Abstract
Many, perhaps even most, members of the early Royal Society of London were physicians (though not all of these were practicing physicians). The Society could never have prospered without the support of wealthy physicians, the rolls of the organization were filled with doctors and surgeons, and medical and biological observations and analyses crowd the pages of its journal. Indeed, some members of the College of Physicians complained about the Royal Society’s forays into medicine. Any simple skimming of the Philosophical Transactions will immediately reveal a network of men (and they were only men) persistently occupied with medical and biological problems—hardly an issue was printed without mention of various medicinal cures, surgical or medical procedures, or observations of strange and mysterious animals or plants. To take one small example, in the very first issue of the Transactions there is a brief article entitled, “An Account of a very odd Monstrous calf” (Philosophical Transactions 1665, 10), which describes a calf with various deformities, including having no joints and a triple (‘Cerebus-like’) tongue. Observations like this one—and much more detailed empirical and theoretical analyses—can be found throughout the early issues of the Transactions, and they were of vital importance to those working on various outstanding problems, in this case the problems of animal generation and of the origin of monstrosity. This news item was communicated by none other than the Honorable Robert Boyle, whose interests go well beyond the physical and chemical sciences for which we usually remember him.
There is no more fruitful occupation than to try to know oneself. And the benefit that one expects from this knowledge does not just extend to morals, as many may initially suppose, but also to medicine in particular. – René Descartes , Description of the Human Body.(Descartes 1998, 170)
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Notes
- 1.
Cook 1990.
- 2.
Cook 1990.
- 3.
The relative status of medical theoria and practica courses changed over time. Taddeo Alderotti in the thirteenth century sought to elevate the status of medicine by associating its theoria with contemplative natural philosophy. Yet many physicians across the sixteenth century concentrated on the importance of medical practica, even to limiting theoria to mere introductory instruction. Siraisi 2001, 215; Maclean 2002, 68–9.
- 4.
Though there was no strict orthodox division. Maclean 2002, 69.
- 5.
Here he follows the strong subalternation of medicine to natural philosophy proposed by Avicenna, Canon 1.1.1.2. Siraisi 2001, 86.
- 6.
- 7.
Sennert 1620, 3–7.
- 8.
See Wolfe and Gal 2010.
- 9.
- 10.
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- 12.
- 13.
As represented in, e.g., Newman and Principe 2002.
- 14.
See Cook 2007, which won the Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society in 2009. Cook does discuss philosophy and philosophers, but his focus is clearly on other aspects of early modernity.
- 15.
Matter theory and mechanism , while making a supporting appearance in these chapters, takes a more central role in Part IV of the volume.
- 16.
On the use of the term ‘chymistry,’ see Newman and Principe 1998.
- 17.
Newman 2006.
- 18.
- 19.
Daston and Park 2006, 3. Gregor Reisch’s important 1503 Margarita philosophica, in contrast, placed the operative part of medicine under the headings of practical and factive philosophy, and the theoria of medicine under divisions of theoretical, real, and physical or natural philosophy. Cf. Bylebyl 1990; Mikkeli 1999.
- 20.
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Goldberg, B., Ragland, E.R., Distelzweig, P. (2016). Introduction. In: Distelzweig, P., Goldberg, B., Ragland, E. (eds) Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7353-9_1
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