COMUNICARE LA SCIENZA MEDICA NEL SETTECENTO EUROPEO: UNO SGUARDO ALLE PROSPETTIVE DI RICERCA

Non disponibile.

GIOVAN BATTISTA MORGAGNI E IL DIBATTITO FRA MEDICINA RAZIONALE E MEDICINA EMPIRICA

Giovanni Battista Morgagni is considered the father of pathological anatomy. His contribution can be contextualized in the extraordinary development of anatomy between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, because along this period anatomy became the most important among the natural sciences. A new pathology based on anatomy was possible thanks to the mechanistic perspective which characterized this science during the seventeenth century, in particular through the work of Marcello Malpighi, whom Morgagni considered as his master. The approach of Malpighi and other ‘iatromechanists’ was widely debated: supporters of mechanisms and empiricism, as well as supporters of the Ancients, or Hippocratic-Galenic medicine, and of the Moderns, or ‘Neoteric’ medicine, were opposed and interlaced. The anatomo-clinical method of Morgagni can be fully understood only by being contextualized within this debate.

LA MEDICINA NEL CAFFÈ

The magazine of Milan Enlightenment had an open attitude to the new knowledge spreading through Europe and was committed towards the dissemination of the so-called «useful studies». This implied that themes related to medicine were widely present among its articles, which recognized the central role of medicine in social life and presented it as both the inescapable premise of the ‘well-being’ of individuals and the population at large, and the aim of any good administration. Il Caffè decisively stands for ‘new’ medicine, the one that best takes into account the progress of studies, and that values the constant updating of its practitioners; medicine to be considered as science rather than experience. Thanks to all these elements, together with its inclusion in the complex system of scientific knowledge (inherently subject to constant verification), the lively formula of erudite entertainment opens, in more than one case, to concrete results, as in Pietro Verri’s article Sull’innesto del vaiuolo (On smallpox grafting); here, the author resolutely places the Caffè in favor of the still suspect practice of inoculation. Furthermore, even though it is Pietro Verri again who offers a wide-ranging nomenclature framework (with the article La medicina), undoubtedly most of the contributors are involved in dealing with these issues with an almost revolutionary narrative writing; certainly the model is English educational journalism, but with an incisiveness that also pays attention to the emerging sensiblerie, especially the «diseases of imagination» and those from which «more or less every man suffers without exactly distinguishing the cause».

CORPOREITÀ E IMMAGINARIO NEL DISCORSO MEDICO SETTECENTESCO: GLI ÉLÉMENTS DE PHYSIOLOGIE DI DIDEROT

L’article part d’une série de considérations sur la précocité des intérêts de Diderot dans le domaine médical. «Pas de livres que je lise plus volontiers que les livres de médecine, pas d’hommes dont la conversation soit plus intéressante pour moi que les médecins», il affirmera vers la fin de sa vie. En fait, le discours médical, dans son oeuvre, s’identifie à un discours philosophique militant sous le signe d’un monisme rigoureux polémiquement opposé au dualisme de la tradition platonicienne-chrétienne, un discours nettement orienté vers la traduction totale de ‘l’âme’ dans le fonctionnement des organes du corps. Cependant, au-delà de la controverse philosophique, chez Diderot la connaissance médicale se révèle comme la base d’une fascinante vision biologique. Contrairement à un Buffon, qui continue de reconnaître une centralité ontologique à l’homme, Diderot tend à nier toute solution de continuité entre l’être humain et le règne animal - et même entre le règne animal et le règne minéral. L’article met en évidence quelques conséquences capitales d’une telle position sur les idées esthétiques de Diderot; et, d’ici, les réflexions sur l’enracinement de la pensée dans le corps présentes dans les Éléments de physiologie sont ramenées à l’un des plus grands changements de paradigme culturel de l’histoire européenne moderne.

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MEDICAL WRITING IN ENGLISH

Eighteenth-century scientific and medical developments have direct relevance to our modern world as they paved the way towards more modern practices. This article presents an overview of English medical writing during the century when, for example, new technical equipment like the microscope opened up new horizons, laboratory medicine took its first steps, and dissemination of medical knowledge developed and diversified. My assessment is qualitative but based on firm quantitative evidence of linguistic data by an innovative Digital Humanities method that revealed the changing trends and put them in ranking order. Most importantly, medicine achieved a new level of professionalization in the eighteenth century. More attention started to be paid to public health, new institutions were founded, and new topics emerged with the expansion of the British Empire.

SEMIOTICA DEGLI AFFETTI E MANIFESTAZIONI FISICHE NEI TESTI MEDICO-FILOSOFICI DI HALLE

In the mid-eighteenth century in Halle the so-called doctors-philosophers tried to develop a scientifically-based map of emotions, which included their causes and their manifestations on the body. Thanks to their scientific rigour, to the literary quality of those studies and to the growing circulation of the journals of the time – above all Unzer’s famous Der Arzt – the subject was so popular that it became central in the debate on physiognomy and pathognomics which was so vivid in the second half of the century. These theories had a powerful import on literature, contributing to the birth of the new ‘character’ in novels as different from the traditional and stereotypical sense of the term as ‘temper’ or ‘nature’. In the field of aesthetics, the effect of these studies had important repercussions on Winckelmann’s revolutionary theories related to the representation and interpretation of emotions in art.

COMMUNICATION IN AND AROUND MESMERISM. CONTROVERSIES, CASE HISTORIES AND THE CULTURAL IMAGINATION

Mesmerism or animal magnetism was the most controversial and most spectacular medical concept of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. It was also conceptualised and practiced as a medical therapy based entirely on communication; a communication that worked on many levels: between magnetiser and patient, between body and mind and – in its theoretical explanations – between human beings and the cosmos. This paper will first briefly look at theories of mesmerism from this perspective and then discuss some of the scandalous and provocative communicative phenomena of the so-called magnetic rapport between magnetiser and patient in the somnambulist trance. It will also briefly review the controversies between supporters and sceptics of the magnetic cure around the communicative experience in the rapport. The final part of this paper will turn to Romantic literature, as its rich aesthetic representations of mesmerism transcend enlightenment controversies and offer more complex, nuanced and insightful negotiations of the forms of communication prevalent and observable in the mesmerist phenomena. In mesmerism we can thus observe that around 1800 literature seems to know and understand more about psychodynamic and psychophysical communication than medical science.

LANCISI E I ‘LANCISIANI’. SAPERE MEDICO E DIVULGAZIONE NELLA ROMA DEL SETTECENTO

The kaleidoscopic figure of Giovanni Maria Lancisi (1654-1720), one of the most remarkable physicians, scientists and scholars in modern Italy, can be a lucky gateway into eighteenth-century Rome – a surprising place for its intellectual vivacity, sometimes unprejudiced and always open to the most innovative expectations. The Medical Library he founded, one of the oldest and most important in the world, is only the most concrete among the many contributions that Lancisi gave to the dissemination and growth of medical knowledge of his time. His studies in the field of hygiene and the fight against malaria, his efforts to eradicate fears and popular superstitions caused by the ‘sudden deaths’, the enhancement of new forms of teaching such as the use of anatomical theatres, the active participation to the life of scientific and literary academies of Europe, are all revealing features, which make Lancisi a figure of lasting and widespread interest three centuries after his death. A figure who, according to his first biographer, was so outstanding «in the knowledge of sciences, and in the competence to explain them» that he aroused «the applause, even among the commoners, and the young people».

SVILUPPO SOSTENIBILE: GLI OBIETTIVI DELLE NAZIONI UNITE 2015-2030

Non disponibile.

AGRICOLTURA SOSTENIBILE

Non disponibile.