Seeing Further by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online

London for Improving Natural Knowledge’. The word ‘natural’ signifies the distinction between such knowledge – based on what you could see and measure, and on the ‘scientific method’: some combination of observation, hypothesis, deduction and experiment – from ‘divine’ knowledge, which was thought to be invisible and immeasurable, and of a higher order.
    Though these two orders of knowledge were not supposed to be in conflict, they often were, and both kinds might be brought to bear on the same problem, with opposite results. This was especially true during outbreaks of disease: victims and their families would resort both to prayer and to purging, and who could tell which might be the more efficacious? But in the first fifty years of the Royal Society’s existence, ‘natural knowledge’ gained much ground, and the Royal Society acted increasingly as a peer-review body for experiments, fact-gathering and demonstrations of many kinds.
    Swift is thought to have begun
Gulliver’s Travels
in 1721, which was interestingly enough the year in which a deadly smallpox epidemic broke out, both in London and in Boston, Massachusetts. There had been many such epidemics, but this one saw the eruption of a heated controversy over the practice of inoculation. Divine knowledge had varying views: was inoculation a gift from God, or was smallpox itself a divine visitation and punishment for misbehaviour, with any attempt made to interfere with itbeing impiety? But practical results rather than theological arguments were being increasingly credited.
    In London, inoculation was championed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had learned of the practice in Turkey when her husband had been Ambassador there; in Boston, its great supporter was, oddly enough, Cotton Mather – he of the Salem witchcraft craze and Wonders of the Invisible World – who had been told of it by an inoculated slave from Africa. Both, though initially vilified, were ultimately successful in their efforts to vindicate the practice. Both acted in concert with medical doctors – Mather with Dr Zabdiel Boylston, who, in 1826, read a paper on the results of his practice-cum-research to the Royal Society, Lady Mary with Dr John Arbuthnot.
    You might think Swift would have been opposed to inoculation. After all, the actual practice of inoculation was repulsive and counterintuitive, involving as it did the introduction of pus from festering victims into the tissues of healthy people. This sounds quite a lot like the exploding dog from the Grand Academy of Lagado and such other Lagadan follies. In fact, Swift took the part of the inoculators. He was an old friend of Dr Arbuthnot, a fellow member of the Martinus Scriblerus Club of 1714, a group that had busied itself with satires on the abuses of learning. And, unlike the ridiculous experiments of the ‘projectors’ – experiments that may have been invented by Swift with the aid of some insider hints from Dr Arbuthnot – inoculation seemed actually to work, most of the time.
    It isn’t experimentation as such that’s the target of Book Three, but experiments that backfire. Moreover, it’s the obsessive nature of the projectors: no matter how many dogs they explode, they keep at it, certain that the next time they inflate a dog they’ll achieve the proposed result. Although they appear to be acting according to the scientific method, they’ve got it backwards. They think that because their reasoning tells them the experiment ought to work, they’re on the right path; thus they ignoreobserved experience. Although they don’t display the full-blown madness of the truly mad fictional scientists of the mid-twentieth century, they’re a definitive step along the way: the Lagadan Grand Academy was the literary mutation that led to the crazed white-coats of those B movies.
    There were many intermediary forms. Foremost among them was, of course, Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein, he of the man-made monster –