Recent scholarship, focusing on the rapid decline of microscopy after the late 1680's, has shown that the limitations of microscopy and the ambivalent meaning of its findings led to a wide-spread sense of frustration with the new instrument. The present article tries to connect this fall from favor with the microscope's equally surprising but hitherto little noticed late rise to prominence. The crucial point is that when the microscope, more than a decade after the telescope, finally managed to arouse the (...) interest of natural philosophers, it did so as a corpuscularian tool, and as such it came to share the difficult fate of seventeenth-century corpuscularianism. The essay ends with the claim that the fall of microscopy was not only due to the failure of microscopy to corroborate corpuscularianism, but also to the changing definition of natural philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and to the separation of the domains of living matter from a physica whose recent mathematical framework excluded the organic world. (shrink)

Modern medical anthropology emerged at the end of the 19th century together with the establishment of scientific methods in medicine and it is founded mainly on two dogmata: 1) The conviction that every process in human beings, be it mental or physical, has to be reduced to chemical processes in order to be known; 2) The hypothesis about the autonomous nervous system. Both dogmata put an invincible hindrance between voluntary and involuntary processes in man, preventing communication between consciousness and the (...) body. Consciousness and mind have thus no role to play in medicine, but pure materialism on the other hand implies difficulties for medical ethics. So the patient has to play a double role: the chemical object of the scientific method and the person, to whom the doctor is responsible. The two main dogmata of modern anthropology are no longer valid: Not only philosophy but also the natural sciences have recently produced weighty evidence against them. Facts are emerging in medicine that are contradictory to its established principles. (shrink)

SynopsisThe response to physics and chemistry which characterized mid-nineteenth century physiology took two major directions. One, found most prominently among the German physiologists, developed explanatory models which had as their fundamental assumption the ultimate reducibility of all biological phenomena to the laws of physics and chemistry. The other, characteristic of the French school of physiology, recognized that physics and chemistry provided potent analytical tools for the exploration of physiological activities, but assumed in the construction of explanatory models that the organism (...) involved special levels of organization and that there must, in consequence, be special biological laws.The roots of this argument about concept formation in physiology are explored in the works of Theodor Schwann, Johannes Müller, François Magendie and Claude Bernard among others. (shrink)