As a child I remember playing in a friend’s somewhat dilapidated house and enjoying racing around an upstairs gallery and making out the curious shapes on the royal arms in plaster over the fireplace. Little did I know then that New Hall, Elland, had been the site of some of the earliest experiments to test Harvey’s theory of the circulation, or that a hill visible from my junior school’s playing field had witnessed important experiments on barometric pressure. Indeed, the name of Henry Power, doctor, scientist and one of the early members of the Royal Society, was unknown in the small town where he once lived and practised. Dr Hughes has done a great service in rescuing this important Restoration scientist from an obscurity that is more than local.
This engaging book clearly describes Power’s scientific and medical work, emphasising his wide-ranging curiosity as well as his experimentalism. Indeed, given the author’s own expertise, one would have liked to have had more quotations from Power’s notebooks, as well as a more detailed comparison of his medical practice with that of other contemporaries. He developed a wide clientele, although several of the places cited by Dr Hughes on p. 69 are closer to New Hall than he implies, and it is unclear whether he went specifically to treat some of his farthest-flung patients or whether they were seen while Power was visiting other acquaintances or on his way to London. His move to Wakefield in 1663–4 will also have been more convenient for a wealthier clientele as well as being half a day’s journey closer to the main road south. Wakefield was also at this time developing into a regional centre with claims to gentility. But Power did not live long there; he seems to have abandoned his scientific observations almost at once, perhaps because of increasing ill health, and he died there in December 1668.
There is more that can be said about Henry Power and, indeed, Dr Hughes in his earlier articles has shown how important are the Power notebooks in the British Library for an understanding of science and medicine in the Cromwellian and early Carolean period. Local pride, which compels me to point out that, pace p. 28, Halifax is on the tiny Hebble Brook (not river Hebden), which joins the Calder a mile or so upstream of Elland, must also acknowledge a paradox. A distinguished doctor, with metropolitan connections, chose to return, probably for family reasons, to a small and relatively isolated community, ill-served by medical men. He may have prospered, but a cynic might wonder whether his passion for experiment was not also fostered by a lack of patients and the absence of a wider local intellectual community.
With the publication of this elegant volume Dr Hughes has brought Henry Power to a broader notice, and one may hope that future inhabitants of Elland, and others, will not be as ignorant of this important scientist as I was for much of my life.
