We who have been raised in a culture with microscopes and electronic microscopes take for granted the existence of a universe of minutiae that shape our surroundings (SARS-COV2, to pick an example we are all exhausted about). Before Antony van Leeuwenhoek developed his microscope around 1668, however, this was impossible.
And so it was that a certain British gentleman named William Ramesey took note of the extremely important role that parasitic worms have played in the human condition, writing that when one looks at a close-up of “corrupt blood,” one sees that “the smallest mite will appear in that magnitude as you may discover every part thereof”. You see in the first image Ramesey’s illustrations of some of the worms that have acted as “an epidemical disease, killing more than either the sword or plague.” He wrote about them in a scientific tract called _Helminthologia_ in the same year Leeuwenhoek came up with his microscope.
But Ramesey had interests in astrology and held ideas about the causes of disease that show just how much the Early Modern European blended completely unproven theories with scientific observation. He observed the worms and their “macerating and direfully cruciating” effects on the human body carefully. But he had no idea about how they were contagious. Instead, he thought they spontaneously generated from “putrid, vitious and gross, viscid, corrupt matter”. What sorts of things might cause the matter to corrupt? God, angels, the devil, witches, air, water, the planets, food (but not by contact– the wrong sorts of food), passions, and the retention of semen are all potential harbingers.
Ramesey’s portrait on the second slide shows an ostentatious dresser, and and indeed the man had a penchant for the ornate — demonstrated often in his writing style in how he expressed his credulousness about the role of astrology and where disease came from. But he was not alone in mixing magic and science in this age: he, at least, had the excuse of coming from a time when far less was understood about the workings of the world than we now have.
Source(s): June 15, 2010, ‘A worm the author of this book’: William Ramesey’s ‘Helminthologia’ @EarlyModernWhale, Dr Roy, lecturer Reading, UK. @searchworks.stanford.edu/view/5095516, “Helminthologia,” William Ramesey, London, John Streamer for George Strawbeidge, 1668
