The idea of innovation in Restoration science and medicine

This article traces the language of innovation through mid-seventeenth-century science and medicine, focusing on controversies surrounding the Royal Society and the proposed Society of Chymical Physicians. 'Innovation' in early modern England was primarily a term of abuse directed against the alleged enemies of the church or state. Following the Civil Wars, defenders of Aristotelian and Galenic learning used the term to implicate the new philosophers and chymical physicians in the radicalism of the previous decades. In response, such thinkers as Walter Charleton, Robert Boyle, John Evelyn, Thomas Sprat and Marchamont Nedham sought to rehabilitate the concept. They aligned innovation with the new experimental philosophy and, crucially, distinguished innovation in philosophy from innovation in divinity. Freed from the stigma of heresy and sedition, the concept could serve rather than undermine the restored church. Innovation, then, was secularized for religious ends: to reconcile the new philosophy with ecclesiastical authority and Christian doctrine. But the alliance between philosophical innovation and religious orthodoxy remained precarious, not least because the boundaries of orthodoxy were far from settled. The debates over innovation reflect competing efforts to define the cultural politics of the new philosophy at a moment of profound religious, political and intellectual contestation.