioners too: they contain the hands eighteen assistants and mention aroung 300 other medi-cal practioners. Third, if 80,000 questions were asked by 65,000 people, then many of them only asked one ques-tion. I will return to the contents of Forman’s and Napi-er’s casebooks in a minute. First we need to step back from them and ask: Why did Forman and Napier write these records? Medical practitioners don’t necessarily work with a pen in hand. Medical records—the series of cases, re-corded day by day, that I call casebooks—have a history. Physicians developed this form of writing in Europe in the 1500s. They modelled themselves on Hippocrates, the ancient father of medicine, who had reputedly recorded case histories on wax tablets and animal skins. As afforda-ble paper replaced expensive parchment and fluid cursive scripts replaced laborious gothic ones, sixteenth-century physicians borrowed practices of note-taking from schol-ars and habits of account-keeping from merchants. Their ancient and medieval predecessors had recorded individual cases that were unusual or illustrated their writings and advertised their skill. These doctors of old often wrote cases in the margins of texts; cases, like recipes and examples, were literally marginal forms of knowledge. Then, around 1500, they became central as physicians and natural philosophers combined trends to focus on natural particulars over theoretical precepts with regimes of sustained observation, in many cases pioneered by astronomers, whose activities included astrology and astrometeorology (fig. 12). Medical cases, first recorded as individual examples, then increasingly in series, were good to think with. All cases—medical, legal, theological—were (and still are) both things and a style of reasoning. Over the past three decades cases have be-come fertile topics for historians and philosophers work-ing on, for instance, Mesopotamian divination, Chinese bureacracy, seventeenth-century observation, and twenti-eth-century biological models. That’s the big picture. How do Forman’s and Napi-er’s casebooks fit with this story? Were they unusual? Yes and no. We know, for instance, that around the same time that Forman was beginning to practise, Gemma Frisius, the Dutch mathematician and physician, reputedly kept a pair of notebooks, one of observations about the stars and

12

6

weather, the other for medicine. Recording medical con-sultations, often called medical observations, had become reasonably common. But the resulting manuscripts sel-dom survive: several hundred, ranging from fragments of a few cases to many thousands, have been located in Eu-ropean archives dating from before 1700. They followed conventions—recording name, date, age, complaint, its cause, perhaps a prescription or payment—but varied from practitioner to practitioner. Some are like account books, written at the time of the encounter. Astrological records typically take this form. Others, like journals or diaries, were written when a doctor returned to his study after a day of visiting patients. Mostly, we know about cases and casebooks because, before 1700, around 100 doctors collected them together and published them as medical observations, often ordering them from head-to-toe or according to disease category and combining them with cases from other, historical practitioners. All of which is to say, other practitioners—medi-cal and astrological—recorded their cases. What makes Forman and Napier unusual is that their records survive and that they are so extensive. In a busy year, the astrolo-gers each conducted more than 2,000 consultations. Their casebooks are the largest surviving set of private medical records in history. This sketch of the significance of cases in gen-eral, and Forman’s and Napier’s casebooks in particu-lar, could lead you to conclude that this run of 66 vol-umes has a place in histories of science and medicine. It could also lead you to conclude that they are trash. Many practitioners had the discipline and intelligence to digest their casebooks into treatises or even, from the late seventeenth century, to publish a choice case in the transactions of a learned society or a medical journal, then to discard their rough notes. The reason Forman’s and Napier’s casebooks are not trash, the reason they are worth preserving and studying, is because they are themselves evidence of how the practitioners worked and because they document details of the everyday worries, fears, hopes, and ambitions of 65,000 people. These are the things that the Casebooks Project offers the world. What is the Casebooks Project?

The Casebooks Project

The Casebooks Project is the team of scholars who study Forman’s and Napier’s casebooks. It’s not the title of our work, it’s a collective term for the group of people who produce this work. Mike Hawkins, Rob Ralley, John Young have been with me from the beginning, before 2008. In 2014 they were joined by Jo Edge, Yvonne Mar-tin-Portugues, and Natalie Kaoukji. With huge gratitude,

