Cheyne, George

(b. Aberdeenshire, Scotland, 1671; d. Bath, England, 12 April 1743),

medicine, mathematics, theology

At first educated for the ministry, Cheyne was influenced by the Scottish iatromechanist Archibald Pitcairn to take up medicine instead. He studied with Pitcairn in Ediburgh and then, in 1702, moved to London, where he joined the Royal Society and established a medical practice. Cheyne was soon an at least peripheral member of a prominent circle of medical and scientific writers that included the astronomers David Gregory and Edmund Halley and the Physicians Richard Mead and John Arbuthnot. He spent several active years in London, winning a major reputaion also as a wit and drinking companion in the tavern and coffeehouse set. Some years later, probably by 1720, he renounced his earlier life and moved permanently to Bath as a sober and dedicated medical practitioner. Cheyne spent the major part of his last decades advising his patients and corrpondents (the novelist Samuel Richardson, for one) to lives of sober and pious moderation, while conveying his general precepts to the public in a series of popular medical tracts. Through these later works he becme one of England’s most widely read medical writers.

Cheyne’s intellectual career was divided into two phases. During the first, which concided with his association with Pitcairn in Scotland and his early years in London, he was a principal representative of British “Newtonianism” in its many cultural facests. His first book, A New Theory of Fevers(1702), was an elaborate, quasi-mathematical explication of febrile phenomena in terms of Pitcairn’s supposeldy “mathematical” and “Newtonian” variety of iatromechanism. Cheyne followed Pitacairn in positing a theory of the “animal economy” based on a view of the body as a system of pipes and fluids, and, in fact, he called for the composition of a Principia medicinae throreticae mathematica, Which would treat such topics as the hydraulies of circulation and the elastic behavior of vascular walls with the same mathematical rigor that Newton applied to celestical mechanics.

In 1703 Cheyne followed his call for medical mathematicization with a treatise of his own on Newton style mathematics, the Fluxionum methodus inversa A work on the calculus of dubious mathematical validity (David Gregory counted 429 errors), the Fluxionum brought Cheyne more anguish than positive reputation. Abranham de Moivre responded with a thorough refutation, and the great Newton himself-so Gregory claimed-was sufficiently provoked to publish his work on “quadraures” in the 1704 edition of the Opticks.

Cheyne pressed ahead nevertheless, in 1705 turning his attention to the theological significance of Newtonian science. In Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion, along with several other arguments for the existence and continued superientendence of the Deity, he claimed that the observed phenomena of attraction in the universe argued for a Supreme Being. Since attraction was not a property essential to the mere being of brute and passive matter, its very occurence, whether in planetary gravitaion or in the simple cohesion of terrestrial materials, therefore gave immediate testimony to the hand of God in designing and maintaining the universe. Cheyne’s argument proved very popular with his contemporaries, perhaps somewhat impressing even Newton. Sir Isaac included a discussion of the phenomena of attraction in the new and lengthy twenty-third “Query” to the 1706 edition of his Opticks (famous as the thirty-first “Query” of later editions) that seems to reflect of some Cheyne’s examples and vocabulary. Cheyne at least thought so, for according to an entry in Gregory’s Memoranda, “Dr. Chyne uses to say among his Chronys that all the additions (made by S Isaac to his book of Light and Colurs in the latin version) were stolen from him."

In the second phase of his intellectual career, which coincided with his residence at Bath, Cheyne repudiated his youthful mathematical brashness and excessive Newtonian enthusiasm. Although he never gave up his intense interest in philosophical and theological speculations or even in Newtonian science, in the works composed while practicing at Bath, Cheyne turned his attention largely to medical subjects. In 1720 he published An Essay on the Gout, in 1724 An Essay of Health and Long Life, in 1747 An Essay on Reginmen, and in 1742 The Natural Methods of Cureing the Diseases of the Body and the Disorders of the Body All these treatises were essentially practical guides that placed considerable emphasis on the medical wisdom of moderation in diet and drink. But Cheyne also devoted some space in each of these books to phiosophical and theological issues. In medical theory, for example, he was much committed to directing attention from the body’s fluids to its fibrous solids, his uncited guide in this matter almost certainly being the influential Leiden professor Hermann Boerhaave.

Cheyne’s most elaborate development of his views on the bodily fibers was contained in the treatise De natura fibrae (1725). He was simultaneously concerned with the relationship between the immaterial, musician-like soul and the material, instrument-like body. Although opinions on this subject can be found in all his later writings, the most extensive account of his views was contained in The English Malady (1733). Through his later medical works generally, and especially through these last two, Cheyne seems to have aroused much interest in Britain in further investigation of the bodily fibers and in exploration of the metaphysical relationship of mind and body.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cheyne’s principal writings have been mentioned above; no complete edition of his works exists. For useful biographical and bibliographical summaries that emphasize the later medical writings, see “George Cheyne,” in Dictionary of National Biography and charles F. Mullet, introduction to The of Dr. George Cheyne to the Countess of Huntingdon (san Marino, Calif., 1940) The best source for Cheyne’s early activities as a “Newtonian” is W. G. Hiscock’s edition of Gregory’s Memoranda, publisdhed as David Gregory, Isaac Newton and Their Circle (Oxford, (1937). For an interesting summary of Cheyne’s theological views, see Helene Metzger Attraction universelle et religion naturelle chez quelques commentateurs anglais de Newton (Paris, 1938). General summaries of some of Cheyne’s medical theories can be found in Albrecht von Haller, Bibliotheca medicinae practicae, IV (Basel, 1788), 435–438; kurt Sprengel, Histoire de la medecine, V (Paris, 1815), 167–170; and charles Daremberg, Histoire des sciences medicales, II (Paris, 1870), 1207–1214.

Theodore M. Brown