17 research outputs found

    Tres medici, duo athei? The Physician as Atheist and the Medicalization of the Soul

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    Until recently, examinations of the ‘mind-body problem’ in historical context paid only cursory attention to its specifically medical dimension, if at all. At best, some ‘folk physiology’ was entertained, usually to laugh at it (the pineal gland, animal spirits). Conversely, historians of neuroscience or of artificial intelligence (Jeannerod 1985, Dupuy 2000) often present figures like La Mettrie as heroic early cases of ‘naturalization’, giving an experimental basis to materialism: their symmetrically inverse mistake is to take professions of medical authority too literally (although there are genuine cases where all of the above does coalesce – where ‘actors’ categories mysteriously transcend historiographic projections –, such as Hieronymus Gaub’s reflections on the ‘regimen of the mind’ in the mid-eighteenth century, or, more theoretically, Guillaume Lamy’s Epicurean-inflected Anatomical Discourses on the Soul, eighty years earlier). Contrary to the denial of the relevance of medicine in early modern philosophy, as regards issues such as the body-soul (then body-mind) relation among others, it seems patently difficult to separate medical theory, medically nourished philosophical speculation, and metaphysics. This is the case, whether in Descartes, Gaub, the ‘animist’ Georg-Ernest Stahl, or materialists such as Guillaume Lamy and La Mettrie: medicine, or rather ‘a certain idea of medicine’, is everywhere. Here I focus on the motif of a radical medicine – a medical precursor of the Radical Enlightenment (Israel 2001, 2006, 2007), symbolized negatively by the slogan, tres medici, duo athei, or ‘where there are three doctors, there are two atheists’, i.e. medicine as a basis for atheism. This theme runs through various works of medical or medico-theological propaganda: Thomas Browne’s 1643 De religio medici begins with Browne regretting rumors of doctors being atheists as the “general scandal of my Profession”; Germain de Bezançon’s 1677 Les mĂ©decins Ă  la censure works hard at rebutting the saying, “Bon Physicien, mauvais chrĂ©tien.” But these are examples of the fear of a radical medicine – a medicine that denies the existence of an immortal soul, or even defends materialism and atheism. Are there positive statements of this doctrine? Indeed, attacks on it are much more common than statements identifying with it, like medical versions of natural theology in general. In fact, just as there were theologically motivated medical works, there were also medically motivated works of radical or heretical theology, like William Coward’s Second Thoughts on the Human Soul (Coward 1702, building on Overton 1644), which engaged in polemics concerning the nature of the soul – mortal or immortal? (Thomson 2008). Parallel to the mortalist trend, but flowing into a common genre of radical, medico-materialist texts (sometimes anonymous, such as L’Âme MatĂ©rielle, from the 1720s) are at least two other strands of radical medicine: a post-Cartesian focus on medicina mentis and the nature of the mind (Henricus Regius, Hieronymus Gaub, Antoine Le Camus), and an Epicurean medicine, in which mind and body are organismically united, with an additional hedonistic component, notably in Lamy, Mandeville and La Mettrie (Wright 1991, Wolfe and van Esveld 2014). The focus on a medicine of the mind (Corneanu, ms. 2013) is obviously connected to a ‘medicalization of the soul’: there was a body-soul problem in and for medicine, a sort of medicalized ‘pneumatology’. Radical medicine is located somewhere in between the early forms of ‘naturalization’ or ‘medicalization’ of the soul and the pose of scientific neutrality that is characteristic of early nineteenth-century medicine (as in Cabanis, Bichat or Bernard): it is a short-lived episode. I seek to reconstruct this intellectual figure, in which mortalist, post-Cartesian and Epicurean strands intersect and sometimes come together. I suggest that medically influenced materialism in the Radical Enlightenment (e.g. in the later French cases, La Mettrie, MĂ©nuret and Diderot), is different from later, more experimentally focused and more quantitatively oriented forms of medical materialism, precisely because of its radical dimension. This radical medicine often insists on vitality, as opposed to “anatomie cadavĂ©rique”: it is vital and hedonistic, a medicine concerned with maintaining bodily pleasure.Until recently, examinations of the 'mind-body problem' in historical context paid only cursory attention to its specifically medical dimension, if at all. At best, some 'folk physiology' was entertained, usually to laugh at it (the pineal gland, animal spirits). Conversely, historians of neuroscience or of artificial intelligence (Jeannerod M, The brain machine. The development of neurophysiological thought, trans. D. Urion, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1985; Dupuy J-P, The mechanization of the mind: on the origins of cognitive science, trans. M.B. DeBevoise, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000) often