In his very distinguished career as a medical historian and chronicler of Galen, Vivian Nutton has often been involved in successful collaborative projects to map the course of European medicine, a...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.2 (2004) 191-211 [Access article in PDF] Oratory and Rhetoric in Renaissance Medicine Nancy G. Siraisi Hunter College In Renaissance medical practice rhetoric had an ambiguous reputation. Many authors warned physicians against use of persuasion or repeated some version of the truism that patients are cured not by eloquence but by medicines. On the other hand, physicians were also reminded (...) that by speaking well they helped patients to have confidence in their advice and to understand directions, which in turn facilitated cure.1 Yet some aspects of medical culture of the period between 1450 and 1600 seem profoundly attentive to rhetoric, at least as regards the use of language, performative elements, and the influence of these features in ancient models (most notably Galen himself).2 One area in which rhetoric had an unambiguous, acknowledged, and essential place was in the medical orations pronounced at university ceremonies. A sample follows: Pursuit of all these different things by study, investigation of obscurities with ingenuity, conquest of difficulties with industry, and—after penetrating into the very fibers of the earth and searching everywhere into the arcana of the whole of nature and from all herbs, fruits, trees, animals, gems, and even poisons—inquiry after remedies and the proper way to use them for all the ills of human life from so many authors, so many disciplines, and even from the very stars: these things, I say, [End Page 191] have uncovered so many hidden cures, been attained with such arduous powers of the mind, completed with so much effort of memory, offer so many things necessary for the health of the entire human race in common, that does not indeed [the entire enterprise of medicine] seem to have been superhuman and really in a certain way divine?3This nicely exuberant example of Renaissance medical rhetoric exemplifies the genre in several respects. The oration to which it belongs was originally delivered to an academic faculty of medicine by a physician; it shows the impact in medical settings of the revival of epideictic rhetoric, and its author drew on learned sources and commonplaces about medicine that belonged to a store of broadly humanistic erudition, shared both in and outside the medical profession. In fact the only truly distinctive feature of this passage is its author. It comes from Erasmus's Encomium medicinae, which he wrote in 1499 for a friend—a physician named Gysbertus—to deliver to the medical faculty of the University of Paris.4If Gysbertus was exceptionally fortunate in his ghost, many other surviving medical orations are internal products of medical faculties, the work of university masters or students of medicine. But whoever their authors, orations delivered in or written for an academic medical setting offer some telling illustrations both of the way in which certain kinds of humanistic interests and requirements came to penetrate medical learning and of the reaction of humanistic rhetoric to medicine. "Medical humanism" is usually understood to encompass both the core enterprise of intensive philological study, editing, and translation of Greek medical texts—never the occupation of more than a handful of hellenist scholars—and also the reception and scientific influence of the fruits of their labors among a wider medical audience. But Renaissance medicine was also a humanistic discipline in a much broader and more inclusive sense; that is, it both fostered and provided ample scope for the development among learned physicians of interests characteristic of humanistic culture in general: rhetoric, history, biography, fascination with remote peoples and places, and antiquarianism. At the same time, as the passage from Erasmus quoted [End Page 192] above demonstrates, humanists outside the medical profession interested themselves in medicine and controlled a stock of rhetorical commonplaces on the subject. To be sure, the penetration of terminology and concepts from medicine into the general culture long antedated the Renaissance.5 But the revival of rhetoric together with attention to ancient sources and commonplaces provided humanist observers with new tools for commenting, sometimes in quite specific and detailed terms, on the contemporary medical scene, a phenomenon... (shrink)

Girolamo Cardano's writings on medicine reflect both the complexity and diversity of the Renaissance medical world and the breadth of his own interests. This book draws on selected themes of in Cardano's medical writings to explore the relation between medicine and Renaissance.

Taneli Kukkonen - Jean Fernel's On the Hidden Causes of Things. Forms, Souls and Occult Diseases in Renaissance Medicine - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.1 158-159 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Taneli Kukkonen University of Victoria Jean Fernel's On the Hidden Causes of Things. Forms, Souls and Occult Diseases in Renaissance Medicine. Edited and translated by John M. Forrester. Annotated and introduced by John M. (...) Forrester and John Henry. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Pp. x + 779. Cloth, $237.00. Our understanding of how early modern conceptions of human nature emerged out of the intellectual tumult of the Renaissance and the Reformation has been greatly enhanced by a growing recognition of the way in which these developments built not only on contemporary scientific advances and a recovery of ancient learning, but also on the philosophical.. (shrink)

From antiquity, Galenic physicians extensively discussed the active powers of simple and compound drugs. In their views, simple drugs, that is, single ingredients, acted according to their material qualities and the properties of their substance. As for compound drugs, their efficacy resulted from the mutual interaction of their ingredients and their modes of preparation. In the late Renaissance, Galenic physicians and naturalists, such as Leonhart Fuchs and Pietro Andrea Mattioli, attempted to explain these pharmacological properties or “faculties” at the (...) intersection of medicine, botany, and natural philosophy. This chapter examines the case of the Italian physician and botanist Andrea Cesalpino. His pharmacological treatise De medicamentorum facultatibus [On the Faculties of Drugs, 1593] was particularly significant for its reception of ancient and medieval texts on drug properties, materia medica, and the role of the senses in the knowledge of bodies. (shrink)

