1. It also figured in the battle between the “Ancients,” who valued traditional learning, and the “Moderns,” who thought recent discoveries had surpassed classical knowledge. Richard Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth Century England (Berkeley: 2nd ed. rpt. 1965), 111.
2. J. G. A. Pocock quoted in Joseph Frank, Cromwell’s Press Agent: A Critical Biography of Marchamont Nedham, 1620–1678 (Lanham, MD: 1980), 94. I thank Glenn Burgess and Steve Pincus for replies to a question about Nedham. See also Allen G. Debus, Chemistry and Medical Debate, 87–102. There is a short and unsympathetic discussion of Nedham in Lester Snow King, The Road to Medical Enlightenment (London: 1970), 147–54. Jones, Ancients and Moderns, 206–10, has a more favorable view.
3. Charles Harding Firth, “Needham, Marchamont,” Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: 1894).
4. P. M. Rattansi, “The Helmontian-Galenist Controversy in Restoration England,” Ambix (1964) 12:1–23, on 17; and Henry Thomas, “The Society of Chymical Physitians, an Echo of the Great Plague of London, 1665,” in Science, Medicine and History, ed. E. Ashworth Underwood, vol. 2 (London: 1953), 55–71. Peter Anstey, “John Locke and Helmontian Medicine,” in The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, eds. Charles T. Wolf and Ofer Gal (Dordrecht: 2010), 93–117 notes John Locke’s previously unknown connections with the Society.
5. King, Medical Enlightenment, 151. These arguments would be echoed by Gideon Harvey, A New Discourse of the Small Pox and Malignant Fevers, with an Exact Discovery of the Scorvey (London: 1685).