Ferroptosis and inflammation: benefits from their association with EMH and novel strategies to combat important diseases

possible thanks to the development of crafts. The use of instruments inspired the study of their laws and functioning, which in turn encouraged the creation of new projects. In fact, the seventeenth century became known as “The Age of Projects”, and some of them were so complicated that they were to remain on paper forever (Forbes & Dijksterhuis 1963: 306-307). Overall, by the late 1600s urban Europe had a dramatically different aspect after the Reformation and the Renaissance (Beal 2004;

Park & Daston 2006). Education was visibly becoming independent from the Church, and the Church had lost much of its control over science. Latin became largely (though by no means entirely) replaced by the vernacular, while scientific practice had moved away from monasteries to universities, and was spreading out from universities to academies and independent (or quasi-independent) societies of learning. The learned European society was becoming enlightened and sought to transmit this enlightenment further on. In England, the foundation of the Royal Society of London in 1660 encouraged scientific communication, both direct and in the shape of public correspondence, which later gave way to the emergence of the research article as a new scientific genre (Valle 1996; Atkinson 1999; Moessner 2009). The following paragraphs attempt to describe the crucial role that the Royal Society would play in the formation of a new English scientific register along the early decades of the Enlightenment.

4. The Royal Society: the scientific method and the experimental essay

The seventeenth century, marked by the English Civil War in the 1640s, the execution of Charles I in 1649, and a ten-year period of tyranny under Cromwell’s Commonwealth, is often described as “one of the most turbulent in British history”

(Banks 2008: 39). The following Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 may be thus regarded “not so much as an attempt to reimpose the old social order, but as a last chance to restore any social order” (Atkinson 1999: 15). It was on that year when, with an earnest desire to cultivate and promote the empirical study of nature in a spirit of temperance, serenity and gravity, a group of learned gentlemen and noblemen decided to lay the foundations of what they had called the “Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge”. A parallel movement was taking place on the European continent. Already in 1609, the Academie dei Lincei had been created in Rome. Germany opened its Academia Naturae Curiosorum (later Leopoldina) in

1652, while the Académie des Sciences in Paris would be founded eight years later under Louis XIV. Just as the Royal Society, they had a common purpose: the development of scientific research within a scientific community. On the other hand, and in the particular case of the Royal Society, there was also an intention to institutionalise the practice of experimental science outside the universities – which were traditionally places of education, rather than research –, as well as to achieve the status and rights of a public corporation, independent from private patronage (Hunter 1989: 1-2), thus becoming “England’s first true professional scientific group”

(Montgomery 1996: 84). All in all, academies remained largely a privilege of nobility until well into the eighteenth century, and the Royal Society was no exception.

Despite the claims of Thomas Sprat’, early historiographer and one of the key fellows of the Society, that “the Soldier, the Tradesman, the Merchant, the Scholar, the Gentleman, the Courtier, the Divine, the Presbyterian, the Papist, the Independent, and those of Orthodox Judgment, have [in the Society] laid aside their names of distinction” (1667: 427), it was still “a society of gentlemen in the fullest sense – run by gentlemen, for genteel purposes, via genteel standards of conduct and communication, as part and parcel of a genteel form of life” (Atkinson 1999: 17), meaning also that they were ruled by a genteel – and therefore polite – code of conduct.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon was not only one of the fathers of the scientific method, but also a pioneer in what would soon become a widespread desire to improve the English language in order to make it suitable for the expression of science. In his works The Advancement of Learning (1605) and Novum Organum (1620), Bacon proclaimed that “in order to progress beyond medieval sophistry, knowledge would require a new type of speech, a plain and unadorned style of writing capable of carrying the truth of the world in as direct a manner as possible” (Montgomery 1996: 74). Bacon died in 1626, but the members of the Royal Society adopted him “as their linguistic messiah” (Montgomery 1996: 75), with John Wilkins and Robert Boyle being two of his most passionate followers.

Wilkins’s Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) condemns metaphor and polysemy because they make language vague, rather than precise, preventing it from expressing “the semantic characteristics of nature”

(Camiña-Rioboo 2013: 57). A perfect language, instead, would maintain a one-to-one

relationship between words and things, “laid on the superiority of res over verba”

(Gotti 2001: 231). Boyle, in turn, shaped a genre for the transmission of the new science: the experimental essay, adopted – and adapted – from Montaigne. Gotti (1996, 2001) summarises five characteristics that an experimental essay should have, as stated in Boyle’s Proemial Essay… with Some Considerations Touching Experimental Essays in General (1661): brevity, lack of assertiveness, perspicuity, simplicity of form, and objectivity.