present figures like La Mettrie as heroic early cases of 'naturalization', giving an experimental basis to materialism: their symmetrically inverse mistake is to take professions of medical authority too literally (although there are genuine cases where all of the above does coalesce where 'actors' categories mysteriously transcend historiographic projections -, such as Hieronymus Gaub's reflections on the 'regimen of the mind' in the mid-eighteenth century, or, more theoretically, Guillaume Lamy's Epicurean-inflected Anatomical Discourses on the Soul, eighty years earlier). Contrary to the denial of the relevance of medicine in early modern philosophy, as regards issues such as the body-soul (then body-mind) relation among others, it seems patently difficult to separate medical theory, medically nourished philosophical speculation, and metaphysics. This is the case, whether in Descartes, Gaub, the 'animist' Georg-Ernest Stahl, or materialists such as Guillaume Lamy and La Mettrie: medicine, or rather 'a certain idea of medicine', is everywhere.Here I focus on the motif of a radical medicine - a medical precursor of the Radical Enlightenment (Israel J, Radical enlightenment. Philosophy and the making of modernity, 1650-1750, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001; Israel J, Enlightenment contested. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006, Israel J, Enlightenment, radical enlightenment and the "medical revolution" of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In: Grell OP, Cunningham A (ed) Medicine and religion in enlightenment Europe. Ashgate, Aldershot, pp 5-28, 2007), symbolized negatively by the slogan, tres medici, duo athei, or 'where there are three doctors, there are two atheists', i.e. medicine as a basis for atheism. This theme runs through various works of medical or medico-theological propaganda: Thomas Browne's 1643 De religio medici begins with Browne regretting rumors of doctors being atheists as the "general scandal of my Profession"; Germain de Bezancon's 1677 Les medecins a la censure works hard at rebutting the saying, "Bon Physicien, mauvais chretien." But these are examples of the fear of a radical medicine - a medicine that denies the existence of an immortal soul, or even defends materialism and atheism. Are there positive statements of this doctrine? Indeed, attacks on it are much more common than statements identifying with it, like medical versions of natural theology in general.In fact, just as there were theologically motivated medical works, there were also medically motivated works of radical or heretical theology, like William Coward's Second Thoughts on the Human Soul (Coward W, Second thoughts on the human soul. R. Basset, London, 1702, building on Overton 1644), which engaged in polemics concerning the nature of the soul - mortal or immortal? (Thomson A, Bodies of thought: science, religion, and the soul in the early enlightenment. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008). Parallel to the mortalist trend, but flowing into a common genre of radical, medico-materialist texts (sometimes anonymous, such as L'Ame Materielle, from the 1720s) are at least two other strands of radical medicine: a post-Cartesian focus on medicina mentis and the nature of the mind (Henricus Regius, Hieronymus Gaub, Antoine Le Camus), and an Epicurean medicine, in which mind and body are organismically united, with an additional hedonistic component, notably in Lamy, Mandeville and La Mettrie (Wright JP, Locke, Willis, and the seventeenth-century epicurean soul. In: Osler MJ (ed) Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and stoic themes in European thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 239-258, 1991; Wolfe CT, van Esveld M, The material soul: strategies for naturalising the soul in an early modern epicurean context. In: Kambaskovic D (ed) Conjunctions: body, soul and mind from Plato to the enlightenment. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 371-421, 2014). The focus on a medicine of the mind (Corneanu, (ms. 2013), The care of the whole man: medicine and theology in the late renaissance, 2013) is obviously connected to a 'medicalization of the soul': there was a body-soul problem in and for medicine, a sort of medicalized 'pneumatology'. Radical medicine is located somewhere in between the early forms of 'naturalization' or 'medicalization' of the soul and the pose of scientific neutrality that is characteristic of early nineteenth-century medicine (as in Cabanis, Bichat or Bernard): it is a short-lived episode. I seek to reconstruct this intellectual figure, in which mortalist, post-Cartesian and Epicurean strands intersect and sometimes come together. I suggest that medically influenced materialism in the Radical Enlightenment (e.g. in the later French cases, La Mettrie, Menuret and Diderot), is different from later, more experimentally focused and more quantitatively oriented forms of medical materialism, precisely because of its radical dimension. This radical medicine often insists on vitality, as opposed to "anatomie cadaverique": it is vital and hedonistic, a medicine concerned with maintaining bodily pleasure

    From genesis to gene sequencing:historical progress in the understanding of skin color

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    Since at least biblical times, humans have pondered on why there might be variation in skin color and what might constitute the nature of that difference. In this article, two historical trails are followed, one beginning with the Ancient Greeks, the other with the Ancient Chinese. These two paths converge to provide us with some historical evidence to back recent scientific discoveries in the dynamic regulation of skin pigmentation, focusing on melanocyte-stimulating hormone and its natural antagonist agouti-signaling protein

    Enduring Influence of Elizabethan Ophthalmic Texts of the 1580s: Bailey, Grassus, and Guillemeau

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    Three English ophthalmic texts of the 1580s were frequently republished: 1) Walter Bailey’s A Briefe Treatise Touching the Preseruation of the Eie Sight, 2) The Method of Phisicke, an adaptation of the medieval treatise of Benevenutus Grassus, and 3) A Worthy Treatise of the Eyes, a translation of Jacques Guillemeau’s treatise. Their history is intertwined through composite publications, some of which lacked clear attribution. At least 21 editions incorporated these texts. Although not previously realized, major elements of all 3 works are found in Two Treatises Concerning the Preseruation of Eie-sight, first published in 1616. To preserve eyesight, Bailey recommended eyebright (Euphrasia officinalis), fennel (Féniculum vulgare), and a moderate lifestyle incorporating wine. In the works of Grassus and Guillemeau, cataracts were believed to lie anterior to the ‘crystalline humor,’ and were treated by the ‘art of the needle,’ or couching. Links are found between Grassus, Guillemeau, and eighteenth century glaucoma concepts. Although one of his students has traditionally received credit, it was English oculist John Thomas Woolhouse who first combined the early concepts and used the term glaucoma to describe the palpably hard eye in the early eighteenth century. The three primary ophthalmic texts of 1580s England influenced ophthalmic thought for over a century

    Building a sexological concept through fictional narrative: The case of 'frigidity' in late nineteenth-century France

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    This paper raises a question about the role of literary texts in intellectual and cultural history, taking the particular example of middle-brow novels published by a set of Parisian publishers during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. It locates those novels with respect to medical writing about sexual pathology, with a particular focus on the notion of female frigidity, which was something of a new topic at that time. The Parisian publishers' catalogues contained a range of texts from popular medical `libraries' to outright pornography, but the greater part of the books they offered for sale were more or less respectable novels with some intellectual pretensions. The paper identifies some commonplaces about frigidity that emerged at the time, and shows that middle-brow novels sometimes led medical writing in the production of those commonplaces, notably by their construction and rehearsal of typical narratives about women characters

    Botany and Medicine

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    In both theoretical and practical medicine, the study of plants played a significant role in the early modern period. As branches of medical knowledge, herbs, plants, and vegetal bodies were the subject of (1) the fabrication of therapeutics, called simples; (2) the discipline of signatures, the knowledge of the hidden key connecting bodies; and (3) the physiological study of living functions, such as growth, nutrition, and generation. Drawing on ancient scholarly tradition, the work of early modern physicians, chymists, women, and natural philosophers reveals the medical importance of botany, which slowly attained an autonomous status in the seventeenth century
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