The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Daily entries from the 17th century London diary

Robert Hooke

6 Annotations

dirk   Link to this

Hooke on the plague

ref. http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1665/06/29/#c22...

On “Exploring our archives” (the “Blog from the Royal Society, the UK and Commonwealth academy of science”) there is an item that refers to the “Waller Collection from Uppsala University”, stating that

“It includes a letter from Hooke to his friend the MP, natural philosopher and antiquary James Long dated 1688 in which he discusses the auctioning of books, sends a new history of China along with some ‘very considerable relations’ of earthquakes in Peru, China, Spain, and India. Hooke puts forward a theory that ‘the Poysenous Exhalations that Issue from such Eruptions may have caused those Distempers in the seasons and constitutions of the air and euen of the helth of People, though in Countrys very Remote, which haue accompanyd them or been always contemporary’. He goes on to speculate that such noxious fumes might have contributed to the ‘Aguish distemper’ then affecting people in England and France, as well as to the plague spreading in Germany. Hooke was of course correct to assume that the effects of earthquakes could have long-term effects on public health through environmental contamination, although inaccurate in linking them to the plague.”

http://www.scienceblogs.org.uk/archives/

JWB   Link to this

Title: Robert Hooke as an astronomer
Authors: Armitage, A.
Journal: Popular Astronomy, Vol. 59, p.287
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/gif/195...

Terry Foreman   Link to this

Hooke, Robert [detailed résumé ]

http://galileo.rice.edu/Catalog/NewFiles/hooke....

JWB   Link to this

"One conclusion based on the evidence stands out. Hooke was recognized as a person dependant upon others, as a person of at best compromised freedom of action, of ambiguous autonomy, and of doubful integrity."
ROBERT HOOKE
NEW STUDIES
Edited byMICHAEL HUNTER and SIMON SCHAFFER
WHO WAS ROBERT HOOKE?Steven Shapin
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:vvC5cpfGZGE...

Sjoerd   Link to this

The Isle Of Wight History site has a very detailed piece on Hooke's relations with his servants and with his niece Grace Hooke.

http://freespace.virgin.net/ric.martin/vectis/h...

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