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By Root 1885 0

was representative in many ways of the perils that faced any author in the period: one of his printed works was appropriated by an entrepreneurial rival, who translated it, reprinted it, and published it in such a way as to transform its meaning and quite possibly damage Grew's own name. Equally typical was the fact that both he and his antagonist claimed that their version was the true work. Each labored hard -digging through old papers, reviving long-dormant rumors, spying, threatening, and blustering- to bolster his case. All this was just the kind of tiresome experience that happened all the time to learned authors. Grew even had an advantage over most, in that he had access to the Royal Society's register system. Yet like Walcot and Fitzgerald he also had a major disadvantage. His quarrel, like theirs, did not begin with print, and its ramifications did not end at the bounds of the experimental community. The Society's register alone therefore could not grant him victory. And in this his experience was more than atypical. It was prophetic.

At the center of this conflict stood what was quite possibly the first patent on a manufactured pharmaceutical in the English-speaking world. It was, then, a substance that was the real prize at stake. Grew's enemies pirated this substance - a salt produced from spawaters bubbling up in the outskirts of London-before they pirated his book, and the latter piracy took place in the service of the former. As a result, the struggle escalated rapidly, calling into question many kinds of identity at once: Grew's professional identity as a physician, the integrity of medical practice more generally, and even the identity of substances-minerals and medicines, salts and waters, and atoms and powers. Moreover, Grew's preparation had been endorsed publicly by both the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians. When it was challenged, that challenge therefore implicated the judgment of Augustan London's elite naturalist and medical communities. The counterfeiters, as Grew's camp called them, not only painted Grew himself as "theAuthor of a Cheat," but charged the Society and the College with endorsing that cheats In other words, this became the test case for a would-be alliance of learned print, medicine, and experimental science.

Grew had sought to exploit the roaring fashion for spa waters. That such waters bore therapeutic properties had been known in antiquity, and the Renaissance had seen a flourishing of interest in them. One physician remarked that "Mineral Waters seem one of the greatest as well as the most useful Branches of the Materia Med/ca." But these waters presented embarrassingly knotty problems for physicians keen to display their expertise in nature's causative processes. Their powers, it was thought, derived from salts dissolved as water seeped through the earth. On this account, the properties of a particular water derived from the peculiar combination of subterranean minerals it had absorbed in coming to the surface. Spas therefore exemplified the conviction, forcefully presented by apothecaries and Paracelsians, that mineral medicaments were not only effective, but local. Generalized causal explanations were of little use in accounting for them. It was even possible that subterranean mineral conditions might vary so much as to preclude any general "knowledge" in this field. At a time when "new" philosophies were everywhere proclaiming the overthrow of Aristotelian and Galenic orthodoxies, waters and their salts therefore stood out as highly visible challenges to traditional medical and philosophical authority .6 lamented how little was known of the salts. They recommended evaporating away the water and examining the remaining crystals. Some also proposed using art to reproduce such salts artificially, such as the variety emanating from the spring at Epsom, a village west of London.? By the mid-seventeenth century this kind of question was being addressed keenly by both medical and natural philosophers. And the man asked by the Royal Society to explicate spawaters