Archibald Pitcairne’s medical writings are inspired by Newton’s Principia mathematica, as the Scottish physician assumed Newtonian physics as a model for scientific inquiry that should be applied to other branches of natural philosophy, including physiology and pathology. The ideal of a comprehensive mathematical science was very appealing to late seventeenth-century intellectuals, including physicians. This essay focuses on how Pitcairne tried to implement these ideas. In particular, I argue that Pitcairne’s medical thinking is based on three philosophical assumptions: first, a methodological (...) assumption, for which medical knowledge should be sought in the form of a deductive system; second, an epistemological assumption, that is, that our knowledge of physiological processes is sound only when we reduce them to a set of mathematical laws; and, third, an ontological assumption that identifies blood as the substance on which animal life most directly depends. I also suggest that such ideas should be studied against the backdrop of Pitcairne’s general mindset, including his personal sympathy for political conservativism. I further argue that his insistence on the reduction of natural processes to mathematical relations and his search for the universal order of nature also connect to his religious and political ideals. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In 1929 and 1934–1935, the physical anthropologist Harry L. Shapiro voyaged in the South Seas on the Mahina-I-Te-Pua and the Zaca, measuring mixed-race islanders, including the descendants of the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn Island. His research in Polynesian hybridity reflects the growing cultural and scientific investment of the United States in the Pacific during this period. Shapiro's oceanic adventures and intimate encounters prompted him to discount typological speculation and emphasize instead the liberal Boasian program in physical anthropology, giving (...) him the confidence to refigure his evaluations of racial difference. The seaborne investigatory enterprise came to influence U.S. racial thought, adding impetus to the condemnation of racism in science. On his return from the South Seas, Shapiro tried to get his fellow physical anthropologists to issue a manifesto opposing the harnessing of their science to racial discrimination and prejudice. (shrink)

Newton’s impact on Enlightenment natural philosophy has been studied at great length, in its experimental, methodological and ideological ramifications. One aspect that has received fairly little attention is the role Newtonian “analogies” played in the formulation of new conceptual schemes in physiology, medicine, and life science as a whole. So-called ‘medical Newtonians’ like Pitcairne and Keill have been studied; but they were engaged in a more literal project of directly transposing, or seeking to transpose, Newtonian laws into quantitative models of (...) the body. I am interested here in something different: neither the metaphysical reading of Newton, nor direct empirical transpositions, but rather, a more heuristic, empiricist construction of Newtonian analogies. Figures such as Haller, Barthez, and Blumenbach constructed analogies between the method of celestial mechanics and the method of physiology. In celestial mechanics, they held, an unknown entity such as gravity is posited and used to mathematically link sets of determinate physical phenomena (e.g., the phases of the moon and tides). This process allows one to remain agnostic about the ontological status of the unknown entity, as long as the two linked sets of phenomena are represented adequately. Haller et. al. held that the Newtonian physician and physiologist can similarly posit an unknown called ‘life’ and use it to link various other phenomena, from digestion to sensation and the functioning of the glands. These phenomena consequently appear as interconnected, goal-oriented processes which do not exist either in an inanimate mechanism or in a corpse. In keeping with the empiricist roots of the analogy, however, no ontological claims are made about the nature of this vital principle, and no attempts are made to directly causally connect such a principle and observable phenomena. The role of the “Newtonian analogy” thus brings together diverse schools of thought, and cuts across a surprising variety of programs, models and practices in natural philosophy. (shrink)

In this chapter I argue that the general category of 'iatromechanics' conceals different views about how mathematics and mathematical physics should be applied in medicine, and thereby about how physiology should be quantified and mathematized. Mechanism, quantification and mathematization are indeed different, albeit interrelated, notions, which overlap without ever coming to be identical, and all of which depend upon the overall epistemological debate over the method for finding truth in science. This chapter compares the epistemological thought of the Newtonians Archibald (...) Pitcairne (1652-1713), James Keill (1673-1719) and the rationalists Yvo Gaukes (ca. 1660-1738) and Friedrich Hoffman (1660-1742). It contends that, still in the early eighteenth-century, contrasting understandings and uses of quantification in medicine related to different conceptions of the epistemological status of mathematics and its connection with experience especially. The chapter then focuses on how the experimental quantitative approach introduced in physiology by Santorio Santorio (1561-1636) is understood in these different scenarios. I argue that contrasting understandings and uses of quantification in medicine correspond not only to different conceptions about the epistemological status of mathematics, but also of its conjunction with experience. (shrink)

What is our nature? : What does government do for us, and to us? -- Cooperation : lepers & pirates -- Punishment : Drop City & the utopian communes -- Justice : 1850's San Francisco & the California gold rush -- Injustice : the Attica uprising & the Batavia shipwreck -- Survival : the Inuits of King William Land & the mutineers on Pitcairn Island -- Subversion : hellships & prison camps -- Credibility : America's prohibition -- Excess : (...) committing felony murder while asleep in bed & life in prison for an air-conditioning fraud -- Failure : getting away with murder beyond a reasonable doubt -- Collapse : Escobar's Colombia -- Taking justice seriously five proposals -- Epilogue : what are they doing now? (shrink)