Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738): Calvinist Chemist and Physician.

Rina Knoeff. Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738): Calvinist Chemist and Physician.

Amsterdam: Edita KNAW, 2002. xvi + 238 pp. index. bibl. [euro]35. ISBN: 90-6984-342-0.

The religious and theological contexts of the development of early modern natural philosophy have attracted interest recently, as historians of science and medicine continue to widen the social and intellectual scope of their disciplines. Examination of the ideas of Hermann Boerhaave, whose influence on eighteenth-century European and American medicine is generally acknowledged, in order to understand how his science fit with his religious convictions is therefore very timely. Moreover, as Rina Knoeff points out, previous studies of the Dutch chemist and physician have focused mainly on his application of mechanical philosophy to medicine and not on his religious contemplations, which she argues were crucial to both his theory formation and experimental methodology.

Boerhaave was an enthusiast for Cartesian and Newtonian explanations of matter and motion early in his career and gave expression to mechanical, corpuscular theory in his explanation of how normal and abnormal physiology are determined by the flow of corpuscles of various sizes through vessels and fibers that constitute the solid parts of animal bodies. It was these ideas and a commitment to experimental methods that his students adopted and used as the basis of their own medical theories, which gave Boerhaave wide fame. Knoeff documents a shift in Boerhaave's thinking from his early Institutiones medicae (1708), which was influenced by Robert Boyle's corpuscularian chemistry and the mechanics of inertia and attraction in Newton's Principia, to emphasize more the chemical attractions and repulsions that are found in Newton's Opticks, and eventually to abandon mechanical philosophy for a more Paracelsian metaphysics of seminal agencies that act directly on bodies from within them. The motivation both for Boerhaave's early study of the human body as a machine and for his subsequent drift away from mechanism to seminalism, Knoeff claims, was his lifelong commitment to a Calvinist framework, which emphasized both the inherent limitations of human reason (owing to the Fall of Adam) and the value of understanding God through an empirical study of Creation, which would reveal His providence. The strength and scope of her claim becomes apparent when she explains that she is not promoting a Weber/Merton thesis, which took personal success as the essential defining feature of Calvinism that motivated the rise of modern science, but rather is following R. Hooykaas in emphasizing Calvin's providentialism, which lay at the root of the new science's emphasis on observation and experiment, so clearly evident in Boerhaave's work. Repeatedly throughout this book she asserts that Boerhaave's philosophy was stimulated and steered by his particular Dutch Calvinism, which was defined at the Council of Doordt (1618-19), but does not deliver a persuasive case, built on careful argument and historical evidence, that his religious ideas engendered his philosophy rather than merely helping him choose and integrate the ideas of his chemical and medical predecessors. Moreover, much of her evidence for Boerhaave's pious introspection is drawn from personal attestations to his religiosity, written down toward the end of his life, and comments by a friend and admirer contained in his funeral oration, raising the possibility that the centrality of Calvinism in Boerhaave's scientific thought is partly an artifact of his senescence.

But, even given that Boerhaave was a fully engaged Calvinist throughout his life, does this mean that any of his natural philosophy is truly Calvinist in origin, as opposed to the weaker claim that it is compatible with his personal religious views? It seems to me equally plausible that Boerhaave's interest in semina as vehicles for God's immediacy in a providential nature came from Paracelsian and Helmontian sources, only some of which were Calvinist. A central point in her case for Boerhaave's following a Calvinist chemical program is his conceptualization of fire as God's instrument, which pervades all matter and energizes it. One wonders, though, if Boerhaave's ideas about the singular power and agency of fire might not stem from Helmontian ideas (Van Helmont's "gehennical fire") rather than from perusal of Calvin's theology. The Paracelsians and Helmontians were clear advocates of examining the book of nature experimentally in order to understand divinity. The influence of this on Walter Charleton and Boyle is manifest, and Boyle's importance for Boerhaave is taken for granted. Moreover, Calvin cannot be said to have had a monopoly on the human mind's inability to grasp the inner essences of material bodies with certainty, as the early modern revival of ancient skepticism--another influence on the methodology of Boyle--shows. In light of these other sources, which no doubt need further examination in relation to Boerhaave's science, Knoeff's Calvinist deterministic thesis is insufficient as argued. I think she herself recognized this at the end of the book, when she put her finger on the crux of the problem: "Of course, we find similar ideas in the work of other (non-Calvinist) natural philosophers, but I hope to have showed that all aspects together make Boerhaave a Calvinist, and his natural philosophy a Calvinist one" (212). If Boerhaave's ideas were similar to those of non-Calvinist contemporaries and predecessors, why should we see them as peculiarly Dutch Calvinist in essence?

JOLE SHACKELFORD

University of Minnesota