Dr. John Mayow : the Harveian oration for 1899 / by A. Crum Brown.

  • Alexander Crum Brown
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr. John Mayow : the Harveian oration for 1899 / by A. Crum Brown. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    except that on the 30th of November 1678, he was elected a Fellow of the Boyal Society of London, having been proposed by Hooke. He was thus twenty-three years old when he published his tract on respiration, and died at the early age of thirty-six. I have chosen Dr. John Mayow as the subject of this discourse, not so much because he was a contemporary of Harvey—he was twelve years old when Harvey died—or because he also lived in Oxford and was a physician, as on account of the five tracts which form his “ Opera omnia.” Mayow’s works were not much noticed in his own time, and speedily fell into total oblivion. When oxygen was discovered, about 1774, and when Lavoisier soon after expelled the phantom Phlogiston, which for a long time had haunted chemistry, Mayow’s book was discovered in old libraries, where it had remained untouched for a hundred years; and those who discovered it were astonished to see that the new chemistry, which was rapidly conquering the scientific world, was to be found in this old book. As far as I know, Dr. Thomas Beddoes was the first distinctly to recognise Mayow’s claim. It is interesting to note that not only did Dr. Beddoes discover this Cornishman, who had been dead and forgotten for more than a hundred years, but that he had the good fortune to discover a living Cornishman, a chemist of greater eminence than Mayow, for Humphry Davy was the superintendent of Dr. Beddoes’ Medical Pneumatic Institution. Dr. Beddoes published his dis- covery of Mayow in a letter to Dr. Edmund Goodwyn, with an “Analysis of Mayow’s Chemical Opinions.” It is dated Oxford, 12th February 1790, two years before his resignation of the readership in chemistry. Besides Beddoes we have Dr. J. B. A. Scherer, physician in Vienna, who in 1793 published “Beweis, dass J. Mayow vor 100 Jahren den Grund zur antiphlogistischen Chemie und Physiologie gelegt hat.,” and also G. D. Yeats, M.B. of Hertford College, Oxford, member of the Eoyal Medical Society of Edinburgh, and physician at Bedford, who in 1798 published “ Observations on the Claims of the Moderns to some Discoveries in Chemistry and Physiology.” Beddoes quotes from Blumenbach’s “ Institutiones Physio- logic^,” 1787, the following remarkable passage: “Magna jam pars memorabilium horum phsnomenorum,” says he, speaking of respiration, “ quibus nuperis lustris et physica de aeribus factitiis disciplina et physiologia negotii respirationis tarn egregie ditata et illustrata est, jam ante centum et quod excurrit annos innotuit acutissimi ingenii medico Joanni Mayow, cujus de sal-nitro et spiritu nitro aereo (quo nempe nomine dephlogisticatum aerem insignivit) tractatum, Oxon. 8vo editum, magna cum voluptate legi et relegi.” But these attempts to make Mayow and his work known to
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