Edgar Zilsel's famous thesis, which argues that modern experimental science was born from the union of artisans and intellectuals in the 16th century, received little support when Zilsel proposed it in the 1940s. In recent years, however, with the turn toward social and cultural history of science, the “Zilsel Thesis” has undergone something of a revival as historians rethink the relevance of artisanal knowledge for the history of early modern science. This essay looks at the Zilsel Thesis in a global (...) setting – specifically a colonial Iberian setting – and argues for its relevance in framing natural history, medicine, and the impact of science on everyday life. Using the examples of corn, quina, and cochineal, this essay argues that the agronomic, chemical, and entomological knowledge accumulated over generations of practice by indigenous practitioners was in fact artisanal knowledge that was passed on to European intellectuals in “global trading zones” to become part of the Western scientific patrimony. (shrink)

The recent discovery of a manuscript has allowed historians to understand the medical routine in a hospital known as the Schneidhaus in Augsburg between the sixteenth and nineteenth century. The context of the manuscript shows that at this institution, non-academic specialists, generally members of the guild of barber-surgeons and barbers, routinely performed surgical cures of intestinal hernia, scrotal swellings, and vesical calculus. The Schneidhaus exclusively admitted patients applying for such specialised treatments and offered no other services. Such a degree of (...) specialisation within medical establishments seems to have only existed in the Holy Roman Empire at this institution founded by the Fugger family in Augsburg. We propose that the Schneidhaus was either itself a model hospital or adopted a model from another site in Europe. In this paper, we investigate the connections of the Schneidhaus to the practice of surgeons in both Italy and Spain. In Italy, a momentous new technique for identifying and removing vesical calculi was first published in 1522. Although surgical treatment was established in Italian hospitals, they tended not to specialise in such surgical treatment exclusively. Moreover, at the time of the hospital’s foundation, the Fugger shifted their economic and social focus from Venice to the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain, research in the history of medicine is complicated by outdated notions about specialised surgery, not unlike those that were recently still current regarding the Holy Roman Empire. We attempt to disprove these notions and use the exemplary textbook of one academic physician, Francisco Díaz, to approach specialized surgical practice in sixteenth-century Spain. In his work, Díaz describes the new Italian surgical method in detail and recognizes the importance of craftsman surgeons to both its development and application. However, he also argues for an expanded role for academic physicians as supervisors of craftsman surgeons’ work. All this is suggestive of a greater network of surgical professionals within which both the methods of the craft and its organisational structures were transported. As such, the Schneidhaus can be seen as a node that embodied the institutionalization of surgical practice as a European phenomenon. Further research is necessary, and we propose how this might be carried out to reveal these historical phenomena in their full complexity. (shrink)

Renaissance medical treatises in the psychology of Francisco Suarez: Spanish Renaissance physicians, especially Francis Valles, are a major source of inspiration for Suarez's commentary to De anima. This paper analyzes two concepts inherited from the medical tradition: experientia and theory of the sympathy of faculties. Suarez could be considered a precursor of gnoseological ocasionalism, but his psychology is rather far from the Cartesian mechanicism and much closer to the philosophical biology of Aristotle.

The contributions of Portuguese and Spanish sixteenth century science and technology in fields such as metallurgy, medicine, agriculture, surgery, meteorology, cosmography, cartography, navigation, military technology, and urban engineering, by and large, have been excluded in most accounts of the Scientific Revolution. I review several recent studies in English on sixteenth and seventeenth century natural history and natural philosophy to demonstrate how difficult it has become for Anglo-American scholarship to bring Iberia back into narratives on the origins of "modernity." The roots (...) of this exclusion, to be sure, hark back to the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. The oversight is unfortunate for it has blinded scholars to the fact that the Iberians first created a culture of empirical, experimental, and utilitarian knowledge-gathering of massive proportions that did not get its cues from the classics or the learned, but from merchants, enterprising settlers, and bureaucrats. The Portuguese and the Spanish confidently saw themselves as the first "moderns," superseding the ancients. The English were the first to recognize this fact and they sought to imitate the new institutions of knowledge-gathering created by the Iberians. I demonstrate, for example, the Iberian origins of many of Francis Bacon's epistemological insights and metaphors. Spanish and Portuguese scholars have long been making this point. I therefore introduce English-speaking audiences to some of the most recent scholarship by Spanish scholars on sixteenth century Iberian science and technology. (shrink)