This paper examines the rise of an epistemic genre, the Observationes, a new form of medical writing that emerged in Renaissance humanistic medicine. The Observationes originated in the second half of the sixteenth century, grew rapidly over the course of the seventeenth, and had become a primary form of medical writing by the eighteenth century. The genre developed initially as a form of self-advertisement by court and town physicians, who stressed success in practice, over and above academic learning, as a (...) core element of their professional identity. This unprecedented emphasis on practice as a source of knowledge remained a key feature of the Observationes in its subsequent development. As the genre evolved, the original emphasis on therapeutic success gave way to a new focus on the descriptive knowledge of disease through detailed observation. The authorial identity projected by the writers of Observationes was increasingly that of the learned and experienced observer, bent on comparing notes and sharing his cases with the fellow members of the res publica medica. This paper charts the development of the genre, examining how its growth contributed to the new epistemological value of observation in the age of the Scientific Revolution. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe “raison d'être” of this paper is my dissatisfaction with current portrayals of the place and the fate of the so-called rational sciences in Muslim societies. I approach this issue from the perspectives of West European visitors to the Ottoman and Safavid Empires during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I show that these travelers encountered educated people capable of understanding and answering their visitors' scholarly questions in non-trivial ways. The travels and the ensuing encounters suggest that early modern Muslim (...) societies and their institutions, their ways of producing knowledge, the types of their knowledge, and their material resources contributed important elements to various early modern West European approaches to gaining knowledge about nature, history, and politics. (shrink)

Early Renaissance naturalists worked to identify the plans described in ancient sources. But during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, naturalists instead began to describe and name plans unknown to the ancients. They also divided nature much more finely, distinguishing species that their predecessors had lumped together. As a result, they created an information overload. Dictionaries of synonyms and local flora were invented in the early seventeenth century as partial solutions to this problem of information overload.