7

affection, and respect I congratulate them on their work. It took us the best part of a decade to realise that the Casebooks Project was our name, not the title of our work, so we put that revelation on the front page of the website along with a simple statement of our achieve-ment: our work has transformed a paper archive into a digital archive. In the process, we have produced four websites. Our main site is a ‘digital edition’, which is our data interface plus a critical introduction: https://case-books.lib.cam.ac.uk. Digital surrogates of the manuscripts can be accessed through the Cambridge Digital Library: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/casebooks. Our da-taset is on Github: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/casebooks. And we have 500 fully transcribed cases on https://casebooks.wordpress.com. As an aside, it’s important to mention that our work has been generously funded, mostly by the Well-come Trust, and mostly for salaries for team casebooks (see https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/about-us/fund-ing-and-support). Thank you. What is the Casebooks Digital Edition? Here is our entry for the consultation about Elizabeth Hartwell (fig. 13). We designate each case with a unique number (CASE12702), transcribe the text above the chart (category A in the anatomized page), and systematically label the attributes of the full case (everything in categories A to D) with metadata. This case illustrates eleven of the fifty or so labels that might be attached to a case. Our metadata allows readers to locate a case or cluster of cases for further study, and it assists them in making sense of any given case and understanding the series as a whole. For instance, here you can see how Eliz-abeth Hartwell, as a woman in her twenties, is part of the largest cohort of querents (fig. 14).Readers can also see all of the cases in which a person was involved, as each individual is given a unique per-son page. Elizabeth Hartwell only has three cases, some people have dozens (fig. 15). (We know that she didn’t die, as was feared in our example case, because she features in the casebooks again two years later.) We also situate individuals socially, through information internal to the records: here is Elizabeth Hartwell’s social network (fig. 16). Digitising the casebooks allows users to read and understand all 80,000 cases, and to zoom in on particular details in the records: individuals, families, households; cohorts by age, sex, and occupation; time (daily, weekly seasonal routines and trends), geographical distributions, and other classes of information (diseases, payments, occupations, relationships) or, through a keyword search, particular words or phrases. We have designed the edition to help readers to intuitively grasp the subtleties of the inscribed records,

14

15

16

8

13

to locate relevant cases for intensive study, and to resist using our data uncritically. For instance, the astrologers were asked 757 questions about pregnancy. This does not mean that 757 women were pregnant. Nor does it mean that the astrologers only considered pregnancy as a possi-bility in 757 cases. The astrologers considered pregnancy a possibility in all cases of women of childbearing age, that is, in all 30,000 cases with women as patients. Rather, it means that 703 women asked the astrologers wheth-er they were pregnant (most wanted to be), in 65 cases someone else asked the astrologer whether the woman was pregnant, and in eleven cases there were multiple patients, though pregnancy might not apply to both of them. To understand pregnancy, and fertility more gen-erally, in these records, you need to consider these 757 cases, the other cases of the women represented here, and other cases of women—married and unmarried—of childbearing age. Our edition helps you find, situate, and understand these cases. When you start reading them, you will realise that some contain very little information, or, like Elizabeth Hartwell’s, are rather generic. Others are more elaborate, evocative, or simply strange. Many of these are included in the 500 fully-transcribed cases, with modernised spell-ing and punctuation, on our wordpress site. Here are a few examples, glossed. CASE587: In 1596, Alice Sampson, age 26, consulted Forman. She worked as a maid. She asked about her disease. He noted that she was nauseous, had a sore stomach, did not menstruate regularly, and ‘says stoutly she is not with child.’ This is her only ap-pearance in the records. CASE14488: In 1603, the nephew of Elizabeth Townsend, age 80, consulted Napier on her behalf, without her consent. Napier recorded that she was light headed, troubled in head and eyes, cannot rest. Something tempts her. She says that something comes to her bed. (Now you’ve met the devil twice in one day.) She got up one night and went to a little spring and came back inside all wet, and only then did they know she’d gone out. She has long been light headed, ‘for she loved one that deceived her’. CASE32922: In 1608 the wife of George Vescy (we don’t know her name) consulted Napier about herself and her husband. Napier recorded that she suffers much ‘grief’ because of her husband and has var-ious physical symptoms. He has pain in his limbs, flashes of hot and cold, and is ‘Desirous … to have women whip him.’ Goody Bigge is suspected of witchcraft. Other ‘desires’ in the casebooks include: ‘only desires my presence’, ‘desires to dance’, ‘desires to lie on the ground’, ‘desires to eat and cannot get it down’, ‘never now desires carnal copulation’, and ‘desires to go from her husband’s and father’s house anywhere’. These phrases, for the most part, appear in the judgment—which is included in the 500 fully-transcribed cases, but

