Medicine, science and the Quakers: the "Puritanism-science" debate reconsidered.

Abstract

A far as I am aware, no comprehensive study exists of early Quaker attitudes to science and medicine. This is particularly surprising in the light of the recent historical debate concerning the "puritan" origins of scientific reform in seventeenth-century England, yet it must be said that Quaker sources have on the whole been ignored. 1 More­ over, where the scientific and medical opinions of early Friends have elicited historical comment, it is customarily%?' assumed that Quaker attitudes to science were to a large extent related to the general "puritan" predilection for educational and scientific reform. As a result, historians of Quakerism such as Frederick Tolles and Richard Greaves have been able to establish the progressive nature of Quaker science which they believe to have derived from the ''puritan" commitment to the utilitarian natural philosophy of Francis Bacon. According to Greaves therefore, the Quakers are to be firmly located within the "puritan Baconian" tradition, for: