31 research outputs found
Medical competence, anatomy and the polity in seventeenth-century Rome
At the centre of this article are two physicians active in Rome between 1600 and 1630 who combined medical practice with broader involvement in the dynamic cultural, economic and political scene of the centre of the Catholic world. The city's distinctive and very influential social landscape magnified issues of career-building and allows us to recapture physiciansâ different strategies of self-fashioning at a time of major social and religious reorganization. At one level, reconstructing Johannes Faber and Giulio Mancini's medical education, arrival in Rome and overlapping but different career trajectories contributes to research on physiciansâ identity in early modern Italian states. Most remarkable are their access to different segments of Roman society, including a dynamic art market, and their diplomatic and political role, claimed as well as real. But following these physicians from hospitals to courts, including that of the Pope, and from tribunals to the university and analysing the wide range of their writing â from medico-legal consilia to political essays and reports of anatomical investigations â also enriches our view of medical practice, which included, but went beyond, the bedside. Furthermore, their activities demand that we reassess the complex place of anatomical investigations in a courtly society, and start recovering the fundamental role played by hospitals â those quintessential Catholic institutions â as sites of routine dissections for both medical teaching and research. (pp. 551â567
The material soul: Strategies for naturalising the soul in an early modern epicurean context
We usually portray the early modern period as one characterised by the âbirth of subjectivityâ with Luther and Descartes as two alternate representatives of this radical break with the past, each ushering in the new era in which âIâ am the locus of judgements about the world. A sub-narrative called âthe mind-body problemâ recounts how Cartesian dualism, responding to the new promise of a mechanistic science of nature, âsplit offâ the world of the soul/mind/self from the world of extended, physical substanceâa split which has preoccupied the philosophy of mind up until the present day. We would like to call attention to a different constellation of textsâneither a robust âtraditionâ nor an isolated âepisodeâ, somewhere in betweenâwhich have in common their indebtedness to, and promotion of an embodied, Epicurean approach to the soul. These texts follow the evocative hint given in Lucretiusâ De rerum natura that âthe soul is to the body as scent is to incenseâ (in an anonymous early modern French version). They neither assert the autonomy of the soul, nor the dualism of body and soul, nor again a sheer physicalism in which âintentionalâ properties are reduced to the basic properties of matter. Rather, to borrow the title of one of these treatises (LâĂme MatĂ©rielle), they seek to articulate the concept of a material soul. We reconstruct the intellectual development of a corporeal, mortal and ultimately material soul, in between medicine, natural philosophy and metaphysics, including discussions of Malebranche and Willis, but focusing primarily on texts including the 1675 Discours anatomiques by the Epicurean physician Guillaume Lamy; the anonymous manuscript from circa 1725 entitled LâĂme MatĂ©rielle, which is essentially a compendium of texts from the later seventeenth century (Malebranche, Bayle) along with excerpts from Lucretius; and materialist writings such Julien Offray de La Mettrieâs LâHomme-Machine (1748), in order to articulate this concept of a âmaterial soulâ with its implications for notions of embodiment, materialism and selfhood
Complexion, Temperament and FourâHumor Theory in the Renaissance
A central concept in Galenic medicine, the temperament designates the state of health resulting from the balance of the four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile (or melancholy). Produced in the liver during digestion, the humors stem from the mixture of the primary qualities (hot, cold, dry, and moist) related to the four elements (air, fire, water, and earth). The notion of temperament was fundamental for theoretical and practical medical branches, from physiology and pathology to therapeutics and dietetics. It defines the physical constitution of all living beings as well as food, drugs, and natural things in general. In therapeutics, the patientâs humoral imbalance is cured by a qualitatively âcontraryâ remedy, an appropriate diet or by surgical means such as bloodletting and clyster. Because temperament also involves the mixture of elements, it gave rise to long-standing debates in medieval and Renaissance philosophy about the status of the elements in the compound, in particular their qualities, matter, and form.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe
A Theory of Medical Effectiveness, Differential Mortality, Income Inequality and Growth for Pre-Industrial England
The interactions between mortality reductions and income growth are studied, with a special attention at their relationship prior to the Industrial Revolution, when income per head was stagnant. The choice of individual medical spending is modelled, giving a rationale for individual health expenditures even when medicine is not effective in postponing death. The rise of effective medicine is then explained by a learning process function of expenditure on health. The rise in effective medicine is linked to the economic growth of the eighteenth century through life expectancy increases which foster capital accumulation. The rise of effective medicine has also had an effect on the relationship between growth and inequality and on the intergenerational persistence of differences in income. These channels are operative through differential mortality induced by medical effectiveness that turns out to determine a differential in the propensity to save among income groups.differential mortality, health expenditure, life expectancy, propensity to save,