Oosterhoff, Richard

Ahnert, Thomas

Winkler, René

2025-04-02T11:40:34Z

2025-04-02T11:40:34Z

2025-04-02

This thesis examines thought and practices surrounding the discipline of natural history in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Scotland and focuses in particular on the ideas and conduct of the most prominent Scottish naturalist during that time, the physician and geographer Sir Robert Sibbald (1641–1722), prioritising his Latin works and his relationship to collecting specimens of natural history. The thesis is in two parts, one looking at Sibbald’s intellectual sources, and the other at his relationship with collecting and museums as emerging practices in natural history. These two parts show a rich and varied picture of the state of natural history in Scotland before the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, in which Sibbald was not the only voice - though perhaps the most important one. The first part of the thesis highlights how continental medical humanism and neo-Stoic ideas shaped Sibbald’s work and reveals more clearly than has been hitherto appreciated, his syncretic approach to medicine which emphasised the examination of the particulars of nature and sought to bridge the divide between ancient and modern learning. Chapter I provides a historiographical overview of Robert Sibbald and emphasises how natural history has been a neglected facet of seventeenth-century intellectual life. In Chapter II, the foundation of Sibbald’s continental medical education will be examined to show how his training in Leiden and Paris led him to embrace an “old-new” method of practising medicine that prioritised natural history and merged Galenic-Hippocratic with modern observations of natural particulars. Chapter III explores more fully the ethical and natural philosophical concepts underpinning Sibbald’s ideas and argues that influences from neo-Stoicism were essential to the description of Scottish nature in his Scotia Illustrata (1684). Ideas concerning the relationship between the microcosm of the human body and the macrocosm of the universe, as well as the possibility of Scottish medical and dietary self-sufficiency, had profound implications for Sibbald’s picture of Scotland, although particularly the latter were challenged by economic realities and rival medical theories. Chapter IV examines these challenges in detail and highlights the role of natural history in the dispute between Sibbald and his colleague Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713), which brought into the open intellectual fault lines and challenges to Sibbald’s vision of natural history. Sibbald’s impassioned, but selective, defence of his work was fought with weapons of humanist rhetoric seeking to guard natural history as a discipline against those who questioned its fundamental premises. The second part of the thesis expands to natural history in Scotland more broadly. It centres on the practices of collecting specimens of natural history and the background to the first teaching collections at a Scottish university, the collection described in Sibbald’s Auctarium Musaei Balfouriani (1697). Chapter V considers two earlier collectors of natural history in Scotland, the brothers James (c. 1600–1657) and Andrew Balfour (1630–1694), who, through their collecting activities, provided role models for Sibbald’s practices of natural history collecting. Sibbald’s assumption of a collecting identity and his didactic aspirations for the collection, as described in the Auctarium catalogue, will be the subject of Chapter VI, which will also deal with the institutional challenges of the university collections in the first decade of their existence. One of the keepers of that collection, James Paterson (c.1680–1705), became engaged in the Scottish network of fossil collectors that surrounded the Glasgow-based librarian Robert Wodrow (1679–1734), which will be the subject of Chapter VII. While this network was not centred on Robert Sibbald, it provides the best-documented case study of a Scottish network of naturalists and reveals an engagement with the fossil debates as well as an independent dynamic shaped by institutional and infrastructural realities.

https://hdl.handle.net/1842/43337

en

The University of Edinburgh

Winkler, René. “Auctarium Musaei Balfouriani.” Robert Sibbald’s Auctarium Musaei Balfouriani, 2024. https://auctarium.omeka.net/.

Winkler, René. “Robert Wodrow’s Eastwood Museum.” 2023. tinyurl.com/wodrow

Robert Sibbald

Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

history of science

natural history

Stoicism

Robert Wodrow

'Best of the Antients and Moderns': Robert Sibbald, natural history, medicine and collecting in Scotland (c.1650-1710)

'The Best of the Antients and Moderns': Robert Sibbald, natural history, medicine and collecting in Scotland (c.1650-1710)

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy