Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

Building Bensalem at Massachusetts Bay: Francis Bacon and the Wisdom of Eden in Early Modern New England

2010 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-606
Author(s):  
Zachary Mcleod Hutchins
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Educational Policies ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Religious Leaders

Francis Bacon's influence on seventeenth-century New England has long passed unnoticed, but his plan for the restoration of prelapsarian intellectual perfections guided John Winthrop's initial colonization efforts, shaped New England's educational policies, and had an impact on civic and religious leaders from John Cotton to Jonathan Edwards.

Was There a Scientific Revolution?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Heilbron
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Republic

This article asks whether there was a Scientific Revolution (SR) at anytime between 1550 and1800. The label ‘Scientific Revolution’ to indicate a period in the development of natural knowledge in early modern Europe has carved a place in historiography. This article suggests that there was SR, if SR signifies a period of time; perhaps, if it is taken as a metaphor. It illustrates how the deployment of the metaphor to seventeenth-century natural knowledge might be accomplished. It also considers the physics of René Descartes, the influence of Cartesianism throughout the Republic of Letters, and the academies. The metaphor can be useful if it is taken in analogy to a major political revolution. The analogy points to a later onset, and a swifter career, for the SR than is usually prescribed, and shows that Isaac Newton was its counter rather than its culmination.

scholarly journals ‘Magic coins’ and ‘magic squares’: the discovery of astrological sigils in the Oldenburg Letters

2008 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Perceived Efficacy ◽  
Magic Squares ◽  
Early Modern Medicine

Enclosed in a 1673 letter to Henry Oldenburg were two drawings of a series of astrological sigils, coins and amulets from the collection of Strasbourg mathematician Julius Reichelt (1637–1719). As portrayals of particular medieval and early modern sigils are relatively rare, this paper will analyse the role of these medals in medieval and early modern medicine, the logic behind their perceived efficacy, and their significance in early modern astrological and cabalistic practice. I shall also demonstrate their change in status in the late seventeenth century from potent magical healing amulets tied to the mysteries of the heavens to objects kept in a cabinet for curiosos. The evolving perception of the purpose of sigils mirrored changing early modern beliefs in the occult influences of the heavens upon the body and the natural world, as well as the growing interests among virtuosi in collecting, numismatics and antiquities.

Francis Bacon and His Fate in the History and Philosophy of Science, 2010–2020

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 206-220
Author(s):  
Doina-Cristina Rusu ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Scientific Methodology ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Theory And Experiments

In this review I analyse new trends in Bacon-scholarship over the last decade. Bacon’s role in the history and philosophy of science has been the topic of debate since the second half of the seventeenth century. Scholars took him to be either a key figure in the emergence of experimental sciences, or the opposite of what science is supposed to be. However, most of these bold claims were based on distortions and misunderstandings of Bacon’s programme. Starting in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, several studies offered a more nuanced account of Bacon’s philosophy and tried to refute some of the ‘unsound criticisms’. Moreover, over the last decade, we can notice a tendency to focus on Bacon’s more practical works, and not only on the more theoretical ones. In the context of these practical works, I identified several new trends: the role of the natural and experimental histories in the overall project of the Great Instauration, and their relation with natural philosophy; the function of mathematics and quantification; the employment of instruments and other devices to overcome the shortcomings of both the senses and the minds; the scientific methodology with an emphasis on the relation between theory and experiments, and the use of exploratory experiments; and finally Bacon’s use of sources and his influence on later early modern authors. As opposed to the idea that Bacon was interested either in collecting random facts or in inventing experimental reports to present his speculative ideas, Bacon is lately portrayed as a careful experimenter, meticulous in writing reports, ingenious in designing instruments and new experiments, and critical towards his own conceptions.

Wonderful Works of Nature: C.S. Lewis and Reijer Hooykaas on Francis Bacon and the Scientific Revolution

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-209
Author(s):  
Arend Smilde
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
History Of ◽  
Good For

This article examines a disagreement which briefly came to light decades ago, half-posthumously, between two twentieth-century Christian scholars, C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) and Reijer Hooykaas (1906–1994), the first Dutch professor in the history of science, who later succeeded to the chair of Eduard Dijksterhuis in Utrecht. Hooykaas and Lewis diverge in their views of the role traditionally ascribed to the work of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) as a major inspiration for the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. Put briefly, while Bacon is a hero for Hooykaas, he is an antihero for Lewis. Sorting out the extent to which either scholar was right not only results in a fairly clear answer but entails, as a bonus, a fine example of what the history of science as an academic discipline is indeed good for.

