Abstract
What happened to the work of Roman physician Galen (130-200 AD) in the seventeenth century? Was it rejected as a consequence of the Scientific Revolution? Or did it live on in some way? This dissertation examines these classic medical historical questions by studying the investigation of drug properties by Dutch
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physicians. Studying Galen’s place in these investigations sheds new light on how his works were interpreted in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. This is essential for our understanding of the Scientific Revolution and the investigation of nature in the Dutch Republic, even though the writings of Galen have hardly appeared in the historiography of Dutch medicine. Paaw’s (1564-1617) lessons of materia medica at the University of Leiden consisted of lectures on Dioscorides (40-90 AD), visits to the academic garden and fieldtrips. He presented them as an integrated whole, teaching both the plants’ medicinal properties and how to identify them. However, the relationship between medicine, botany and natural history in the curriculum were less harmonious than it appeared. In his textbook Institutiones medicinae, Paaw’s colleague Heurnius (1543-1601) made Galenic pharmacology a cornerstone of his description of a methodus medendi, a rational method of curing that united the theory and practice of medicine. The textbook was a product of sixteenth-century academic medicine and focused on three aspects of Galen’s writings on the subject: the different tastes, the faculties of drugs and the way drug properties should be investigated through reason and experience. Drug faculties, the particular ways in which drugs worked in particular parts of the body, received most attention. Dodonaeus (1516/17-1585) and Spigelius (1578-1625) published similar accounts of drug properties. Whereas Dodonaeus, like Dioscorides, considered the investigation of the medicinal properties of plants and their appearance as interconnected, Spigelius described them as separate activities. In their attempts to understand the relations between various properties of materia medica, contradictions within the Galenic framework became visible. To some extent, this exposed prevailing ideas about matter and its properties to criticism. Many argued that medicinal properties could only be identified through therapeutic experience. Nevertheless, the Galenic framework, developed in the sixteenth century, remained central to discussions in the following century. The fact that this framework was largely inspired by Galen’s writings became mostly irrelevant however, as physicians in the mid-seventeenth century reformulated and amended it. Through their pursuit of reliable ways of curing, physicians actively contributed to the changes for which the Scientific Revolution is best known, such as the introduction of corpuscular and chemical theories of matter, a more mechanistic view of causality, the more prominent role of experimentation and the success of the microscope as a scientific instrument. Inspired by the work of Thomas Willis (1621-1675), Blankaart (1650-1704) and De Heide (1646-after 1690) explored how these changes to the investigation of nature, affected their understanding of drug properties. De Heide especially created a new concept of what true knowledge of these properties should look like, even if it appeared unattainable for the moment.
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