Health in the Early Modern Philosophical Tradition

This chapter examines the connections between medicine and philosophy in the seventeenth century with a particular focus on Anne Conway, Rene Descartes, and thinkers influenced by Descartes such as Henricus Regius, Jacques Rohault, and Johannes De Raey. It is shown that, despite the strong dualism associated with Descartes, thinkers of the period were very interested in the close connections between body and mind. One problem confronting these thinkers was how to reconcile their mechanistic, anti-teleological understanding of bodies with the normative concept of health. It is also shown that Descartes was intensely concerned with using philosophy to achieve a good state of both mind and body, a project shared by medical authors who adopted the Cartesian system.

Health in the Renaissance

In the Renaissance medicine was still based largely on the works of Galen, but increasingly the Galenic medical paradigm was tested and modified. This was in part the result of new findings in anatomy, in part the result of new reflection on the nature and sources of health. The humanists pointed to cultural and physical factors to account for the flourishing of the human person, though figures such as Cardano continued to work with the Galenic idea of the six non-naturals. Ficino, Francis Bacon, and others proposed that one could preserve health through a “medicine of the mind” that would be grounded partly in an understanding of the states of the body, in part on the mind’s influence on the body. Consideration was also given to defining just what it means to live a flourishing life.

The Soul’s Virtue and the Health of the Body in Ancient Philosophy

This chapter undertakes a comparison between ancient philosophy and ancient medicine, showing that in Greek works and texts of the Roman period a parallel was drawn between the therapeutic art of medicine for the body and philosophy as a form of therapy in its own right. Attention is also paid to the epistemological dimension of medicine, with a variety of thinkers taking different stances on the kind of knowledge available to medicine and its sources. Do doctors have a mere “knack” for curing like rhetoricians with their art of persuasion, or is medicine a science in the full and proper sense? Authors and traditions covered include Plato, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Pyrrhonist Skeptics, as well as medical thinkers like Diocles and Herophilus.

Introduction

This introduction to the volume gives an overview of the chapters, setting out a case for integrating the history of philosophy with the history of medicine and sketching some of the key philosophical issues that arise around the concept of health. These include the difficulty of defining “health,” the mind-body relationship, and questions about how philosophy informs medical science and practice. A central idea is that the concept of health operates at two levels, the mental and the physical (or the soul and the body), so that ethical virtue and physical well-being have often been seen as parallel or mutually dependent.

Reflection

The Roman physician Galen wrote in his instruction manual On Anatomical Procedures: “As poles to tents and walls to houses, so are bones to living creatures.” In his short treatise On Bones for Beginners he added that bones were the “hardest and driest parts of the living body and, as one might say, the earthiest. . . . All else depends on or is attached to them.” Therefore knowledge of the skeleton must precede any other exploration of the body....

Reflection

What does a healthy artist look like? Perhaps artists themselves are not the ones to tell us. Oftentimes, it’s true, they have presented themselves as respectable and entirely well-adjusted, suited, or smocked, standing at the easel with palette in hand. But the more indelible images left to us by art history, particularly since the onset of Romanticism in the nineteenth century, are more vivid and less peaceful of mind. Take, for example, Theodore Géricault, an early nineteenth-century painter who defined the Romantic sensibility both in his work and life. In one of his earliest works, Géricault showed himself slouched in a chair with a skull perched on the shelf above him. The pictorial analogy between his own youthful, handsome visage and the death’s head was clear: the artist was haunted by his own eventual demise. In 1824, shortly after completing a series of sensitive portrayals of “monomanics” (the inhabitants of asylums), which form a visual canon of mental disturbance, he would make good on the prediction of his early self-portrait, showing himself hollow-eyed and ghoulish, a dying man, as indeed he was. Géricault was soon to pass away at the age of thirty-two of tuberculosis....

Health in the Eighteenth Century

This chapter first offers a survey of definitions and conceptions of health in the eighteenth century, drawing on a range of sources including medical textbooks such as Herman Boerhaave’s Institutiones Medicae and Diderot’s Encyclopédie. It then moves on to examine the notion of “sensibility” that offered a link between the organic and the mental and moral spheres of human life. The Swiss thinker Samuel Auguste Tissot is discussed for the close connections he draws between moral and physical deficiency. The role of “sensibility” in accounting for women’s supposed emotional instability is related to anatomical ideas about the gendered body, for instance in Pierre Roussel’s Système physique et moral de la femme. A final section looks at advances made in public health during the period.

Health in Arabic Ethical Works

This chapter focuses on the idea of ethics as a form of medicine for the soul, inspired by Greek works including the Galenic corpus and espoused in the Islamic world by Abu Bakr al-Razi, Abu Zayd al-Balkhi, and Miskawayh. It is proposed that we should take this idea seriously on the basis of pervasive parallels between bodily and “spiritual” medicine, for instance the need for preventative measures, the tailoring of such measures to particular patients, the claim that a person may be unaware of their own illness or deficient state, and above all the idea of “balance” in the humors of the body and the parts of the soul. It is also asked whether philosophical argument is really a plausible means of curing maladies of the soul like emotional disturbance.

Health and Philosophy in Pre- and Early Imperial China

Though there was no single Chinese term that corresponds to the English word health, there were a variety of theories about bodily ideals. This chapter follows these theories through three periods of early Chinese history. A key notion is qi, or “vital breath,” that circulates through the body to preserve health; learning methods of breath control can thus prolong life. So-called “Daoist” philosophy draws a parallel between health in the individual and good order in the state, as well as nature or the cosmos as a whole, an idea furthered in medical works of the Han dynasty.

Reflection

The very word “leech” for a medieval physician sounds romantic, in the way that practices from the past can seem exotic and alien. I must admit, that even after years of studying medieval Anglo-Saxon medical books, the first time I entered the British Library manuscript room to examine ...