The Public Anatomy Lesson

2020 ◽  
pp. 217-262
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
State Building ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Dutch Painter

This chapter analyses a crucible of the state’s making in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the public anatomy lesson. The body, this piece of ‘natural’ property that every human ‘has’, was being increasingly opened up and peered into for the purposes of finally seeing human nature itself. Bringing together visual studies and international relations, the chapter charts the scopic regime that established vision as modernity’s primary ordered instrument and that was honed upon the body dissected in public. To map its contours, it begins with the writings of anatomist William Harvey and scientist-statesman Francis Bacon. The chapter then tracks how this scopic regime was institutionalised by the spread of the highly popular public anatomy lesson across early modern Europe. It then analyses Renaissance and early modern representations of the public anatomy lesson, notably the frontispiece of the first manual of modern medicine, Andrea Vesalius’s On the Fabric of the Human Body (1943), and Dutch painter Rembrandt’s anatomy lesson paintings. The chapter examines the work of boundary-drawing and state-building wrought by these public performances by tracking the roles of the female and the poor body in their crafting.

scholarly journals Was there a Scientific Revolution?

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER HARRISON
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Western History ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Major Discipline

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Scientific Revolution came to be understood as a key period in Western history. Recently, historians have cast doubt upon this category, questioning whether the relevant institutions and practices of the seventeenth century are similar enough to modern science to warrant the label ‘scientific’. A central focus of their criticisms has been the identity of natural philosophy – the major discipline concerned with the study of nature in the early modern period – and its differences from modern science. This paper explores natural philosophy and its relation to philosophy more generally. It concludes that a significant philosophical revolution took place in the seventeenth century, and that this was important for the subsequent emergence of modern science.

scholarly journals Puer barbatus: Precocious Puberty in Early Modern Medicine

2020 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-52
Author(s):  
Diederik F Janssen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Precocious Puberty ◽  
Pubertal Timing ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Social Stressors ◽  
Marriage Age ◽  
Early Modern Medicine ◽  
Novel Reading

Abstract During early modernity, medico-legal concerns with timing puberty gave way to physiological and medical-hygienic concerns with pubertal timing. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical-jurisprudential tracts isolated rare cases of conception before the legal marriage age. Scattered reports of “monstrously” early menarche and “prodigious” male puberty were offered from the latter half of the seventeenth century. Tied to excess heat, moisture, plethora and climate since antiquity, in the second half of the eighteenth century pubertal timing attracted sustained commentary regarding the purported role of social stressors, from novel-reading to diet and trousers. Both the known variability and strikingly outlying instances of pubertal timing thus provided an inroad to unravelling such perennial explanatory devices as temperament, constitution, and life style. Despite and in part because of its explanatory significance in early modern physiology, leading eighteenth-century nosologists did not yet itemize precocious puberty. One precocious boy described in the 1740s, the Willingham Prodigy, provided the best documented early medical and public response. Formal nosological interest followed by the 1760s, initially under Haller’s heading of excessive growth (incrementum nimium, tied to enhanced circulation) and only much later under Meckel the Younger’s heading of premature development (vorschnelle Entwicklung).

Examples and experience: on the uncertainty of medicine

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN PENDER
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Medical History ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Medical Theory ◽  
The Common ◽  
Medical Writers

After a brief account of the uncertainty of medicine in early modern thought, this paper focuses on two supple, sophisticated accounts of medicine by ‘non-medical’ writers – Michel de Montaigne's views of medical theory and medical practice and Francis Bacon's proposals for renovating both – in which the claims of individual sufferers are set against the normativity of medicine as a whole. From around 1500 to around 1680, in the common ensemble of both learned and popular invective, medicine was disparaged as poor philosophy and worse practice, even as the ‘lowest of professions’. In remarkably broad, elegant interventions, Montaigne argues that medicine is based on ‘examples and experience’ (and ‘so is my opinion’, he adds), impugning its universalizing claims with the tractable experience of his own embodiment, with his own historia and consilium, while Francis Bacon enlists dietetics, Hippocratic case-taking and medical history in his broad programme for the reform of medicine. He more or less accepts Montaigne's argument for particularity in medical theory and practice, but presses the particular into service in his reformist programme. Like many sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century scholars and physicians frustrated with Galenic methods and models, both turn to Hippocratic practice and to hygiene and dietetics as salves for an ailing discipline. Finally, I argue that both writers enquire into viable means for inflecting learned medicine with particular experience, and both settle on rhetorical tools – analogy and exemplarity – as the means by which universalized medical models might be particularized or reformed.

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