As early as 1646, when he was not yet twenty, there comes into his letters the note of physical suffering. Like many scholars and thinkers, Robert Boyle was very sensitive about physical pain, and the chances of infection and disease. As a boy at Eton, it will be remembered, the “potion” held more than ordinary terrors for the spiritay Robyn. Perhaps he had heard about little Hodge, who had died at Deptford, after so dutifully swallowing the powder of unicorns’ horns. But even if not, he must have seen the same thing happening all about him; he must have known well enough that medical treatment in his day was steeped in the optimism of blackest ignorance. The plasters and powders and potions and purges with which the Faculty “wrought” so boldly on every disease, and the weird and melodramatic endings which were their usual results, had given Robyn “a perfect aversion to all physick.” He believed that, in most cases, it “did but exasperate the disease.” Had not he seen “life itself almost disgorged together with a potion”? It was his own childish experiences that inclined this experimentalist, all his life, to “apprehend more from the physician than the disease,” and set him to apply himself to the study of physic “that he might have the less need of them that profess it.” And so, though he was to count among his friends of the Philosophical College and elsewhere the most learned and eminent physicians of his time, and as he grew older came to trusting very humbly and gratefully to the skill of more than one of them, Robert Boyle’s tendency, all through life, was to simplify medical treatment, and as far as possible to doctor himself with the aid of an intelligent and obedient “apothecary.” If he had known that he was to live till he was sixty-five, and that the five-and-forty years that lay before him were to be years of more or less invalidism and suffering! But the long future was veiled; at twenty, the months in front of him were all-important. And he must have known as early as 1646 that his attacks of pain and “ague fits” were caused by the existence of renal calculus—the “gravel of the kidneys” of his day. He knew of it when he wrote the letter to Hartlib (a fellow sufferer) in which he gratefully thanks good Mrs. Hartlib for a “receipt” or “sanative remedy,” which she had sent him in one of her husband’s letters, against a disease that Robyn calls “so cruel in its tortures and so fatal in its catastrophe.”[148]