1. Marina Benjamin, “Medicine, Morality and the Politics of Berkeley’s Tar-water,” in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, eds. Andrew Cunningham and Roger French (Cambridge: 1990), 165–93.
2. A. Rupert Hall, “Medicine and the Royal Society,” in Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Allen G. Debus (Berkeley: 1974), 421–2; and Richard Sorrenson, “Towards a History of the Royal Society in the Eighteenth Century,” N&R (1996) 50, no. 1:29–46, esp. 37–8. See also Lotte Mulligan and Glenn Mulligan, “Reconstructing Restoration Science: Styles of Leadership and Social Composition of the Early Royal Society,” Social Studies of Science (August 1981) 11, no. 3:327–64. The Mulligans argue that the Secretaries to the Society affected the composition of its membership and attribute an increase of medical members to Sloane.
3. For the importance of “weak ties” in a social network, and the even greater value of networks that join strong (face-to-face) and weak ties, see Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (New York: 2009), passim, esp. 158–67. For its application to the Royal Society, see David S. Lux and Harold J. Cook, “Closed Circles or Open Networks? Communicating at a Distance during the Scientific Revolution,” History of Science (1998) 36:179–211. See also Rhodri Hayward, “Emmanuel Mendes Da Costa (1717–1791),” in Travels of Learning: A Geography of Science in Europe, eds. Ana Simoes, Ana Carneiro, and Maria Paula Diogo (Dordrecht: 2003), 101–14; the work of Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall including M. B. Hall, “The Royal Society and Italy, 1667–1795,” N&R (1982) 37, no. 1:63–81; and Andrea Rusnock, “Correspondence Networks and the Royal Society, 1700–1750,” British Journal for the History of Science (1999) 32:155–69. I know of no comparable studies of early Enlightenment medicine, but see Marc Ratcliff, The Quest for the Invisible (Farnham, Surrey: 2009), for the pivotal role of communication networks in determining the selection of problems and the acceptance of findings in eighteenth-century microscopy.
4. Quoted by Lotte Mulligan and Glenn Mulligan, “Reconstructing Restoration Science,” 333, n. 55. For Lister’s theory that poisonous insects (or possibly venomous animals) originated attacks of smallpox and syphilis that ultimately became contagious, see Anna Marie Roos, Web of Nature: Martin Lister (16391712): The First Arachnologist (Leiden: 2011), 346–50.
5. Mulligan and Mulligan, “Reconstructing Restoration Science,” 334. See also Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: 1981), 44.