Abstract
DeLacy outlines the philosophical and religious background of early modern British medicine, in particular classical or Galenic four-element theories of matter, the nature of life, and the role of the soul. She traces the development of the idea of contagion by early modern authors such as Paracelsus, Fracastoro, Fernel, Sennert, and Kircher in response to epidemic diseases such as plague and syphilis. She concludes that the monist philosophy underlying contagionism was more compatible with a heterodox religious outlook than with either a traditional Catholic or a traditional (magisterial) Protestant approach to natural philosophy.
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Vivian Nutton, “The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance,” Medical History (1983) 27:1–34, on 9, and Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Claire L. Carlin (Basingstoke, Hampshire: 2005). See also Conrad and Wujastyk, Contagion. Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger French, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven: 1997) shows how ideas about the transmission of a contagious disease evolved from the late fifteenth century to the work of Sennert. Annemarie Kinzelbach, “Infection, Contagion, and Public Health in Late Medieval and Early Modern German Imperial Towns,” JHMAS (2006) 61:369–89 questions the idea of a divide between academic and popular medicine on the roles of miasma and contagion in spreading plague but shows that physicians attributed a local epidemic to humoral changes affecting only the poor. Peter Elmer, The Miraculous Conformist: Valentine Greatrakes, the Body Politic and the Politics of Healing in Restoration Britain (Oxford: 2013) notes on 113–14 that contemporaries also thought witchcraft operated through physical contact.
Charles Greene Cumston, An Introduction to the History of Medicine: From the Time of the Pharaohs to the End of the 18th Century (New York: 1926, rpt. 1987), 161.
Nutton, “Seeds,” 15, citing Owsei Temkin, “The Scientific Approach to Disease: Specific Entity and Individual Sickness,” in Temkin, Double Face of Janus. See also Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 2nd rev. ed. (Basel: 1982), 137–8; and same, Joan Baptista Van Helmont, chapter 5: “The Ontological Concept of Disease,” 141–98; Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, “Fevers and Other Fundamentals: Dutch and German Medical Explanations c. 1680–1730,” in Theories of Fever from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, eds. W. F. Bynum and V. Nutton, (Medical History, Supplement 1) (London: 1981), 99–120; and L. J. Rather, “Towards a Philosophical Study of the Idea of Disease,” in Historical Development of Physiological Thought, eds. Chandler McC. Brooks and Paul F. Cranefield (New York: 1959), 351–73.
Winslow, Conquest, 64–5; Ralph Hermon Major, A History of Medicine, 2 vols., (Springfield, IL: 1955), 1:126–7.
Jole Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine (Copenhagen: 2004), 156; Eric Grier Casteel, “Entrepot and Backwater: A Cultural History of the Transfer of Medical Knowledge from Leiden to Edinburgh, 16901740” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles: 2007), esp. 108–10 and 123; more generally see David Cantor, ed., Reinventing Hippocrates (Aldershot, UK: 2002).
Nutton, “Seeds,” 13. For the concept of seeds in the Renaissance and early modern period see Hiro Hirai, Le Concept de Semence dans les Théories de la Matière à la Renaissance: De Marsile Ficin à Pierre Gassendi (Turnhout: 2005).
Walter Pagel, New Light on William Harvey (Basel: 1976), 21–2.
Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660 (New York: 1976), 200 and 280. G. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: 1962), introduction, xxiii–xxix.
Christopher Hill, “William Harvey and the Idea of Monarchy,” in The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (London: 1974), 186
See John Henry, “The Matter of Souls: Medical Theory and Theology,” in The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, eds. Roger French and Andrew Wear (Cambridge: 1989), 88.
On the use of this idea by Van Helmont and Severinus see Jole Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine: The Ideas, Intellectual Context, and Influence of Petrus Severinus (1540/2–1602) (Copenhagen: 2004), 238–49, and Hirai, Semence. Hirai shows on 441–4 that Helmont’s early work echoes that of Severinus.
Nutton, “Seeds,” 9–10; Cohen, “Evolution,” 4. For a more extended account of the development of atomic and corpuscular theories, see R. A. Horne, “Atomism in Ancient Medical History,” Medical History (1963) 7:317–29, Robert Hugh Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford: 1966), and the introduction and essays in Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories, eds. Christoph Lüthy, John E. Murdoch, and William R. Newman (Leiden: 2001).
John S. Wilkins, Species, the History of the Idea (Berkeley: 2009), 25–6.
