So wrote William Hunter, surgeon turned physician, in an introductory lecture for his London anatomy class in the early 1780s. Hunter made a nicely prescient guess about the direction of progress in medicine. Read with the benefit of hindsight, his comment evokes the juncture of three paths into the “direct road” to medical modernity. First, Hunter pointed to an empirical methodology for “improvements in physic” that detached the investigation of disease from patients' experiences of illness and from direct concern for treating it. A newly conceptualized medicine started at death, when the bedside-practitioner gave up and the scientist-practitioner took over – and these were the same person. Second, Hunter placed his man in a hospital where he had equal power “to attend the sick” and to “dissect the dead.” Casting the hospital as an institution where practitioners deployed new methods to produce new knowledge transformed an expression of charitable care and social concern into a foundation for professional medical authority.

In September of 1769, Mr. Horsley paid for a notice in the Daily Advertiser, one of the newspapers devoted to announcing the wares of the commercial metropolis:

Mr. Horsley's appeal to “Young Gentlemen” encapsulates the themes of this chapter. He offered private instruction that, together with hospital ward-walking, would free “the Student” from the “seven years servitude” of apprenticeship. He promised to teach “both scientifically & practically,” casting anatomy and surgery as “sciences” into which students were “initiated.” Mr. Horsley couched his advertisement for a competitive market. He sold more than “one single course of lectures” at a time when medical lectures had become familiar items in newspaper notices. While it is impossible to estimate Mr. Horsley's success in his teaching career, in 1769 he appeared as a quintessential entrepreneur in the knowledge market of mideighteenth-century London.

In 1776, Joseph Hooper, a London surgeon and man-midwife, published a short case history in Medical Observations and Inquiries. A female midwife had called him to see a woman who was a few months pregnant. The midwife was disturbed, Hooper wrote, because she was unable to “feel the mouth of the womb.” He proceeded to examine the patient per vaginum. At that moment, Hooper reported, “I immediately recollected what Dr. Hunter had said in his public lecture upon the subject of the inverted uterus.” While making the inspection, Hooper continued, “the woman, with expressions of much joy, said she could make water.” Hooper helped her to relieve her distended bladder and, following what he learned from William Hunter's course, manipulated the uterus back into its proper position.

Hooper decided to tell this story – and it was his story, for no doubt the midwife and the patient had their own versions – to medical readers. He depicted himself, of course, as a clever and competent practitioner, certainly more knowledgeable than the midwife. Yet he also chose to ascribe his knowledge to William Hunter's lectures. Here he not only revealed his regular education, but also borrowed Hunter's authority and expertise. Hooper's flash of memory and insight (even if contrived) illustrates just how ordinary practitioners both accepted and established lecturers' influence and reputations. Throughout my work, I have argued that stories like Hooper's reveal a great deal about the construction of medical authority in eighteenth-century London.

I have now reviewed the context of Han astronomy so far as it relates to the Zhou bi, and tried to show how the contents and origin of the book can be understood within that context. From the Han dynasty onwards the nature of our discussion changes, for the Zhou bi is no longer the property of an active group of astronomical thinkers, but becomes a classical text subject to the labours of commentators and editors.

So far it has been necessary to be cautious in speaking of ‘the Zhou bi’, for we have had no guarantee that the term referred to anything that had yet taken on a fixed form and content. If my tentative explanation of the process by which the canon was closed is correct, the Zhou bi waited at least two centuries before Zhao Shuang saw it, and in that interval it certainly seems that the text suffered some damage and corruption. But a careful reading of the present text and its three commentaries suggests that since the time of Zhao the text has not changed apart from a few minor copyist's errors. The object of this section is to tell the story of how the Zhou bi came down to the present day. In the process it will be interesting to say something about its later influence, without becoming too involved in the historical complexities of pre-modern Chinese debates on astronomy and cosmography.

The Zhou bi in the period of division

From the break-up of the Han in AD 220 to the reunification under the Sui in AD 581, China underwent three centuries of division and political chaos.

Most previous discussions of the Zhou bi have at some point attacked the apparently obvious question of the date of the work. A recent study cites the opinions of fourteen scholars before coming to its own conclusion that ‘Therefore, the date of composition of the work must be in the early Western Han (c. 200 BC).’ We may note that the opinions cited give dates ranging from the traditional attribution to the Duke of Zhou in the eleventh century BC to the conclusions of a modern scholar that the book can be precisely bracketed into the period AD 9 to AD 84.

I do not intend to provide such a review of the work of all previous scholars on this topic before beginning my own discussion. My reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, and fairly trivially, a critical review of fourteen different opinions (each it must be said written with little or no reference to the others) is probably not the best way to help the reader towards clarity of mind on this question. More importantly, I believe that previous writers on this topic have largely misdirected their efforts in trying to find some epoch when the book as a whole could reasonably have been composed.

I suggest that two unspoken assumptions behind these efforts have lead to largely illusory results being obtained. Firstly, it is assumed that the Zhou bi is more or less a single entity which must therefore have some particular date of composition. I believe that on the contrary the different sections of the Zhou bi have extremely varied degrees of interrelation.

I have endeavoured here to write an account of the greatest mind in British history. If any names of Englishmen survive into the remote future, those of Shakespeare and Newton will surely be among them. The latter was above all things a mathematician and a natural philosopher, but he also gave deep scholarship and profound thought to ancient history, especially to the early history of Christianity, the unravelling of sacred prophecy and even to monetary theory and practice. On all these topics he left vast accumulations of manuscript material.

In this book attention is chiefly directed to Newton the mathematician and philosopher. As such he worked his great transformation in human thought. Even so, a volume of modest size permits no very technical treatment of his researches in mathematics and mechanics, and in experimental optics. For such treatment the reader may turn to D. T. Whiteside's epoch-making edition of Newton's Mathematical Papers, the parallel volumes of Optical Papers (in progress) edited by Alan E. Shapiro, and very many specialist studies by these and other scholars. As for Newton's daily life and personal pursuits, for all the huge amount of material by and concerning Newton now accessible to us, these are shadowy at all periods of his life. I have not tried to emulate here Frank E. Manuel's psychological analysis of Newton in terms of theories whose validity seems to be doubtful. In general, I believe it imprudent to try to interpret Newton's life and writings in terms of single factors, whether these be his infantile experiences, his reading of the strange books of the alchemists, his faith in God or even his confidence in number and measure.