wider historical tradition, opinions differ. It has been suggested that the argument between Lucas, and a physician who did believe in the presence of sulphur such as Rice
(humoralists) and Paracelsians Cchemistsl with Lucas as a member of the former group.30 Certainly Lucas,- like many other writers in this controversy, used the language of humoral medicine. But he also wished to be thought of as a more advanced chemist that his opponents, and therefore to place him with a group of 'Galenists' is to endanger the one obvious social distinction that distinguished him - that he had once been an apothecary. In the argument with Charleton it is almost as if the two men were trying to show that each knew more Boerhaave than the other. Someone like Alexander Sutherland, a Bath and Bristol doctor, in his The Nature and Qualities of Bristol Water , of 1758 continually refers to Hoffmann, Boerhaave and other authorities, and even praised the experimental research of Lucas himself.31 He was also agnostic on the sulphur question. It seems that Lucas was much more
interested in what might be called 'controversial visibility' - and that he needed a more extravagant style of writing in order to make his mark as an opponent of the 'closed shop' of established Bath physicians. Hence his concentrating on sulphur, which he takes to be a coverall word concealing chemical ignorance, and his use of ideas of 'phlogiston' and 'volatile acid', to distinguish himself from the other writers in the field. It was this tendency to verbal display that was pointed out in a review of Lucast Essay in the
Tobias Smollett.32 It is difficult to tie in these various strands of argument into a division, once favoured by G.S. Rousseau, between Galenists and Paracelsians, or iatro- mechanists and iatrochemists.
In the case of Charles Lucas, one has the example of an ambitious medical man anxious to place himself in a tradition of argument that ran against the less well
informed chemical education of Bath's established physicians. Coley has provided a succinct account of this debate: what needs stressing is that Lucas was anxious not simply to foliaathe major position on the absence of sulphur, but to establish his case on more sophisticated chemical analyses.33
It was quite obvious to contemporaries that a
fundamental distinction in Bath waters was being challenged, and that to allege the non-presence of sulphur was to slander both the theory and practice of the local, established
physicians.34 It was this hint at 'cover up' and ignorance that drew William Oliver's anger in his brief exchange of letters with Lucas on the allegation of a conspiracy-35 Should the Bath waters be proved milder and less pungent than was thought, their distinctiveness against the waters of the Bristol Hotwell would be challenged. This challenge might have further implications for the economy of Bath in
general.
The case for Charles Lucas was restated by William
and further attacked by Lucas's fellow Irishman, John Rutty (1695-17751.36 Baylfes had also been initially trained as an apothecary, and in his book on the Bath waters of 1757, he restated Lucas' arguments, calling the latter
' learned and judicious'. Baylfes proposed that some of the mixtures of waters and medicines that were being used were
dangerous. He says that the apothecary Thomas Haviland could testify to the need to use the salts of the Bath waters in careful quantities, and that the salts should sometimes be taken without water.37 Baylies appears to suggest something more too: that the failure to examine and utilise the
separated salts of the Bath waters wasdeliberate policy on the part of the established medical men and the corporation. Perhaps there was a fear that the waters would become
mobile as it were, with the salts available for packaging and transport. It is bcf related interest how relatively small the transport of bottled water was from Bath, as compared to other resorts.38 Baylies also claimed that the hospital was deliberately keeping down the number of physicians, and still failing to produce accurate research and open argument. He accused William Oliver of nepotism, and said that many of the combinations of medicine and water that were being used were dangerous, especially to persons of frail disposition,39 He alleged that at a meeting of the subscribers to the pauper charity, he had been told by a surgeon to the hospital that were the case histories of patients in the hospital to be published in the manner that
Baylies suggested, the water would be exposed and that
the world would be shown their real insignificance. Baylies also points out his sympathy for the fate of Archibald
Cleland, and mentions an( article published in the Critical Review of 1758, which suggested that the case of Archibald Cleland should have been recalled more accurately, for
' that suspension and that dismission, as Dr. Baylies well knows, were instances of the most illegal despotism, of the most flagrant, iniquity and cruel oppression ."_40 As a
result of these allegations, Baylies was shunned by Doctors Oliver, Moysey and Charleton, and an official reply to his complaints was printed which stressed the parlous financial state of the hospital as a reason for not being able to take on further physicians.41 Baylies stood by his claims and by those of Charles Lucas who he claimed was being blamed for
' expelling from the waters the ideal sulphur, the god of some men' s idolatry'.42 Baylies quit Bath, and eventually became a physician at the court of Frederick the Great. He died in Berlin, in March 1789.
The arguments that Charles Lucas had generated had in fact begun in his native Ireland, where his protagonist was the Quaker physician named John Rutty (1698-1775).43 Rutty had written extensively on mineral waters, and had dealt with Lucas's claims specifically in a volume entitled The Argument of Sulphur or no sulphur in waters discussed, in 1762, five years after his magnum opus, A Methodical synopsis of Mineral Waters . Rutty concludes on the question of Bath water:
The Bath water therefore maintains its title to the powerful effects ascribed to it, not merely from the active heat, nor merely from
the ingredients common to it and any mere purging chalybeate water ... but also from a
sulphureous impregnation, particularly as an expeller of gouty or other morbid humours to the surface of the body.45
This 'sulphur controversy' reflected the divisions
that existed within the profession of physic in eighteenth- century Bath. The setting up of the Bath hospital entailed the admission of patients from other areas of the country, and led to a persistent tension between Bath physicians who practised in the hospital and outsiders who argued that the practices of the hospital were not suffiently detailed in publicly available form. Circling this institution came
outsider figures, with trainings as apothecaries and a desire to gain publicity in the lucrative tourist market. Sulphur was the terrain, the natural symbol, around which the attack and the defence were fought. 45 There was of course another dimension - as always - the Oxbridge dimension. William Oliver and Rice Charleton were graduates of Oxford and
Cambridge respectively, and the latter went out of his way to stress to William Baylieg that his not having gone to Oxford and Cambridge, and having come from Aberdeen, was of no
46 consequence.