A B S T R A C T . Historians have commonly described John Evelyn's pamphlet about London smoke pollution, Fumifugium, as a precocious example of environmental concern. This paper argues that such an interpretation is too simple. Evelyn's proposals are shown to be closely related to political allegory and the panegyrics written to welcome the newly restored Charles II. However, the paper also shows that Fumifugium was not simply a literary conceit; rather it exemplified the mid-seventeenthcentury English interest in the properties of air that is visible in both the Hartlib circle and the early Royal Society.
A B S T R A C T. Recent years have seen the growth of a new and newly self-conscious cultural historiography of the senses. This article extends and critiques this literature through a case study of the sensory work and worlds of Sir John Floyer, a physician active in Lichfield during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Floyer is best known for his work on pulse-taking, something which he described as contributing to the art of feeling. Less well known is his first book -a discussion of the tastes of the world and their therapeutic possibilities. The article explicates, contextualizes, and relates these two books and uses this analysis to suggest ways of refining and developing the wider historiography of the senses. It demonstrates how they reveal that what Floyer sensed was closely bound up with the changing ways in which he sensed, particularly when he began feeling the pulse in a 'Chinese ' style. This, the article concludes, suggests that historians of the senses need fundamentally to reconsider the model of culture which underpins their work, focusing less on the ways in which people have interpreted or ordered sensory stimuli, and rather analysing the senses as forms of skill or dynamic ways of engaging with the world.In the mid-1680s a Lichfield physician began investigating the properties of soot. He collected samples from a wood fire and a coal fire and popped each one in turn into his mouth, rolling it around his palate in order to distinguish and describe their tastes. 1 About the same time he visited London and went to Chelsea Physic Garden. There he was ' pleas'd with many Curiosities ' and the 'Ingenuity ' of their ordering ; he admired the ' great Number ' of specimens, and chewed the plants. 2 This was not mere recreational grazing: Sir John Floyer was chewing experimentally. He recorded his perceptions of the tastes and smells, having conferred with the keeper, Mr Watts, whose 'Taste and Smell did very much agree with Mine ', and with his companions, the London Collegiate physicians,
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