9

not in the proper edition. Remember that we edited the systematic information in the question (category A in fig. 11), and tagged the contents of the full entry. The 500 fully-transcribed cases are designed as a taster for the richness of the full corpus, with many of them chosen because they caught the editors’ attention. So what were we editing? We focused on the ques-tions—the material generally above the chart—because time and funding was limited, but also because these systematic details represent the querents and patients and their concerns. We were editing what the astrolo-gers wrote and also the encounter that produced their records. Working digitally allows us to do both. Editors often distinguish between editing what the scribe wrote (that’s a diplomatic edition) and editing what the text meant (that’s a normalized edition). We have prepared a diplomatic edition of the casebooks, recording what the astrologers wrote, mistakes and all. At the same time, we have overlaid this with an apparatus that captures the circumstances and dynamics of the consultations. I asked you to imagine yourselves observing the conversations taking place across the astrologers’ desks. The casebooks digital edition helps you to do this. It transforms an old archive into a new archive. When we scan, transcribe, and decode these manuscripts, we render them legible. We try to show what they mean in relation to the corpus as a whole. We are contributing to the long history of scribal practices of which the history of archives, paper and digital, is part.

Conclusions

So what do Forman’s and Napier’s casebooks have to do with the history of science and medicine? I haven’t said much about the politics of medicine in early modern England. Forman was a ‘quack’ and Napier was a cler-gyman. This was an era when physicians guarded their privilege to practise medicine and the boundaries be-tween religion and medicine were contested. It is now generally agreed that it doesn’t make sense to consider the nascent medical marketplace without understanding spiritual economies. Over the past four decades, prac-tical and material ‘turns’ have focused our attention on the means of production of natural knowledge and actu-al devotional habits. Yet we hold on to grand narratives about the secularization of society, the naturalization of the world, and the medicalization of health and healing. Rather than slot Forman’s and Napier’s casebooks into a before-and-after story about the decline of magic and religion and the rise of scientific medicine, I think the best approach is to knock such stories on their side. We are not looking for the progression from magic to religion

10

to science or medicine; we are looking for the existence of all of these categories, their historical specificity, and their shifting relations across history. Forman’s and Napier’s casebooks—as artifacts that shaped encounters and as records of them—confront us with questions about what science, medicine, religion and magic mean. In them we see the three definitions of magic with which I began. At the same time, editing Forman’s and Napier’s casebooks has provided an opportunity to consider the relationship between the past and the present in a way that is unusual for historical projects. Everything I’ve said monumentalises Forman’s and Napier’s casebooks and our edition of them: the old archive is in the Bodleian Li-brary, the new archive is on the website of the Cambridge University Library. These are enduring institutions. We have taken our work very seriously. We have also played with the casebooks. We brought Forman to life first in a ninety-second animated film (https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/using-the-casebooks/casebooks-animated-film), then in a haunting work of art, Mental Metal, by Lindsay Seers, then, as consultants to the videogame develop-er Nyamyam, in a narrative comedy called Astrologaster (https://www.astrologaster.com), after Melton’s pamphlet. Other works shown alongside Mental Metal included Remy Markowitz’s Casebooks Calf—it speaks cases—and Tunga’s You, Me and the Moon (https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/about-us/casebooks-at-ambika-p3). To mark the beginning of the project one of our editors (John Young, aka Shed) published a casebooks themed cryptic cross-word in the Guardian (I think of this as secret impact, https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/prize/25107), and a second casebooks themed crosswork will be published tomorrow—by happenstance, not design (https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/prize/27860). Finally, what next? Remember the Elizabeth Townsend, age 80, who wandered at night? I am thinking about a project on how to live forever. I will always work on medical encounters, and questions about the nature of historical evidence. I am writing a short book on the long history of astrology. I might go back to my unfinished work on magical practitioners. And I quest, aimlessly I think, for an archive to rival Ashmole’s.

Acknowledgements

None of this work would have been possible without the Casebooks Project: Mike Hawkins, Rob Ralley, John Young, Jo Edge, Yvonne Martin-Portugues, and Natalie Kaoukji. We are immensely grateful to the support of the Wellcome Trust through grants 090619 and 104083. We also received support from the Isaac Newton Trust, Cam-bridge’s Wellcome Institutional Strategic Support Fund,

11

the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and Pembroke College, Cambridge. Full acknowledge-ments are detailed here: https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/about-us/casebooks-project.

