The Decline of Magic by Michael Hunter

Author:Michael Hunter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300243581
Publisher: Yale University Press

Scepticism and the Enlightenment

Hence there is a surprising degree of overlap between the doctors and the progressive clerics whose views on ostensibly supernatural phenomena have been considered here, and it is perhaps interesting to find that there is some evidence of links between these clerics and the medical men and Deists on whom I focused earlier. Arthur Ashley Sykes was a patient of Sir Hans Sloane’s and a handful of letters from him to Sloane survive.76 It is interesting that at one point in his Enquiry, Sykes cited a conversation he had with ‘an ingenious Physician’ about the meaning of a key biblical text to which he attributed a sceptical meaning, and one wonders whether this could have been Sloane or someone like him.77 Here, it is perhaps also worth noting that it was from Sloane that the cleric, Francis Hutchinson, had requested advice concerning the publication of his sceptical Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft some years before it actually appeared in 1718.78 In the case of Sykes and Mead, though I am not aware of any direct links between the two, in 1749 Sykes expressed his support for Mead’s Medica Sacra in a letter to the cleric and intelligencer, Thomas Birch. Invoking Hippocrates and others, he agreed with Mead’s view that ‘Demoniacs’ were ‘Madmen’, adding: ‘All the Old Physitians knew the meaning of that Word, as well as any modern Divines; & can explain it as well, if I do not very grievously mistake’.79

As for Middleton, we know that he consulted Sloane concerning his eyesight, while on one occasion he dealt with a scholarly enquiry on Sloane’s part.80 With Mead, on the other hand, his relationship was positively antagonistic, since in the 1720s Middleton had demolished the claim made by Mead in a public oration that doctors enjoyed high status in ancient Rome; Middleton illustrated that, in fact, doctors were of servile status.81 But the notorious combativeness of doctors at this time over their versions of a mechanical theory of medicine has already been mentioned, and Middleton’s attack on Mead aligned him with Mead’s medical antagonists, and especially with John Woodward, with whom he enjoyed a friendly relationship that led to his being appointed the first Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge in 1731.82 In addition, one of Middleton’s closest friends, who became his executor after his death, was a medical man, William Heberden, and it is interesting to find Middleton recalling in a letter to Heberden ‘those easy & philosophic conversations, which I used so frequently to enjoy with you’, promising in another that he would ‘now reserve to a personal conference & open to you perhaps at the same time, in our old free manner, what new heterodoxies I have bin meditating & sketching out in the interval of your absence’.83 Even more interesting are Middleton’s links with Thomas Gordon, the Deist collaborator of John Trenchard in such publications as the notoriously heterodox Cato’s Letters. Many years after Trenchard’s death in 1723 Gordon married his widow, and one

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