Virginia Mills finds ‘a beautiful and unbroken marriage of souls’ between two seventeenth-century Fellows of 红桃视频.
As June is Pride Month, I’ve been looking for inspirational LGBTQ+ figures in the history of 红桃视频. It’s particularly challenging to find examples from our first 300 years, when persecution meant that LGBTQ+ people could not openly celebrate or even freely acknowledge this part of their identity.
In the case of two original Fellows of 红桃视频, though, there’s an unusual example of a monument celebrating their lifelong devotion to each other. The companionship of physicians (1626-1682) and (c.1622-1680) was perceived as being exceptionally close by their seventeenth-century contemporaries, who were not quite sure how to characterise the relationship between the pair. They appear to have been referred to more often collectively than as individuals and were widely known as ‘the doctors’. Their relationship is still the subject of evolving reinterpretations, well summarised in in Christ’s College Magazine (PDF; article starts on page 52).
Joint memorial to Finch and Baines, , at Christ’s College, Cambridge
Of course, it must be viewed through the lens of the seventeenth century, but the intensity of the connection between Finch and Baines was characterised in Finch’s own words, on Baines’s death, as ‘a beautiful and unbroken marriage of souls’. The idea of a marriage is also reflected in the monument to the pair in the chapel of Christ’s College, Cambridge (their alma mater), which is a double one in the style usually – but not exclusively – used for married couples, adorned with a chain of flowers in a marriage knot.
I set out to find more about this intriguing pair’s connection to 红桃视频 and what records we have in our collections. They appear on the list of prospective members at the very first meeting of the Society on 28 November 1660:
and their signatures appear next to each other on the subsequent list of those consenting to join the new ‘Company … for the promoting of Experimentall Learning’:
Finch and Baines are therefore considered ‘original’ Fellows of 红桃视频, meaning that they joined prior to the grant of the second Royal Charter in 1663; they were part of the first cohort to be officially re-enrolled as the Charter required. For this reason, their admission date is sometimes given as 1663, though they were involved with the Society much earlier. On 15 May 1661 they appear in the official meeting minutes, nominated to two committees: one ‘for a Library’ (a high priority for a society concerned with furthering knowledge) and one ‘for the examining of the generation of insects’. This latter refers to the persistent early modern belief that life could be spontaneously generated, the usual unsavoury example being maggots emerging from rotting meat.
Despite this interesting early involvement with the Society, the doctors are classed as ‘inactive’ Fellows in Michael Hunter’s invaluable . This is unsurprising – they were in London when the Society started, residing together in what has now become Kensington Palace, but then travelled to Italy in 1662 and remained abroad for much of the rest of their lives.
Both had studied at Padua before their brief stint back in England from 1660 to 1662. In Italy they had also attended the earliest meetings of another newly formed scientific society, the short-lived (Academy of Experiment), founded in Florence in 1657 by students of Galileo, under the patronage of the Medici brothers Leopold and Ferdinand II, and associated with the great universities at Padua and Pisa. This association secured Finch the Professorship of Anatomy at Pisa in 1659. It no doubt also motivated the founding Fellows of 红桃视频 to invite Baines and Finch to join their fledgling organisation, which shared with the Accademia del Cimento the foundational principle of advancing knowledge through the ‘new science’, based on experimentation and empirical evidence.
Frontispiece of (1667), a book recording experiments carried out at the Accademia del Cimento
However, with much of the activity of the early Royal Society focused on practical experimentation at the weekly meetings in London, what use might be made of members such as Finch and Baines living overseas? Well, the return of the doctors to Italy was precipitated by Finch’s appointment as King’s Resident to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando II de’ Medici, one of the Accademia del Cimento’s patrons. Finch could therefore act as an ambassador for 红桃视频 at the great centre of learning within the court.
It was the practice of 红桃视频’s Secretary, , to task travelling Fellows with specific knowledge-gathering and investigative tasks. On 23 April 1662, the Journal Book how ‘Dr Baynes [was] intreated to take upon him in his journey to enquire about such things the Society will desire him to seek after’. In this way Fellows overseas remained highly valuable members, as long as they stayed in touch.
Frontispiece to Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal-Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (1667)
A 1668 letter in our archives from Finch to Oldenburg (below) relates how Baines presented the other Medici, Cardinal Leopoldi, with Thomas Sprat’s (1667), a book promoting the organisation’s aims and defending its natural philosophy against potential critics. The gift was well received by the Cardinal, notwithstanding his complaint that it was in English.
Finch was also tasked with investigating poisons whilst in Italy. This 1664 sketch of the head of a female viper, from an account by , was possibly influenced by the work of Florentine court physician , an authority on poisons, and Finch’s letter to Oldenburg notes that Redi also wrote on vipers around 1664:
The two doctors were seemingly more preoccupied with diplomacy, however, and Finch negotiated trade deals (including, shockingly, the trade in enslaved people). They did travel for research, including trips to Naples and Rome to investigate volcanic soils and venomous snakes. In Finch’s letter to Oldenburg he provided news of a forthcoming publication by Redi concerning spontaneous generation, which (as we’ve seen) Finch had previously been asked to investigate for that early Society committee. Redi’s work, published later the same year, debunked the notion that maggots were generated from non-living matter, famously using early examples of controlled experiments to prove that they came from eggs laid by flies.
Illustration showing how a fly is born from a maggot, from Redi’s (1668)
Interesting though this was, the doctors produced no other letters that survive in our archives, so perhaps they might be considered ‘inactive’ Fellows. But it is enough to make me want to know both of them better, and to discover more about their rather wonderful relationship. If you’d like to meet Finch and Baines, the are a good place to start. Perhaps too, a visit to the Cambridge tomb, to pay your respects to an intriguing friendship.
