Gehennical fire

by William Royall Newman

Reputed to have performed miraculous feats in New England restoring the hair and teeth to an aged lady, bringing a withered peach tree to fruit - Eirenaeus Philalethes was also rumored to be an adept, possessor of the alchemical philosophers' stone. That the man was merely a mythical creation didn't diminish his reputation a whit - his 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. A work of meticulous scholarship, Gehennical Fire is both an absorbing intellectual biography and an intriguing exploration of alchemy and medical science in the seventeenth century.