Abstract:Over more than thirty years the Bolognese botanist, natural historian, and physician Ulisse Aldrovandi compiled his Pandechion epistemonicon—a manuscript encyclopedia composed of pasted note slips drawn from books he was reading. This article examines the 580 slips that comprise Aldrovandi’s Pandechion entry on old age. The entry allows us to examine how an early modern physician and his intellectual community approached old age as an epistemological problem with medical, poetic, and spiritual dimensions. Aldrovandi’s engagement with old age in the Pandechion (...) presents a fluid set of disciplinary boundaries for how we understand old age in the past and present. (shrink)

"Through a close reading of rarely studied materials, the author examines the contested position of the body in Renaissance philosophy, showing how abstract metaphysical ideas evolved in tandem with the creation of new metaphors that shaped the understanding of early modern political, cultural, and scientific practices. The result is a new approach to the issues that describes the function of new technologies (such as optics and distillation) and their interaction with popular creeds (such as witchcraft and folk medicine), (...) as well as their relationship to the newly discovered ancient Greek and Roman texts that captured the attention of Renaissance intellectuals. The text also investigates, for the first time, how some philosophers forged their original syntheses from newly available and traditional materials. In so doing, these philosophers contributed in unexpected ways to the formation of new cultural practices--practices that entailed largely unexplored conceptualisations of physical bodies but also linked inextricably to the formation of new and striking metaphors for the physical world."--Publisher. (shrink)

This is a major work by Ian Maclean exploring the foundations of learning in the Renaissance. Logic, Signs and Nature offers a profoundly learned, compelling and original account of the range of what was thinkable and knowable by learned medics of the period c.1530-1630. This is a study of great significance to the history of medicine, as well as the history of European ideas in general.

This article sets out to investigate aspects of the uptake of Renaissance law and medicine from some of the logical and natural-philosophical components of the university arts course. Medicine is shown to have a much laxer operative logic than law, reflecting its commitment to the theory of idiosyncrasy as opposed to the demands made upon the law by the need for a uniform application of justice. Symptomatic of the different uptake arc the contrasting meanings of "regulariter" and (...) "generaliter" in the two disciplines. Whereas the law treats the rule as inviolable and the exception as only valid if made explicit in due legal form, medicine is able to conceive of a nature as a field of knowledge broader than that encompassed by its rules of art. Both law and medicine approach evidence. (shrink)

A Karger 'Publishing Highlights 1890-2015' title This 2nd, revised edition is still the reference work available in print and electronically on Paracelsus by the Paracelsus authority. Furthermore, it makes a very good read. See also Pagel's last book The Smiling Spleen on Paracelsianism as a historical phenomenon. '...a work in the brilliant tradition of biographical research... even the casual reader will be impressed to learn that, four centuries ago, the man who had the courage to burn in public the writings (...) of Avicenna, recognised pulmonary disease in miners as an occupational hazard, cretinism and goitre as endemic in certain areas, and chorea and hysteria as manifestations of disease, not demonic possession.' The Lancet. (shrink)

This third collection of Charles Schmitt's articles complements the previous two and consists largely of studies published in the last few years of his life. It therefore contains his mature reflections on central issues in the fields of Renaissance philosophy and science, as well as important new research findings. The main subjects are Aristotelianism and Scepticism, and the history of medicine and natural philosophy. Some articles assess the place of traditional elements in the work of major scientific innovators, (...) such as Galileo or Harvey, others make available new sources of documentation and show the significance of writings others had not deigned to look at. Charles Schmitt's insistence that Renaissance thought should be reconstructed in terms faithful to the value systems of the period also led to an increasing interest in the socio-economic context of philosophical speculation, reflected here in the studies on the University of Pisa in the 16th century. (shrink)

Various historical sources from the Renaissance--including transcripts of trials for witchcraft, writings on demonology and textbooks of pharmaceutical botany--describe vegetal ointments prepared by women accused of witchcraft and endowed with marked psychoactive properties. Here, we examine the botanical composition and the possible pharmacological actions of these ointments. The results of our study suggest that recipes for narcotic and mind-altering salves were known to Renaissance folk healers, and were in part distinct from homologous preparations of educated medicine. In (...) addition, our study reveals an unexpected connection of these vegetal psychotropes with archaic chtonic beliefs, confirming the tight association between rituals and cults entered on the Underworld and the image of the Medieval witch. (shrink)

The Legacy of Aristotelian Enthymeme provides a historical-logical analysis of Aristotle's rhetorical syllogism, the enthymeme, through its Medieval and Renaissance interpretations. Bringing together notions of credibility and proof, an international team of scholars highlight the fierce debates around this form of argumentation during two key periods for Aristotle's beliefs.Reflecting on medieval and humanist thinkers, philosophers, poets and theologians, this volume joins up dialectical and rhetorical argumentation as key to the enthymeme's interpretation and shows how the enthymeme was the source (...) of a major interpretive conflict. As a method for achieving the standards for proof and credibility that persist across diverse fields of study today including the law, politics, medicine and morality, this book takes in Latin and Persian interpretations of the enthymeme and casts contemporary argumentation in a new historical light. (shrink)

The Canon of Avicenna, one of the principal texts of Arabic origin to be assimilated into the medical learning of medieval Europe, retained importance in Renaissance and early modern European medicine. After surveying the medieval reception of the book, Nancy Siraisi focuses on the Canon in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italy, and especially on its role in the university teaching of philosophy of medicine and physiological theory. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest (...) print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)