Table Of ContentOXFORD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS
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Portrait of Simon Forman by John Bulfinch (fl. –), engraved by Richard Godfrey.
By permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Medicine and Magic in
Elizabethan London
Simon Forman: Astrologer,
Alchemist, and Physician
CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Simon Forman had a habit of writing, Richard Napier preserved his papers,
Elias Ashmole hoarded them for posterity, and William Black masterfully
catalogued them. My first debt is to Forman, my second to those who saved
and sorted his papers.
I have incurred countless other debts. Margaret Pelling has met many drafts
with generous comments, fostering my understanding of early modern medi-
cine and holding me to her scrupulous standards. Tony Grafton, Simon
Schaffer, and Charles Webster have periodically read recensions of this book
and shared their visions of Forman’s world, confident that my archival
prospecting would pay off. Jim Secord read a complete draft and made sugges-
tions, such as the chronology, in the interests of the reader. Earlier Stuart Clark
and Paul Slack suggested how to make the study broader and more coherent,
and Paul has read subsequent drafts and shepherded the book through the
press, trusting me to do what needed to be done. Versions of individual chap-
ters have benefited from the comments of David Colclough, Marina Frasca
Spada, Nick Jardine, Helen King, Bill Newman, Sophie Page, and anonymous
readers. Often my mining and foraging turned to scrounging, and I am enor-
mously grateful to the following for sharing their manuscript references and/or
arcane expertise: Penny Bayer, Helen Brocklebank, Peter Forshaw, Peter
Grund, Deborah Harkness, Susan Hitch, Martin Ingram, Mark Jenner, Peter
Jones, David Katz, Giles Mandelbrote, Scott Mandelbrote, Sara Pennell, Max
Satchell, and Bill Sherman. I have presented work on Forman to audiences in
Oxford, Cambridge, Geneva, London, Manchester, and Princeton and I am
grateful for their questions. I apologize to anyone I have forgotten. Many
people have contributed to this book, and responsibility for its shortcomings
and faults are wholly my own.
This project also has had enormous institutional support, direct and tacit.
I began work on it in the ‘old’ Wellcome Unit, Oxford, a community that
inspired rigour and independence. Two years of research and a trip to Jerusalem
were funded by the Wellcome Trust. The Department of History, University
of Aberdeen, briefly housed me. Pembroke College, Cambridge, supported me
for two years as the R. A. Butler Research Fellow, and has provided a grant
towards the illustrations. With fondness I remember the welcome I received in
Pembroke and Cambridge from the late Mark Kaplanoff. The Department of
Acknowledgements vii
History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, home to some of
the people listed above and many friends, has collectively willed me to com-
pletion. The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, has given me more time
than I knew I needed. The Society for the Social History of Medicine awarded
a much abbreviated and now revised version of Part III its Essay Prize,
‘How to Read Simon Forman’s Casebooks: Medicine, Astrology and Gender
in Elizabethan London’, Social History of Medicine,(),–, and I owe
them gratitude for this award and Oxford University Press for permission to
revisit that material in this book. Bill Newman and Tony Grafton nursed the
germs of Part IV into print, ‘“The Food of Angels”: Simon Forman’s
Alchemical Medicine’, in Anthony Grafton and William Newman (eds.),
Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge,
Mass., ),–, and MIT Press has allowed me to include this material
here. I am also indebted to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the British Library,
the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, the Provost and Fellows of
King’s College, Cambridge, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Master and
Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge, for permission to reproduce images
from their collections. I am grateful to the Royal Society for a grant towards the
costs of the illustrations. Librarians and library staff throughout Britain and
the United States have been more than accommodating. My dependence on
the Bodleian Library, Oxford, is self-evident, and I am especially indebted
to the staff in Duke Humphrey’s Library, Alan Carter, Russell Edwards,
Jean-Pierre Mialon, and William Hodges. Ashmole’s volumes are big and
heavy and only now am I learning not to want to look again at the ones I have
just returned to the stacks.
Finally, in all of these places I have had many friends who bore with my talk
of Forman and talked about other things. This book was begun when I stayed
in England to be with Joad, and with him and for him it was written.
L.K.
June
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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations x
List ofTables xii
Abbreviations and Conventions xiii
List of Astrological Symbols xv
Chronology xvi
Introduction
I. THE MAKING OF AN ASTROLOGER-PHYSICIAN
. Early Life and Learning
. Astronomy, Magic, and the Mathematical Practitioners of London
. How to Write like a Magus
II. PLAGUE AND THE COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS
OF LONDON
. The College of Physicians and Irregular Medicine in London,
c.–
. Plague and Paracelsianism
III. THE CASEBOOKS
. How to Read the Casebooks
. Gender, Authority, and Astrology
IV. ALCHEMY, MAGIC, AND MEDICINE
. ‘Of Cako’, or the Medical Uses of Antimony
. The Food of Angels
. Magic and Medicine
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index of Manuscripts
General Index
Description:Simon Forman (1552-1611) is one of London's most infamous astrologers. Whilst he was consulted thousands of times a year for medical and other questions he stood apart from the medical elite as he boldly asserted medical ideas that were at odds with most learned physicians. In this fascinating book,
