Main description:

This volume presents an innovative look at early modern medicine and natural philosophy as historically interrelated developments. The individual chapters chart this interrelation in a variety of contexts, from the Humanists who drew on Hippocrates, Galen, and Aristotle to answer philosophical and medical questions, to medical debates on the limits and power of mechanism, and on to eighteenth-century controversies over medical materialism and 'atheism.'

The work presented here broadens our understanding of both philosophy and medicine in this period by illustrating the ways these disciplines were in deep theoretical and methodological dialogue and by demonstrating the importance of this dialogue for understanding their history.

Taken together, these papers argue that to overlook the medical context of natural philosophy and the philosophical context of medicine is to overlook fundamentally important aspects of these intellectual endeavors.

Contents:

1. Introduction; Benjamin Goldberg, Evan Ragland, and Peter Distelzweig.- Part I Philosophy, Medicine and Method in the Renaissance.- 2. Lodovico Settala's Aristotelian Problemata Commentary and Late-Renaissance Hippocratic Medicine; Craig Martin.- 3. Renaissance Surgeons: Anatomy, Manual Skill and the Visual Arts; Cynthia Klestinec.- 4. Why All This Jelly? Jacopo Zabarella and Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente on the Usefulness of the Vitreous Humor; Tawrin Baker.- Part II Life and Mechanism.- 5. Machines of the Body in the 17th Century; Domenico Bertoloni Meli.- 6. "Mechanics" and Mechanism in William Harvey's Anatomy: Varieties and Limits; Peter Distelzweig.- 7. Descartes on the Theory of Life and Methodology in the Life Sciences; Karen Detlefsen.- 8. Mechanism, the Senses, and Reason: Franciscus Sylvius and Leiden Debates over Anatomical Knowledge after Harvey and Descartes; Evan Ragland.- 9. Louis de la Forge and the Development of Cartesian Medical Philosophy; Patricia Easton and Melissa Gholamnejad.- Part III Matter and Life, Corpuscles and Chymistry.- 10. Transplantation and Corpuscular Identity in Paracelsian Vital Philosophy; Jole Shackelford.- 11. Mysteries of Living Corpuscles: Atomism and the Origin of Life in Sennert, Gassendi and Kircher; Hiro Hirai.- 12. Mechanism and Chemical Medicine in 17th-century England: Boyle's Investigation of Ferments and Fermentation; Antonio Clericuzio.- 13. Boyle, Malpighi, and the Problem of Plastic Powers; Ashley J. Inglehart.- Part IV Medicalizing Philosophy?.- 14. Early Modern Medical Eudaimonism; Justin E. H. Smith.- 15. Tres medici, duo athei? The Physician as Atheist and the Medicalization of the Soul; Charles T. Wolfe.