Charles Singer and E. Ashworth Underwood, A Short History of Medicine, 2nd ed. (Oxford: 1962), 48–51.
Wilmer Cave Wright, “Introduction” to Hieronymi Fracastorii, De Contagione et Contagiousus Morbis et Eorum Curatione, Libri III (New York: 1930). John Herman Randall, The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science (Padua: 1961) emphasizes the role of the Aristotelian revival in Padua. See also Jerome Bylebyl, “The School of Padua: Humanistic Medicine in the Sixteenth Century,” in Health Medicine and Mortality in the 16th Century, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge: 1979), 335–70. Antonio Clericuzio, “Chemical Medicine and Paracelsianism in Italy, 1550–1650,” in The Practice of Reform in Health, Medicine, and Science, 1500–2000, eds. Margaret Pelling and Scott Mandelbrote (Aldershot, UK: 2005), 59–79 noted that the theories of Paracelsus spread slowly in Italy but permeated Italian medicine by the mid-seventeenth century.
Charles and Dorothea Singer, “The Scientific Position of Girolamo Fracastoro,” Annals of Medical History (Spring 1917) 1:1–29, 10. “Fomites” are objects that harbor infection. There is some disagreement about the first record of typhus, but most historians accept a date of 1489/90 for the first written description. Victoria A. Harden, “Typhus, Epidemic,” in The Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease, ed. Kenneth F. Kiple (Cambridge and New York: 2003), 352–5, and “Typhus,” in Encyclopedia of Medical History, ed. Roderick E. McGrew (New York and St. Louis: 1985), 350–5. See also Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History (Boston: 1934, rpt. 1963). The subtitle includes a selection of synonyms for this disease. On Fracastoro’s thought see the review by Samuel Cohn, Jr. of two works by Concetta Pennuto: a translation (into Italian) of Fracastoro’s De sympathia et antipathia rerum Liber 1 and Sympatia, fantasia e contagio: il pensiero medico e il pensiero filosofico di Girolamo Fracastoro in Medical History (October 2009) 53:616–18. See also Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 244–51.
For example, Paul Slack notes that English author Stephen Bradwell in 1636 quoted Fracastoro and described contagion as a “seminary [i.e., seminal] tincture full of a venomous quality, that being very thin and spirituous mixeth itself with the air,” The Impact of Plague on Tudor and Stuart England (London and Boston: 1985), 27–8.
Also known as Girolamo Cardano. See Charles Singer, The Development of the Doctrine of Contagium Vivum 1500–1750 (London: 1913), 4. Like most neo-Platonists, Cardan regarded all terrestrial objects as animated.
See Singer, Contagium Vivum, and Robert Jutte, Contraception: A History, trans. Vicky Russell (Cambridge, UK: 2008), 96, citing Falopius De Morbo Gallico (Padua: 1564).
H. Youssuef, “The History of the Condom,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (April 1993) 86, no. 4: 226–8, 226.
I am paraphrasing Linda Deer Richardson, “The Generation of Disease: Occult Causes and Diseases of the Total Substance,” in The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, eds. Andrew Wear, Roger Kenneth French, and Iain M. Lonie (Cambridge: 1985), 175–93. See also Jean Fernel, On the Hidden Causes of Things, trans. and ed. John M. Forrester, introduction and annotations by John Forrester and John Henry (Leiden: 2005), esp. book 2, ch. 10–18, 533–721, and Laurence Brockliss, “Seeing and Believing: Contrasting Attitudes Towards Observational Autonomy among French Galenists in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century,” in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. William F. Bynum (Cambridge: 1993), 69–84.
Iwao Moriyama, R. M. Loy, and A. H. T. Robb-Smith, History of the Statistical Classification of Diseases and Causes of Death, eds. H. M. Rosenberg and D. L. Hoyert (Hyattsville, MD: 2011), 9, online at the National Center for Health Statistics, www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/misc/classification_diseases2011.pdf. See also Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 264, “An ontological conception of disease was more available to those who maintained a belief in some hidden disease process, such as that of ‘whole substance,’” and Forrester and Henry’s introduction to Fernel, Hidden Causes, 22–3.
Felicis Plateri, De febribus liber: Genera, causas, et curationes febrium (Frankfurt: 1597), online at Hathi Trust: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ucm.5309455207. Plater is also known as Felix Platter or Platerus. Walter Charleton prefaced his book on atomism with an extract from Fernel’s De Abditis on atoms, Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (London: 1654).
