Descartes is well known as a mathematician and natural philosopher. However, none of Descartes's biographers has described the invitation he received in 1633 to fill a chair in theoretical medicine at the University of Bologna, or the fact that he was already sufficiently known and respected for his medical knowledge that the invitation came four years before his first publication. In this note I authenticate and contextualize this event, which I refer to as the ‘Bologna affair’. I transcribe the letter (...) written to the Bolognese Senate announcing efforts to bring Descartes to the university and explain the events that led to Descartes receiving the invitation. While many questions about the Bologna affair cannot be answered because of the paucity of the historical record, I conclude that the event invites us to consider again the larger historiographical issue of how best to integrate the history of medicine with the history of science and philosophy during the early modern period. (shrink)

There is a familiar opposition between a ‘Scientific Revolution’ ethos and practice of experimentation, including experimentation on life, and a ‘vitalist’ reaction to this outlook. The former is often allied with different forms of mechanism – if all of Nature obeys mechanical laws, including living bodies, ‘iatromechanism’ should encounter no obstructions in investigating the particularities of animal-machines – or with more chimiatric theories of life and matter, as in the ‘Oxford Physiologists’. The latter reaction also comes in different, perhaps irreducibly (...) heterogeneous forms, ranging from metaphysical and ethical objections to the destruction of life, as in Margaret Cavendish, to more epistemological objections against the usage of instruments, the ‘anatomical’ outlook and experimentation, e.g. in Locke and Sydenham. But I will mainly focus on a third anti-interventionist argument, which I call ‘vitalist’ since it is often articulated in the writings of the so-called Montpellier Vitalists, including their medical articles for the Encyclopédie. The vitalist argument against experimentation on life is subtly different from the metaphysical, ethical and epistemological arguments, although at times it may borrow from any of them. It expresses a Hippocratic sensibility – understood as an artifact of early modernity, not as some atemporal trait of medical thought – in which Life resists the experimenter, or conversely, for the experimenter to grasp something about Life, it will have to be without torturing or radically intervening in it. I suggest that this view does not have to imply that Nature is something mysterious or sacred; nor does the vitalist have to attack experimentation on life in the name of some ‘vital force’ – which makes it less surprising to find a vivisectionist like Claude Bernard sounding so close to the vitalists. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Historians of science, inasmuch as they are concerned with knowledges and practices rather than institutions, have tended of late to focus on case studies of common processes such as experiment and publication. In so doing, they tend to treat science as a single category, with various local instantiations. Or, alternatively, they relate cases to their specific local contexts. In neither approach do the cases or their contexts build easily into broader histories, reconstructing changing knowledge practices across time and space. (...) This essay argues that by systematically deconstructing the practices of science and technology and medicine (STM) into common, recurrent elements, we can gain usefully “configurational” views, not just of particular cases and contexts but of synchronic variety and diachronic changes, both short term and long. To this end, we can begin with the customary actors’ disciplines of early modern knowledge (natural philosophy, natural history, mixed mathematics, and experimental philosophy), which can be understood as elemental “ways of knowing and working,” variously combined and disputed. I argue that these same working knowledges, together with a later mode—synthetic experimentation and systematic invention—may also serve for the analysis of STM from the late eighteenth century to the present. The old divisions continued explicitly and importantly after circa 1800, but they were also “built into” an array of new sciences. This historiographic analysis can help clarify a number of common problems: about the multiplicity of the sciences, the importance of various styles in science, and the relations between science and technology and medicine. It suggests new readings of major changes in STM, including the first and second scientific revolutions and the transformations of biomedicine from the later twentieth century. It offers ways of recasting both microhistories and macrohistories, so reducing the apparent distance between them. And it may thus facilitate both more constructive uses of case studies and more innovative and acceptable longer histories. (shrink)

William Hunter's anatomical inquiry employed all of his senses, but how did his personal experiences with the cadaver become generalized scientific knowledge teachable to students and understandable by fellow practitioners? Moving beyond a historiographical focus on Hunter's images and extending Lorraine Daston's (2008) concept of an ‘ontology of scientific observation’ to include non-visual senses, I argue that Hunter's work aimed to create a stabilized object of the cadaver that he and his students could perceive in common. Crucial to this stabilization (...) was the sense of touch and its interaction with other senses, creating intersensory knowledge of the cadaver. Through a close reading of his neglected posthumous publication An Anatomical Description of the Human Gravid Uterus (1794), I demonstrate that Hunter wrote extensively about touch and other sensory experiences, using comparative metaphors and other linguistic strategies to engender clear ideas of the cadaver in the mind of the reader. That these ideas could be consistent between practitioners was guaranteed by God, but required practitioners to appropriately reflect on their sensory experiences with cadavers. Hunter's experimental practice encompassed both simple and complex methods, all aimed at increasing the range of sensorial experiences he had with the gravid uterus. His preservations of these experiences in text, image and preparation could then be used to support further anatomical investigations. (shrink)

Science entails history writing: scientists are continuously engaged in creating “imagined pasts” for their own specialisms, both on the small scale of the ubiquitous literature review and on a much broader scale. This aspect of science has been considered in very different ways in decades-old, yet largely neglected, contributions by Thomas S. Kuhn, Augustine Brannigan, and Simon Schaffer. Inspired by these pieces and by the missing dialogue between them, this essay argues that their concealment is itself an instance, on the (...) broadest possible scale, of the power of “imagined pasts”—in this case the imagined continuity, inscribed in the very name of our discipline, between Isaac Newton and ourselves. (shrink)