The medical casebook of William Brownrigg, M.D., F.R.S., (1712–1800) of the town of Whitehaven in Cumberland, Medical History

anniversary of Boyle's death in 1691. This was held appropriately near Stalbridge on the Somerset-Dorset border where Boyle lived between 1645 and 1655. The twelve revised conference papers printed here include a useful Boyle bibliography of nearly 300 items published since 1940 and a helpful introductory orientation by Hunter which again lays to rest Jacob's thesis that there was a direct connection between Boyle's espousal of the mechanical philosophy and the ideological conflicts of the English civil war. As both Malcolm Oster and John Harwood argue in their respective essays on interregnum politics and on rhetorical theory, Boyle transcended sectarianism and was indifferent to the identity of a government so long as it was effective. The keys to understanding Boyle, they, and other contributors, maintain, are the ethical and moral writings he penned as a young man in Latin and English. The problem for Boyle scholars is to demonstrate that these early thoughts and beliefs remained norms for the mature figure of the 1670s and 1680s. Of direct interest to historians of medicine is Rose-Mary Sargent's examination of how Boyle constructed an experimental philosophy by comparing the methods of, among others, Galileo, Paracelsus, Helmont, and Harvey, as well as the practical activities of artisans. Boyle's plan to publish a critique of orthodox medicine came to nothing, though there are clear references to it in some of his other writings. It would seem that Boyle believed that physicians would benefit from a knowledge of iatrochemistry; equally, he maintained that chemists would benefit from a study of the physician's methods of diagnosis and use of inference, prognosis and confirmation. As Antonio Clericuzio plausibly argues, the purpose of the mangled dialogue, The sceptical chymist, was to make the study of chemistry respectable among gentlemen, while at the same time offering a criticism of those Oxford physiologists who were uncritically adopting the chemical principles of Paracelsus and Helmont. Other essayists raise the vexed questions of Boyle's attitudes towards alchemy, miracles, final causes, and whether his belief in the existence of "certain subtle bodies" was consistent with his apparent commitment to mechanical philosophy. Like Newton, it seems that we shall come to see Robert Boyle as a transitional figure and that to achieve a full understanding of this remarkable man we shall need to immerse ourselves in seventeenthcentury theology and ethical theory. Michael Hunter and his disciples will be good guides to our better understanding.