Bacon’s, Boyle’s and Wilkin’s efforts appear to be intrinsically connected in the Society’s engagement with improving and transmitting scientific research. The following explanation by Camiña-Rioboo (2013: 46) illustrates how this structure was intended to work:

The ambitious enterprise to reform science and education purported by the members of the Royal Society was founded on three pillars: a) the methodology employed to deal with scientific facts, b) the vehicle to disseminate the results of the experiments performed and the knowledge acquired, and c) the language employed to communicate those experiments and knowledge. The scientific method, the experimental essay and the philosophical (scientific) language represented those pillars, respectively.

All in all, despite their fiery defense of the necessity of a plain and straightforward philosophical language, the abovementioned members of the Royal Society tend, in fact, to disregard their own precepts. Boyle, for instance, resorts sometimes to polysemy and other figurative devices in his use of terminology (Gotti 1996: 39;

2001: 232). And Sprat, while advocating for “a close, naked, natural way of Speaking”, chooses the metaphor of “putting in Execution the only Remedy” (as was indeed the use at those times!) to save language from “all the Amplifications, Digressions, and Swellings of Style” (1667: xx). Many of their writings, therefore, give the impression that “[a]ttacking and accusing metaphorical language for its wantonness, its antipathy to truth, became one of the only real rhetorical standards observed by the Society… this was often done in florid fashion, with magnificent self-negation” (Montgomery 1996: 86). However, the cause of verbosity lay sometimes in the fear of excessive brevity, which would in turn compromise clarity of exposition, and Boyle, being conscious of this problem, apologised for the occasional

inconsistencies in his own writings (Gotti 2001: 227). In any case, this linguistic habit would change some years later with Newton. Compared to Boyle, who “still has his linguistic feet firmly planted in the Renaissance”, Newton is considered to “ha[ve] a flatter linguistic footprint and is much easier to follow” (Montgomery 1996: 97). His sober style, untouched by flourishes and for the most part unaffected by emotion, has been found to be considerably influenced by Latin (Banks 2008: 59-63). This may, to a point, explain the frequency of passive constructions in his Opticks (1704), a linguistic construction usually associated with a detached, impersonal character. All in all, Newton’s language is still very far from losing a personal voice of a “public and private self” (Montgomery 1999: 98), telling a story.

Apart from the somewhat polemical clarity and brevity, persuasion is agreed to be another characteristic of scientific prose, used as a rhetorical strategy to convince the members of the scientific community through writing (Bazerman 1988;

Allen et al. 1994). This strategy would be widely exploited since 1665, when the Royal Society started the publication of its journal, the Philosophical Transactions, edited by the Society’s first Secretary Henry Oldenburg and intended primarily for the communication of the latest discoveries among the members of the Society. First and foremost, experiments could not be trusted unless witnessed and carefully reported. In the beginning, scientists would engage in providing a detailed account of their experiments, ideally in a laboratory accessible to another scientist whenever that was an option, but also in the solitude of their houses; their stories would serve as a guarantee of the credibility of their scientific reports (Shapin 1988: 376). With time, however, personal discoveries gave way to a shift in focus towards “more universal grounds: the proof of a claim transcending the particulars of an investigation”

(Bazerman 1988: 78). This gradual change can be seen in Atkinson’s (1999: 76-81) rhetorical analysis of the Transactions since 1665 to 1975. He noticed that the rhetorical focus in the early publications of the Society’s journal was mostly author-centered; that is, the emphasis was on the author relating his experiment to the reader (presumably, other members of the Society) in the first person. Atkinson (1999: 77) observes four characteristics that often accompany this author-centered approach, all of them being also typical of Boyle’s writing (Gotti 2001: 227-237): witnessing (or giving the names of renowned fellow-scientists who were present during the experiment or observation; also, sometimes, inviting the reader to be a “virtual

witness” in the absence of a real one); indexes of modesty or humility (i.e. lack of assertiveness, or hedging); a tendency towards miscellaneity, with common digressions and sometimes unconnected observations; and elaborate politeness explicitly addressed to fellow-members of the Society.¹⁴ By the end of the eighteenth century, the author-centered approach started shifting towards an object-centered one (Atkinson 1999: 78-80), highlighting the observed, rather than the observer, the experiment, rather than the experimenter, processes, rather than actions. And it is only at that time that experimental articles would start offering claims and experimental proofs as a solid basis for scientific trust (Bazerman 1988: 78). This was accomplished through a progressive increase in the use of the passive voice, which largely substituted the use of the first person.

Looking back at the first half of the late Modern period, we may thus agree with Montgomery that, “[i]n the mid- to late 17^th century… even at its Senecan extreme, what we witness is an attitude towards language, not its achievement” (1996:

98). Change in scientific language would arrive at a relatively slow pace, and not necessarily at a steady one, as it would parallel change in scientific thought and in science itself. In the next section, I will try to provide a glimpse of the three scientific disciplines included in the present study as they looked in the context of change outlined above and in the subsequent decades, until they became what we know today as astronomy, philosophy and life sciences.