Plater, De febribus, 92; cf. A Golden Practice of Physick in Five Books and Three Tomes by Felix Plater, trans. Abdiah Cole and Nicholas Culpeper (London: 1662), 201.
David Wootton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (Oxford: 2006, rpt. w. postscript, 2007), 127. Wootton refers to him as Platter. Wootton paraphrases Plater’s argument, combining two of his works, the De Febribus and the Quaestiones (1625) published posthumously. He does not give exact page references.
Wootton, “Further Reading,” Bad Medicine, 300–1, citing “Of Contagion, the Chief Cause of a Plague,” in T. Lucretius Carus, Of the Nature of Things, Vol. II: Containing the Fifth and Sixth Books, trans. Thomas Creech (London: 1714), 776–81.
On Sennert’s conversion to atomism see Christoph Lüthy, “Daniel Sennert’s Slow Conversion from Hylemorphism to Atomism,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal (2005) 35, no. 4:99–121, and William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: 2006), Section Two: “Daniel Sennert’s Atomism and the Reform of Aristotelian Matter Theory,” 85–153. See also Michael Stolberg, “Particles of the Soul: The Medical and Lutheran Context of Daniel Sennert’s Atomism,” Medicina nei Secoli (2003) 15:177–203, and Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 272–7, for Sennert’s theory of syphilis.
Lüthy and Newman, “Daniel Sennert’s Earliest Writings (1599–1600) and Their Debt to Giordano Bruno,” Bruniana and Campanelliana (2000) 6:261–79. Tycho Brahe and Sennert both lived in Jessenius’ home and must have been acquainted. Sennert was tried but acquitted on a charge of heresy for maintaining that God created the souls of animals as well as men out of nothing; his earliest works included “one of the few references to Bruno that was printed during his lifetime and … may well constitute the only discussion of his doctrines in an academic context before 1600” (271).
Marchamont Nedham, Medela Medicinae (London: 1665), see esp. 112–15 and Chapter 3 below. See also Webster, “Instauration,” 271.
An outline of Sennert’s life compiled by Richard Westfall is on the Galileo Project website at http://galileo.rice.edu/Catalog/NewFiles/sennert.html. Many of Sennert’s works are rare (especially his early Latin works and theses), and the bibliography has yet to be straightened out. Many dissertations by his students were credited to Sennert as well as the student author. The online Wellcome Library Catalogue, http://catalogue.wellcome.ac.uk, lists 62 titles or editions between 1611 and 1687. For Sennert’s influence on the Oxford school of physiology, see Robert G. Frank Jr., Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists (Berkeley: 1980), 120. Walter Pagel, The Smiling Spleen: Paracelsianism in Storm and Stress (Basel: 1984), 86–90, emphasizes the divergences between Paracelsus and Sennert.
Daniel Sennert, Institutions, trans. N. D. B. P. (London: 1656) online from EEBO. Some Worldcat entries erroneously list B. P. N. D. as translator. Lodowick Lloyd, the publisher, also published works by Van Helmont, Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus, and Oswald Croll.
Dr D. Sennertus of Agues and Fevers. Their Differences, Signes and Cures. Divided into Four Books: Made English by N. D. B. M … (London: 1658), Book 4, Chapter 3 [sic], 79. This is a translation of Book 4, Chapter 2, in Daniel Sennert, De Febribu[s] Libri IV (Wittenberg: 1619). I used the Google Books online edition (Geneva: 1647). Marchmont Nedham also translated portions of this chapter in the Medela Medicinae, see below, chapter 3.
Daniel Sennert, The Sixth Book of Practical Physick: Of Occult or Hidden Diseases; in Nine Parts … by Daniel Sennertus, trans. N. Culpeper and Abdiah Cole, Doctors of Physick (London: 1662, online from EEBO). Notes refer to this version. This appears to be from the final volume of Sennert’s Practicae Medicinae Liber Primus — [Sextus] published between 1628 and 1636, but I have not seen a copy of the latter work. For the complicated status of the Culpeper-Cole translations, see chapter 2.
Kircher’s work appeared as Scrutiniumphysico-medicum contagiosae luis, quae pestis dicitur (A medical and physical examination of the contagious pestilence that they call the plague) (Rome: 1658). See also P. Conor Reilly, Athanasius Kircher S. J.: Master of a Hundred Arts, 1602–1680 (Wiesbaden: 1974), 88.
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DeLacy, M. (2016). Introduction: Medical Theory in Early Modern Europe. In: The Germ of an Idea. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-57529-6_1
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