Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution [Hardcover]

Reputed to have performed miraculous feats in New Englandrestoring the hair and teeth to an aged lady, bringing a withered peach tree to fruitEirenaeus Philalethes was also rumored to be an adept possessor of the alchemical philosophers stone. That the man was merely a mythical creation didnt diminish his reputation a whithis writings were spectacularly successful, read by Leibniz, esteemed by Newton and Boyle, voraciously consumed by countless readers. Gehennical Fire is the story of the man behind the myth, George Starkey.

Though virtually unknown today and little noted in history, Starkey was Americas most widely read and celebrated scientist before Benjamin Franklin. Born in Bermuda, he received his A.B. from Harvard in 1646 and four years later emigrated to London, where he quickly gained prominence as a chymist. Thanks in large part to the scholarly detective work of William Newman, we now know that this is only a small part of an extraordinary story, that in fact George Starkey led two lives. Not content simply to publish his alchemical works under the name Eirenaeus Philalethes, A Peaceful Lover of Truth, Starkey spread elaborate tales about his alter ego, in effect giving him a life of his own.

[An] impressive book& Newman has pulled off two remarkable achievements in a single bookand one of modest size at that. To begin with, he has reconstructed the career of an intellectual adventurer whose talents for investigating the natural world and for promoting his own fame were equally outsized& [Starkey] was not only a medical reformer, he was also one of the most ingenious and prolific of those strange figures, half con man and half high-tech entrepreneur, who were known at the time as projectors& This story of a forgotten career, though told with much learning and occasional wit, forms only one strand in the double helix of Newmans book. He also seeks to identify the sources and explain the contents of Starkeys chemical thought and prló3