1. C. Webster, ‘Alchemical and Paracelsian Medicine’, in C. Webster (ed.), Medicine, Health and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 301–34. A different view was held by Kocher and by Debus, who suggested that before the 1640s the philosophical and medical theories of Paracelsus had little or no influence, the impact of Paracelsianism in England being confined to the practical aspects of medicine. According to Debus, chemical therapies were adopted, but the foundations of Galenic medicine were not shaken. See P.H. Kocher, ‘Paracelsian Medicine in England: (ca. 1570–1600)’, Journal of the History of Medicine 11 (1947), 451–80 and A.G. Debus, The English Paracelsians (London, 1965). As is apparent from the sources used in this chapter, Paracelsian medicine and philosophy were widespread in early seventeenth-century England.
2. N. Hill, Philosophia Epicurea, Democritiana, Theophrastica proposita simpliciter, non edocta (Paris, 1601). On Hill see M. Mersenne, Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim (Paris, 1623), cols. 1837–8; G. McColley, ‘Nicolaus Hill and the Philosophia Epicurea’, Annals of Science 4 (1939), 390–405; J. Jacquot, ‘Hariot, Hill, Warner and the New Philosophy’, in J.W. Shirley (ed.), Thomas Hariot, Renaissance Scientist (Oxford, 1974), pp. 110–4 and H. Trevor-Roper, ‘Nicholas Hill, the English Atomist’, in Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans. Seventeenth-century Essays (London, 19892), pp. 1–39.
3. R.H. Kargon, Atomism in England: from Hariot to Newton (Oxford, 1966), p. 15.
4. H. Percy, Advice to his Son, ed. G.B. Harrison (London, 1920), p. 70, quoted in Kargon, Atomism (n. 3), p. 14. Percy’s Advice was written about 1595. Percy’s library bears evidence of his interests in alchemy and Paracelsianism, also in the works of Bruno and Delia Porta, see G. Batho, ‘The Library of the “Wizard Earl”, Henry Percy ninth Earl of Northumberland, 1564–1632’, The Library, 5th series, 15 (1960), 246–56.
5. See P.M. Rattansi, ‘Alchemy and Natural Magic in Raleigh’s History of the World’, Ambix 13 (1966), 122–38.