The life and work of Dr Martin Lister,

Martin Lister (1639-1712), a Lincolnshire medical virtuoso

‘Interdisciplinarity’ is a buzzword utilised by contemporary researchers, universities, and funding agencies. But its practice is nothing new, and some of the most interdisciplinary scholars were physicians working in the seventeenth-century Royal Society, demonstrating close ties between medicine and natural history. Martin Lister (1639-1712), Royal Physician and the first scientific arachnologist and conchologist—who spent his adolescence and part of his early adulthood at the manor at Burwell Park, Lincolnshire—moved seamlessly between these pursuits. He observed his patients and the natural world with sensitivity, keen empiricism, and with artistic flair. Expertise in natural history in the seventeenth century was in fact representative of its becoming foundational for a great deal of contemporary science, including medicine. But Lister’s integration of natural history and medicine went even further than virtuosic interdisciplinarity. As historian Hal Cook has remarked, natural history was the early modern equivalent of “big science”, and Lister was at its very centre.