Descartes’ Man Under Construction: The Circulatory Statue of Salomon Reisel, 1680

This paper studies the “human circulatory statues” which Salomon Reisel designed in the 1670s in order to demonstrate the circulation of the blood and its effect on the brain. It investigates how Reisel intended this project to promote Descartes’ philosophy, and how it relates to contemporary diagrammatic schematizations of the blood circulation system. It further explores Reisel’s claims concerning the epistemological and practical advantages of working with a three-dimensional model and argues that Reisel intended his statua to address the concerns of his fellow physicians and, more specifically, to help in diagnostics. I consider the background, strategy and legacy of the essays in which Reisel presented his devices, as well as their relevance to the general project of the scien­tific journal – one of the earliest – in which they appeared, the Miscellanea Curiosa. Reisel was a leading physician who acted throughout his life as a mediator between the Royal Society and the Academia Naturæ Curiosorum. His articles, the paper argues, have much to tell us much about the role played by the recently established scientific academies and their journals in shaping the transmission of early modern science and medicine, in terms both of theories and of the knowledge embodied in scientific instruments.

1919-1939: The First Life of the Union

In April 1919, delegates of five allied nations gathered in Paris, at the initiative of the Société de Chimie Industrielle (SCI-F) and the French Federation of Chemical Associations (FNAC) to decide on the creation of an interallied confederation for pure and applied chemistry. The delegates were following up on a proposal made by the Interallied Conference of Scientific Academies that had met in London and Paris in 1918. Each country was asked to create a national body in each discipline, and these entities would be united into a Union, at first an interallied then international union when the wounds of war healed. The whole structure was to be headed by an International Research Council (IRC) [1].

Tools for Science

This article presents an overall reflection on the libraries that were assembled in scientific institutions in France and Italy in the eighteenth century using case studies and comparative approaches. It focuses in particular on five scientific academies (located in Turin, Florence, Paris and Brest) and two Florentine institutions, the Museo di Fisica e di Storia Naturale and the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital. Decisions made regarding library premises, book procurement policies, catalogue publications and whether or not to open to the public were all investments that demonstrated the role of the written culture in the identity of scholarly communities, including those (such as the naval and surgeons’ communities) whose members had long been seen as professionals firmly rooted in a manual practice that was detached from theory. This article thus shows how libraries participated in the institutionalisation of scientific activities, the definition of professional knowledge and the formation of scholarly collectives.