We have now reached the pinnacle of investigations into magnetism and the magnetic compass, during the Early Modern Period, with the publication of William Gilbert’s De magnete in 1600. I will be handling it in four separate posts–a biography of Gilbert, a presentation of the book, a possible/probably co-author, and the dispute of the disciples. It is interesting to look at Gilbert as a whole and not just as the author of De magnete, because he had a long and successful career as a physician, which would make him a figure of interest in the histories of science and medicine if he had never carried out his research into magnetism. All of which tends to get overlooked because of the significance of De magnete. I found it wrong when somebody changed the title of his Wikipedia article from William Gilbert (physician) to William Gilbert (physicist) arguing This guy seems way more noticeable as a physicIST than as a physicIAN. Correct, in my opinion would be William Gilbert (physician) because that is what he was and did. His magnetic investigations were secondary in his life.
Gilbert[1] was born into a rising, middle-class family that had only recently acquired its well-to-do status. His great-grandfather, John Gilbert, had married Joan Tricklove, the only daughter of a wealthy merchant from Clare, Suffolk. Their son, William Gilbert of Clare, became a weaver and eventually sewer [server] of the chamber to Henry VIII. This William married Margery Grey, and among their nine children was Jerome Gilbert. Jerome, who had some knowledge of law, moved from Clare to Colchester in the 1520’s became a free burgess and recorder there, and married Elizabeth Coggeshall. The oldest of their four children was William Gilbert of Colchester. (DSB)
Timperleys, the 15th-century home of the Gilbert family in Colchester. Source: Wikimedia CommonsBy 1558 Jerome Gilbert had married for the second time to Jane Wingfield, who bore him a further nine children. There are no real records of Williams life before he matriculated from St John’s College, Cambridge in May 1558. There is no record of his birth or baptism, but a later nativity listed 2:20 pm, 24 May 1544. However, the monument erected by his stepbrothers Ambrose and William in Holy Trinity Church in Colchester states that he was born in the town of Colchester but gives his age at death in 1603 as sixty-three, placing his birth in 1640.
Local tradition says that he attended Colchester Royal Grammar School founded in 1128 and granted a royal charter by Henry VIII in 1539. It would be granted a second royal charter by Elizabeth I in 1584. However, there is no proof of his having attended the grammar school and his family was wealthy enough that he could have had a private tutor. In Cambridge he graduated BA and was admitted to a fellowship of St John’s in 1561. He graduated MA in 1564. He served in the junior position of mathematical examiner in 1565 and 1566, graduating MD in 1569. He was senior bursar in January 1570, then left Cambridge to set up a medical practice in London.
The inscription on his monument states that he practiced for more than thirty years in London. He was obviously successful acquiring a clientele amongst the gentry and aristocracy. He obtained a grant of arms in 1577 and was moving in court circles by 1580.
The most important body for medical practitioners was the London College of Physicians. It was established with a royal charter by Henry VII in 1518, although it didn’t start being called the Royal College of Physicians until late in the seventeenth century.
It was set up as the first official licencing body for physicians in England but only for the City of London and an area of seven miles around it. Up until the sixteenth century there were no controls on who could practice as a physician in England. Previously in the sixteenth century there had been an Act of Parliament in 1511, which gave bishops the power to licence physicians for their dioceses. The setting up of the College of Physicians was the next set in establishing control in the matter, but as noted it only had authority in and around London. The whole thing was set up upon the initiative of Thomas Linacre (c. 1460–1524), who was its first president and benefactor, bequeathing his house and his library to the college.
In 1523 an Act of Parliament extended their licensing powers to the whole of England, but the licensing was to be carried out in London. There are only very few cases of physicians outside of London, who had been licensed by the college.
As well as his social climb as a physician Gilbert made a successful career within the College of Physicians. Around 1580 he was elected to one of the about thirty fellowships of the college holding the post of censor, regulating standards of practice, between 1581 and 1590. He held the post of treasurer to the college twice from 1587 to 1594 and again from 1597 to 1599, he was consiliarius from 1597 to 1599 and finally elected president in 1600.
