The Revd John Ward Amateur Chemist and Physician

8 THE REVD JOHN WARD AMATEUR CHEMIST AND PHYSICIAN 

Yet while all of these medical men interpreted the disease process in a very different way from how we think of it now, their strivings towards what one might call a rational pathology are very obvious, and one aspect of that striving was the attempt to understand the nature of the chemical substances that were found in diseased bodies. John Ward, for example, cites the case of an 

Oxford woman who had died from a dropsical condition, and whose abdominal cavity was found to contain no less than three bucketfuls of water by Ward s friend Dr Conyers when he performed a post mortem. Conyers then had the idea of distilling the extracted water to see what it contained, but was surprised to find that, from such a large volume, he got only three or four spoonfuls of water out of his retort. The rest seemed to emulsify, and turnd to a Kind of slime or mucilage when it was cold .  

In understanding the cultural significance of the Ashmolean after 1683, however, we must remember that the Museum as an institution had by then become one of the necessary technical adjuncts to scholarly and scientific research. For a Museum s collections, especially of natural objects such as crystals, minerals, and anatomical preparations, were now seen as providing yardsticks by which nature could be evaluated and compared, and the normal contrasted with the freak or sport . Crucial, indeed, if science was to be conducted along proper Baconian empirical lines. Similarly, the laboratory, or Officina , provided the space where forensic investigations into specific aspects of nature could be conducted, while at the same time the whole building became 

Although Plot would naturally have known about pure distilled water in the laboratory, his extensive discussion of natural waters occurring in the county of Oxford proceeds along fundamentally different lines. For instance, he takes it as axiomatic that all natural waters coming out of, or running on, the surface of the earth contain two inner chemical properties saltiness and sulphurousness. The salt was the heavier mineral content, the sulphur the oily and volatile. 

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