"Made Up from Many Experimentall Notions": The Society of Apothecaries, Medical Humanism, and the Rhetoric of Experience in 1630s London†

This article examines an important new manuscript discovery: a set of lectures delivered at the Society of Apothecaries in 1634 by four members of the Society. No evidence of the intellectual and methodological assumptions of the apothecaries in this period has previously been known; the article contextualizes the lectures, and identifies the authors-a prominent group of apothecaries centered on the controversial John Buggs and the botanist Thomas Johnson. It then proceeds to discuss the contents of the lectures, which consist, to a remarkable extent, of reflections on the nature of physic and pharmacy inspired by the works of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical humanists. The apothecaries used the resources of medical humanism to raise the status of pharmacy as a medical discipline, and to argue for the proficiency of the apothecary as a fully fledged physician. Moreover, they emphasized the role of operative arts and used the rhetoric of "experiment" and "experience" in ways that might seem, on first impression, to foreshadow the "new science" that would soon emerge in England. As such, the lectures allow us to make not only some major revisions to existing accounts of the apothecary-physician relationship and the intellectual assumptions behind it, but also to some prominent recent literature in the social history of science and the history of the concept of "experimental philosophy."