Between 1589 and 1594 Gilbert was involved in the college’s first, controversial, and aborted attempts to produce a pharmacopoeia. The Pharmacopoeia Londinensis finally saw the light of day in 1618 backed up by a royal proclamation from King James I. The proclamation enabled the Royal College of Physicians to create an officially sanctioned list of all known medical drugs, their effects, and directions on their use. No one was allowed to concoct any medicine or sell any substance if it did not appear in the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis. Of historical interest in the fact that Nicholas Culpeper’s legendary Herbal was a deliberate attempt to break the college’s monopoly on medical treatments.
His social status continued to rise in the same period adding the powerful Cecil family to his patrons. He attended the death of Mildred Cecil, Lady Burghley (née Cooke)in 1589 and that of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I chief counsellor, in 1598. His social climb reached a peak with his formal appointment for life as a physician to Elizabeth I in April1601. He was re-appointed royal physician to James I & VI shortly before his own death in 1603.
Very little in known about his personal life. He remained unmarried but seems to have maintained close relations to his family, especially his half brothers and sisters. By 1595 Gilbert had acquired and moved into Wingfield house in St Peter’s Hill, a large property near St Paul’s Cathedral.
This was possibly inherited from his stepmother Jane Wingfield. Here he developed an informal intellectual circle. This included the famous correspondent John Chamberlin (1553–1628), who possessed a large circle of notable intellectual friend such as Sir Henry Wotton (1568–1639) and Thomas Bodley (1545–1613), and who lodged in Wingfield House. The physician and magnetic philosopher, Mark Ridley (1560–c. 1624), of whom we will hear much more in a later episode, also lodged in Wingfield House. Thomas Blundeville (c. 1522–c. 1606) author of Exercises (1594) covering a wide rang of cosmographical and navigational topics was a close friend, as was Lancelot Browne (c. 1545–1605) another royal physician, co-author with Blundeville of The Theoriques of the Seuen Planets (1602), an astronomy book that also published research of William Gilbert on magnetism, and which contained work by Henry Briggs (1561–1630) and Edward Wright (1561–1615), who we have met before and will meet again. William Harvey (1578–1657) married Lancelot Browne’s daughter Elizabeth. William Barlow (1544–1625) another magnetic philosopher whom we have met before and will meet again was also a member of this circle.
As a physician Gilbert came into contact with London’s maritime community. In 1588, he and Lancelot Browne were approached by the privy council to administer drugs to sailors struck down by an epidemic, being two of four, ‘very fytt persons to be employed in the said Navye to have care of the helthe of the noblemen, gentlemen and others in that service.’ Gilbert was also proud of his conversations with the circumnavigators Francis Drake (c. 1540–1596) and Thomas Cavendish (1560–1592). Gilbert offered to write a book on tropical medicine for the chronicler of English exploration Richard Hakluyt (1553-1616) and advised Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s security chief, on health issues during the hostilities with Spain.
At his death in 1603, Gilbert donated his library to the College of Physicians but his library, the college and Wingfield were all destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.
Gilbert’s high social status, his status as a leading London physician, and his close circle of prominent intellectual friends almost certainly guaranteed a warm reception for De magnete when it was published in 1600. This was not the product of some unknown projector[2] but the work of a man of substance with an excellent reputation.
[1] This biographical sketch relies heavily, but not exclusively, on the writings of Stephen Pumfrey, Gilbert’s best modern biographer. I just wish that Icon Books would reissue his Latitude & The Magnetic Earth: The True Story of Queen Elizabeth’s Most Distinguished Man of Science (2003) with footnotes, or even endnotes, and an index!
[2] In the Early Modern and Enlightenment periods the figure of the projector was as vital as it was common. Daniel Defoe famously nicknamed his era the “Projecting Age.” Decades earlier scholars were already commenting on the “rampant passion for schemes”. Projectors were inventors or entrepreneurs ‘who set out to gain the trust and backing of a powerful patron such as a ruler or potential investor, for what he claimed was a financially profitable and generally prestigious original venture which would yield practical benefits.’