Blood, Sweat and Tears

The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity Into Early Modern Europe
Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-90-04-22918-1
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 25, 772 Seiten, Format (B × H): 163 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 1361 g

Reihe: Intersections

The history of anatomy has been the subject of much recent scholarship. This volume shifts the focus to the many different ways in which the function of the body and its fluids were understood in pre-modern European thought. Contributors demonstrate how different academic disciplines can contribute to our understanding of ‘physiology’, and investigate the value of this category to pre-modern medicine.
The book contains individual essays on the wider issues raised by ‘physiology’, and detailed case studies that explore particular aspects and individuals. It will be useful to those working on medicine and the body in pre-modern cultures, in disciplines including classics, history of medicine and science, philosophy, and literature.

Zielgruppe

Mostly researchers interested in the history of the body, history of ideas, history of medicine and science. Medical practitioners would also find this material interesting.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Horstmanshoff, Manfred

King, Helen

Zittel, Claus

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface and Acknowledgements
Notes on the Editors
Notes on the Contributors
List of Illustrations

Introduction
Helen King

PART ONE
HISTORY OF PHYSIOLOGY IN CONTEXT:
CONCEPTS, METAPHORS, ANALOGIES

Physiologia from Galen to Jacob Bording
Vivian Nutton

Physiological Analogies and Metaphors. In Explanations of the Earth and the
Cosmos
Liba Taub

The Reception of the Hippocratic Treatise On Glands
Elizabeth Craik

Between Atoms and Humours. Lucretius’ Didactic Poetry as a Model of
Integrated and Bifocal Physiology
Fabio Tutrone

Losing Ground. The Disappearance of Attraction from the Kidneys 85
Michael R. McVaugh

The Art of the Distillation of ‘Spirits’ as a Technological Model for Human
Physiology. The Cases of Marsilio Ficino, Joseph Duchesne and Francis Bacon
Sergius Kodera

The Body is a Battlefield. Conflict and Control in Seventeenth-Century
Physiology and Political Thought
Sabine Kalff

Herman Boerhaave’s Neurology and the Unchanging Nature of Physiology
Rina Knoeff

The Anatomy and Physiology of Mind. David Hume’s Vitalistic Account
Tamás Demeter

More than a Fading Flame. The Physiology of Old Age between Speculative
Analogy and Experimental Method
Daniel Schäfer

Suffering Bodies, Sensible Artists. Vitalist Medicine and the Visualising of
Corporeal Life in Diderot
Tomas Macsotay

PART TWO
BLOOD

Blood, Clotting and the Four Humours
Hans L. Haak

An Issue of Blood. The Healing of the Woman with the Haemorrhage
(Mark 5.24b-34; Luke 8.42b-48; Matthew 9.19-22) in Early Medieval
Visual Culture
Barbara Baert, Liesbet Kusters and Emma Sidgwick

The Nature of the Soul and the Passage of Blood through the Lungs.
Galen, Ibn al-Nafis, Servetus, Itaki, ‘Attar
Rainer Brömer

Sperm and Blood, Form and Food. Late Medieval Medical Notions of Male
and Female in the Embryology of Membra
Karine van ’t Land

The Music of the Pulse in Marsilio Ficino’s Timaeus Commentary
Jacomien Prins

‘For the Life of a Creature is in the Blood’ (Leviticus 17:11). Some
Considerations on Blood as the Source of Life in Sixteenth-Century
Religion and Medicine and their Interconnections
Catrien Santing

White Blood and Red Milk. Analogical Reasoning in Medical Practice
and Experimental Physiology (1560-1730)
Barbara Orland

PART THREE
SWEAT AND SKIN

The “Body without Skin” in the Homeric Poems
Valeria Gavrylenko

Sweat. Learned Concepts and Popular Perceptions, 1500-1800
Michael Stolberg

Of the Fisherman’s Net and Skin Pores. Reframing Conceptions of the Skin
in Medicine 1572-1714
Mieneke M. G. te Hennepe

PART FOUR
TEARS AND SIGHT

Vision and Vision Disorders. Galen’s Physiology of Sight
Véronique Boudon-Millot

Early Modern Medical Thinking on Vision and the Camera Obscura.
V.F. Plempius’ Ophthalmographia
Katrien Vanagt

The Tertium Comparationis of the Elementa Physiologiae. Johann Gottfried
von Herder’s Coception of “Tears’ as Mediators between the Sublime
and the Actual Bodily Physiology
Frank W. Stahnisch

PART FIVE
BODY AND SOUL

From Doubt to Certainty. Aspects of the Conceptualisation and Interpretation
of Galen’s Natural Pneuma
Julius Rocca

Metabolisms of the Soul. The Physiology of Bernardino Telesio in Oliva
Sabuco’s Nueva Filosofía de la Naturaleza del Hombre (1587)
Marlen Bidwell-Steiner

“Full of Rapture”. Maternal Vocality and Melancholy in Webster’s Duchess
of Malfi
Marion A. Wells

The Sleeping Musician. Aristotle’s Vegetative Soul and Ralph
Cudworth’s Plastic Nature
Diana Stanciu

Index Locorum
Index Generalis

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

Helen King

Writing physiology

In the history of early modern medicine, physiology – now understood as the theory of the normal functioning of living organisms – remains the poor relation.
The papers presented here are intended to help scholars in a range of disciplines to consider why it is so difficult to provide a history of physiology; how far is this due to changing notions of what physiology is, and how far does it depend on the methods by which physiology comes to its conclusions? There has been no general history of physiology for the last forty years and, in contrast to anatomy, the topic has received very little attention at all from historians in that period. Within philosophy, the situation is rather different; the work of Dennis Des Chene, particularly his Physiologia. Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 1996) has been welcomed by philosophers but has had surprisingly little impact outside that field. In this book, and in his subsequent monograph Life’s Form. Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (2000), Des Chene locates Descartes within his Aristotelian background, exploring the emergence of modern ideas of ‘science’ from medieval philosophy. The standard modern histories of physiology include Thomas Hall’s work, originally published in 1969 and subsequently reissued as History of Physiology 200 BC–AD 1900 in 1975, and the 1953 book in German by Karl Rothschuh, published in English translation in 1973. Hall set out what he regarded as the ‘classic questions’ of physiology, from the Greeks onwards: these concerned ‘motion, generation, nutrition’ and ‘the life-matter problem, of the nature of life and of its seat in the body’. In his Introduction to the English translation of Rothschuh, Leonard G. Wilson stated that ‘Physiology, as a subject of inquiry has a long and remarkably continuous history beginning with studies and speculations of the Greeks in the fifth century BC’.
This image of continuity has been challenged by the work of Andrew Cunningham, whose papers published in 2002 and 2003 respectively, cited by a number of contributors to this volume, are among the very few modern studies of the relationship between anatomy and physiology in the Early Modern period. Cunningham emphasised how physiology used reason rather than experiment, and that it remained very close to philosophy, so that ‘When explanations in natural philosophy changed, so explanation in physiology also changed’. While the word ‘physiology’ is thus found in texts written before the nineteenth century, there is a wide range of concepts working underneath the same name.
In contrast to the neglect of the unified and functioning body of ‘physiology’, the history of ‘anatomy’ – traditionally seen as concerned with structure, rather than function – has been the subject of considerable recent study. Trends in medical history towards ‘the body in parts’ approach have privileged anatomy; literally, the cutting-up or ‘division’ of the body. They have done this by concentrating on a single body part – heart, head, foot – and tracing its representation and interpretation across time. Anatomy has been important in recent histories of early modern medicine partly because of its place in education; for example, Katy Park’s Secrets of Women (2006) traced the rise of human dissection from its emergence in the thirteenth century to its establishment in the curriculum of European universities in the mid-sixteenth century, and showed how the quest to understand women’s interior ‘secrets’ informed this anatomical turn to medicine. The division of the body was, she has shown, an important part of early modern cultural practices even before the rise of dissection for educational purposes; parts of the dead, saintly body could be buried separately, and preserved independently as relics. Furthermore, the demonstrations in the anatomy theatres of sixteenth-century Europe wer

Über Autor(innen)

Horstmanshoff, Manfred
Manfred (H.F.J.) Horstmanshoff was Professor of Ancient Medicine at Leiden from 2006-11, having taught Ancient History there since 1976. He is currently a Fellow of the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, University of Cologne, studying the history of the patient from a comparative perspective. His publications include the co-editorship (with P.J. van der Eijk and P.H Schrijvers) of Ancient Medicine in its Socio-Cultural Context (Amsterdam: Clio Medica, 1995) and editorship of the selected papers of the XIIth Colloquium Hippocraticum as Hippocrates and Medical Education (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

King, Helen
Helen King, formerly Professor of the History of Classical Medicine at the University of Reading, is currently Professor of Classical Studies at The Open University, Milton Keynes. She works on ancient medicine and ist reception until the nineteenth century, particularly on gynaecology and midwifery. Her publications include The Disease of Virgins (London: Routledge, 2003) and Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

Zittel, Claus
Claus Zittel teaches philosophy and German literature at the Universities of Frankfort am Main, Berlin (FU) and Olstzyn (Poland) and is the co-leader of the Max-Planck Research group, “The Conscious Image” at the Kunsthistorisches Institut/Max-Planck-Institut Florence. His publications include Theatrum philosophicum,. Descartes und die Rolle ästhetischer Formen in der Wissenschaft (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009) and (with Moritz Epple) Science as Cultural Practice Vol. 1: Cultures and Politics of Research from the Early Modern Period to the Age of Extremes (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010).

Manfred (H.F.J.) Horstmanshoff was Professor of Ancient Medicine at Leiden from 2006-11, having taught Ancient History there since 1976. He is currently a Fellow of the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, University of Cologne, studying the history of the patient from a comparative perspective. His publications include the co-editorship (with P.J. van der Eijk and P.H Schrijvers) of Ancient Medicine in its Socio-Cultural Context (Amsterdam: Clio Medica, 1995) and editorship of the selected papers of the XIIth Colloquium Hippocraticum as Hippocrates and Medical Education (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

Helen King, formerly Professor of the History of Classical Medicine at the University of Reading, is currently Professor of Classical Studies at The Open University, Milton Keynes. She works on ancient medicine and its reception until the nineteenth century, particularly on gynaecology and midwifery. Her publications include The Disease of Virgins (London: Routledge, 2003) and Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

Claus Zittel teaches philosophy and German literature at the Universities of Frankfurt am Main, Berlin (FU) and Olstzyn (Poland) and is the co-leader of the Max-Planck Research group, “The Conscious Image” at the Kunsthistorisches Institut/Max-Planck-Institut Florence. His publications include Theatrum philosophicum. Descartes und die Rolle ästhetischer Formen in der Wissenschaft (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009) and (with Moritz Epple) Science as Cultural Practice Vol. 1: Cultures and Politics of Research from the Early Modern Period to the Age of Extremes (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010).