Sir Isaac Newton’s Prescription for Plague? Toad Vomit Lozenges
Handwritten notes detailing the British polymath’s unsavory treatment are now up for auction
If someone told you that Sir Isaac Newton—the great mind responsible for the discovery of calculus and fundamental laws of physics—had also developed a remedy for the bubonic plague, you’d be forgiven for assuming it might be worth a shot. You would, however, be in for an unwelcome surprise.
In 1665, when Newton was a student at the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College, the school temporarily shuttered due to the Great Plague of London. This outbreak of bubonic plague lasted until 1666 and killed an estimated 100,000 people—roughly a quarter of the city’s population, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
As the plague raged through England, Newton quarantined himself at Woolsthorpe Manor, his family estate in Lincolnshire. In the two years he spent isolated at Woolsthorpe, Newton, to put it mildly, got some good work done.
His period of social isolation was rife with experiments on gravity—including that whole business with the apple tree—and breakthroughs in mathematics, physics and optics. But as Thomas Levenson writes for the New Yorker, Newton’s achievements during the epidemic can’t be attributed solely to the magic of solitude, as is sometimes suggested, but rather to the fact that he was Isaac Newton.
When Newton returned to school in 1667, he threw himself into the medical works of Belgian physician Jan Baptist van Helmont, according to a statement from the Bonhams auction house. While working through van Helmont’s book on the plague, De Peste, the young scientist penned a proposed plague cure in his handwritten notes. Now, two pages of these previously unpublished scribblings are up for sale in Bonhams’ June manuscripts auction.....MORE
The British polymath’s plague remedy dates to 1669, which was admittedly a long time ago—but just how bad could it be?....
