‘In the tents of the King as well as the Muses’

Abstract

Chapter 1, ‘In the tents of the King as well as the Muses: The life and reputation of Thomas Willis’, starts with the reaction to Willis’s death, aged 54, in 1675. From there, an account is given of Willis’s childhood and education in Oxford and his activities supporting the Royalist cause during the Civil War. After training in medicine, Willis’s casebook, involvement with the Oxford Experimental Philosophical Club and the episode of Anne Greene, spared from dissection through resuscitation after judicial hanging, and his lectures as Sedleian professor of Natural Philosophy in Oxford, are described. After moving to London in 1667, Willis was in demand as a physician and involved with the other Fellows of the Royal Society in reshaping ideas on respiration, fermentation, and muscular movement. The chapter ends with an analysis of the consolidation of Willis’s reputation as a major figure in the history of medicine.{146 words}