ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Contesting sources for water knowledge and consumptive practices in early modern England

• In Event: Water Knowledge and Water Experts I

English Abstract

“Nothing passeth for currant now, but new devises” complained physician Richard Short in 1656. Where our “Physitians… had wont to be carried to the top of Paranassus, with admirable Galenical methode, now they are carried to the bottom of emperical new experiments… And if they cannot frame themselves to introduce a new opinion, they will create a new paradox of an old one, and furbush it over with a new aereall smooth Language.” Through these lines, Short angrily articulated a perceived shift in the sources for medical knowledge being drawn upon by contemporary authors, while suggesting that those who did draw on classical knowledge did so incorrectly, spinning texts to support their claims.
These frustrations form part of the introduction for Short’s work Peri psychroposias, a text arguing against drinking water, which Short claimed was being pushed by recent “novelists”. Short’s work is one of dozens for early modern England that argued over the role water should or should not play in various consumptive practices. Authors deployed a variety of different sources of knowledge to support their claims for or against water’s possible health benefits in different scenarios. In doing so they produced numerous starkly opposing viewpoints, and constructed complex intellectual worlds of plural waters, frequently through interpreting the same sources in entirely different ways. Beyond interpreting and reinterpreting older materials, they drew on practical and labouring experiences as well as experimentation, highlighting the degree to which authors understood water knowledge as diffuse and replete with mysteries that texts alone could not illuminate. This paper uses these texts to highlight how early modern experts pluralised sources of water knowledge in their quest to prove their own points of view on consumptive practices.

Author

• Daniel Gettings, University of Warwick