Figure captions

Figure 1. Astrologer casting a horoscope from Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi ... historia (Oppenheim, 1617–121), 2 vols.; v. 2, book I, section II, part IV, p. 71. More work needs to be done to situate this much-reproduced im-age. Accessed https://archive.org/details/utriusquecos-mima02flud/page/n351, 24 August 2019. Getty Research Institute.

Figure 2. Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi ... historia (Oppen-heim, 1617), title page. Accessed https://archive.org/details/utriusquecosmima01flud/page/n3, 24 August 2019. Getty Research Institute.

Figure 3. John Melton, Astrologaster, or, the figure-caster (London, 1620), detail from title page. Accessed https://wellcomecollection.org/works/pp3bq4rk/items?can-vas=9&sierraId=b30328299&langCode=eng, 24 August 2019. Wellcome Collection.

Figure 4. Giovanni Cipriano, A most strange and wonderfull prophecie upon this troublesome world (London, 1595), detail from title page. Bodleain Libraries, University of Oxford.

Figure 5. Albrecht Dürer, St Jerome in his Study (Nurem-berg, 1514). Accessed https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O130491/st-jerome-in-his-study-print-durer-albrecht/, 24 August 2019. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 6. Johannes Hevelius, Cometographia, totam nat-uram cometarum ... exhibens (Gedani, 1668), frontispiece. Accessed https://hos.ou.edu/galleries/17thCentury/Hev-elius/1668/Hevelius-1668-000fp-image/10in/, 24 August 2019. Image courtesy History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries. © Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Figure 7. Jan Steen, The Doctor’s Visit (c. 1663–5). Ac-cessed https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/perma-nent/102298.html, 24 August 2019. John G. Johnson col-lection, Cat. 510, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Figure 8. David Dernie, St Jerome and the Labrador (2019).

Figure 9. Autumn, probably as Adam and Eve, in an ana-tomical fugitive sheet, c. 1700. Accessed https://wellcom-

12

ecollection.org/works/r7rcf5a2, 24 August 2019. Property of Duke University Medical Center Library, Trent Collection, History of Medicine Collections, Durham, NC.

Figure 10. A page from Richard Napier’s casebooks, MS Ash-mole 228, f. 204r, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Accessed https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ASHMOLE-00228/417, 27 June 2019. © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Figure 11. Anatomy of a case, from Lauren Kassell, Michael Hawkins, Robert Ralley, and John Young, ‘Anatomy of a case’, A Critical Introduction to the Casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, 1596–1634, https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/reading-the-casebooks/anatomy-of-a-case, accessed 27 June 2019.

Figure 12. Donato Creti, Astronomical observation: the Moon (1711). Accessed https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q24007726, 24 August 2019. Vatican Museums. This image adorns the cover of Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago, 2011).

Figure 13. CASE12702 from Lauren Kassell, Michael Hawkins, Robert Ralley, John Young, Joanne Edge, Janet Yvonne Mar-tin-Portugues, and Natalie Kaoukji (eds.), ‘CASE12702’, The casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, 1596–1634: a digital edition, https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/cases/CASE12702, accessed 27 June 2019.

Figure 14. Detail of age and sex facets from Lauren Kass-ell, Michael Hawkins, Robert Ralley, John Young, Joanne Edge, Janet Yvonne Martin-Portugues, and Natalie Kao-ukji (eds.), The casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, 1596–1634: a digital edition, https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/search?f1-document-type=Case%3A%3AEn-try;sort=sort-date;f3-patient-sex=Female, accessed 27 June 2019.

Figure 15. Elizabeth Hartwell’s person page. Lauren Kassell, Michael Hawkins, Robert Ralley, John Young, Joanne Edge, Janet Yvonne Martin-Portugues, and Natalie Kaoukji (eds.), ‘Elizabeth Hartwell (PERSON12608)’, The casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, 1596–1634: a digital edi-tion, https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/identified-entities/PER-SON12608, accessed 27 June 2019.

Figure 16. Elizabeth Hartwell’s social network. Lauren Kas-sell, Michael Hawkins, Robert Ralley, John Young, Joanne Edge, Janet Yvonne Martin-Portugues, and Natalie Kaoukji (eds.), ‘Elizabeth Hartwell (PERSON12608)’, The casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, 1596–1634: a digital edi-tion, https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/identified-entities/PER-SON12608, accessed 27 June 2019.

13