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PITHY QUOTE FROM Boyle: Correspondence

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I had the opportunity lately to make use of millepedes. There was a child here in this town (a citizen’s daughter) of six years of age, troubled exceedingly with sore eyes, especially one of them, which she would not suffer to be touched or opened for eighteen weeks and more, nor could not endure the least light, having a very sharp fretting rheum in it, which did inflame all the cheek on that side, on which it fell. She had been touched for the evil, but received no benefit. I only gave her small beer with millepedes bruised and infused in it, for a fortnight, to drink for her ordinary drink, and one gentle purge before the use of them; and she is as well recovered as ever she was in her life; the rheum is all gone; she hath no blemish at all in them, only a little speck upon the cornea, which since is worn quite off.

The Correspondance of Robert Boyle. Volume 2, "Letter from Lower to Boyle," June 1664

The Correspondence of Robert Boyle. Electronic Edition. book cover

The Correspondence of Robert Boyle. Electronic Edition.

ISBN: 978-1-57085-373-9

Language: English

MARC Records



Detail: Portrait of Robert Boyle. By Johann Kerseboom, c.1689. On display at Historical Portraits in Dover Street, London

List of Contents

The Correspondence of Robert Boyle is the definitive edition (and first in two centuries) of Boyle's correspondence from the Boyle Project in London. The Boyle Project edition of autobiographical and biographical texts has been added.


Boyle, Robert. The Correspondence of Robert Boyle. Edited by Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio and Lawrence Principe. 7 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001.

_____. Robert Boyle / by himself and his friends: with a fragment of William Wotton's lost Life of Boyle. Edited with an introduction by Michael Hunter. London; Brookfield, VT: W. Pickering, 1994.



The most important reason [for emerging research on Boyle] is the extraordinarily intensive and extensive work of Michael Hunter, who has done more for Boyle studies than anyone before him (or, one might almost say, than all previous Boyle scholars put together). Apart from writing and editing volumes of essays on Boyle, he has also produced the first scholarly catalogue of the Boyle papers; he has edited (with Edward Davis) Boyle’s works, in fourteen volumes; and now, with Antonio Clericuzio and [Lawrence] Principe, he has produced the first ever edition of Boyle’s complete correspondence, in six volumes containing more than 3,000 pages. . . . This is a monumental work of scholarship, an indispensable resource for all future studies of Boyle’s life and thought.

—Noel Malcolm
"Of Air and Alchemy"
Times Literary Supplement