Center for the History of Medicine

2004 Workshop: Medicine in War
2007 Workshop: Disease, Experiment, and Mechanism

2008 Workshop
Between Anatomy and Therapy:
Chymical Analysis and 17th-Century Medicine
(Goodbody Hall 107)

Thursday May 8

• 9:30–10:30 am
  ANTONIO CLERICUZIO, University of Cassino
  Pietro Castelli and the Establishment of Chemical Medicine in Rome
  Abstract: Before 1600 a few Italian physicians explicitly advocated Paracelsianism, but a considerable number of Paracelsians remedies were adopted all over the Peninsula. The scene changed in the early decades of the 17th century when Paracelsian theories were followed by an increasing number of medical practitioners. As recent studies showed, in Rome chemical medicine and Paracelsianism were promoted by the Accademia dei Lincei. Pietro Castelli, who was part of the influential circle of Cassiano dal Pozzo and Francesco Barberini, played a prominent part in the establishment of chemical medicine in Rome.
  The most innovative aspect of Castelli's medicine was his chemical interpretation of human physiology—mostly contained in a series of letters published in 1626. Castelli, who adopted the Paracelsian analogy of macrocosm and microcosm, maintained that an acid spirit was responsible for most physiological processes. Castelli identified spirit with Paracelsus' alchemist, namely, the spiritual directing force located in the body. Castelli ruled out the Galenic theory of digestion and explained it in chemical terms, namely, as a process produced by an acid ferment contained in the stomach. He described digestion as a fermentation originating from an acid spirit communicating its movement to the sulfurous, saline and mercurial parts contained in food.
• 10:30–11:30 am
  JOLE SHACKELFORD, University of Minnesota
  From Paracelsian Theory to Medical Practice: Chemical Physiology and Pathology as a Guide for Early Modern Therapeutics
  Abstract: The importance of Paracelsus and Paracelsian chemical medicine to early modern European medical discussion is evident from even a cursory examination of the books and pamphlets that were published in the seventeenth century and has been subject to numerous scholarly studies. Most of these research efforts, however, have been oriented either toward the place of Paracelsian theory in natural philosophy and medical theory, or toward the appreciation of the role of the chemical physicians who followed Paracelsus in creating and promoting chemical drugs for an eclectic medical marketplace. Indeed, medical historians' interest in Paracelsian medicine was focused on pharmacology, since it was here that the Paracelsians were seen to have made a positive contribution to the development of modern medicine, just as historians of science sought in Paracelsus the early development of chemical science. However, less scholarly attention has been devoted to understanding how chemical pharmacology was actually connected to Paracelsian medical theories about how the body works, that is, how chemical drugs functioned within what can be defined as a Paracelsian praxis. Indeed, little attention has been paid to Paracelsian medicine as a practice, owing to the fact that the most obvious early modern debates were framed around the use of particular drugs (antimonials being the most salient group), the principles of natural philosophy, or the religious heterodoxy of Paracelsian ideas about human anthropology and the nature of Christ. And yet, there was a point at which Paracelsian theory translated into clinical practice. It was in fact practices that concerned many clients of Paracelsian practitioners most dearly.
       I am to create a framework for understanding Paracelsian medical practice in terms of connecting what we might define as chemical therapeutics—chemiatrics perhaps—to distinctively Paracelsian theory about how the human body functions in sickness and health. My preliminary research into Paracelsian uroscopy suggests that there is a distinctively chemical approach to physiology and pathology that serves as a conceptual model for a Paracelsian practice that harnesses a diagnostics in terms of chemical philosophy to a practical therapeutics that makes sense of the use of particular drugs in terms of their chemistry.
• COFFEE BREAK 11:30–12:00
• 12:00–1:00
  WILLIAM NEWMAN, Indiana University
  Sennert's Last Words
  Abstract: It is little known to scholars that Daniel Sennert, the atomist and medical professor of early seventeenth-century Wittenberg, left behind a cache of literary revisions when he died in 1637. His children, at least one of whom was himself a prominent physician, collected this copious material into a volume called Paralipomena, published in Wittenberg in 1642. Although many of Sennert's revisions made their way into the later editions of his posthumous Opera omnia, the Paralipomena of 1642 provides a unique look at Sennert's last thoughts about his medical theory and practice, his atomism, and the persistent hylomorphism that he continued to espouse up to (and in this case beyond) his death. Sennert's Paralipomena provides some of his most explicitly atomistic discussions of natural phenomena usually linked to organic life—namely vinous and acetous fermentation. My paper will explore these explanations, focusing particularly on Sennert's integration of theory and practice.
• LUNCH BREAK FOR PARTICIPANTS 1:00–2:30
• 2:30–3:30
  KARIN EKHOLM, Indiana University
  The Cross-Fertilization of Anatomy, Atomism, and Chymistry in Highmore's Studies of Generation
  Abstract: In the History of Generation and Corporis Humani Disquisitio Anatomica, both of 1651, Nathaniel Highmore provides an atomistic account of the production of plant, animal, and human seed. I examine how his dissections of human reproductive parts as well as studies of plants and their seed informed his explanations of how living beings reproduce. My focus is on analogies that he draws between parts of bodies and alchemical devices, and between the development of fetuses and of plants. In particular, I consider how these comparisons led to Highmore's interest in palingenesis. The History of Generation is formulated as an explicit response to Sir Kenelm Digby's Two Treatises (1644), which also presents a chemico-mechanical account of generation. Comparing Highmore's and Digby's accounts reveals noteworthy distinctions between their efforts to replace appeals to Aristotelian faculties with mechanical and chemical accounts of generation.
• 3:30–4:30
  EVAN RAGLAND, Indiana University
  Chemical Assaying and the Products of the Body Abstract: By the late seventeenth century, the conjunction of chemistry, anatomy, and medicine in the new natural philosophies resulted in important novel methods for assaying bodily substances. Eminent anatomist Marcello Malpighi identified the chemical assay of the body's fluids as a practice "renowned among the Moderns." In this essay, I investigate the list of moderns Malpighi provides as evidence and provide a taxonomy and brief history for their practices and the relevant conceptual grounds for such chemical assay. I examine the assaying approaches of Franciscus Sylvius and Reinier de Graaf on the bile and pancreatic fluid, Robert Boyle on the blood, Antonius Nuck on the saliva, Antoni de Heyde on the blood, and Johannes Bohn an a variety of fluids. In general, these experimenters readily borrowed and refined existing techniques from chemists and apothecaries and relied on direct sensory assay or laboratory chemical tests to determine the epistemic status of bodily fluids, thus articulating in their experiments and writings the essential overlap of chemical art and chemical nature, of the inner and outer laboratories. In terms of the material analysis, collapse or interpenetration of the art/nature distinction, and multiple, varied trials, such experimentation was characteristic of the emerging science in the seventeenth century.
• 5:00–6:00
  JOEL KLEIN, Indiana University
  Thomas Willis's Experimental Chemical Anatomy
  Abstract: The Oxonian physician Thomas Willis (1621–1675) has been primarily understood within the context of the history of medicine and anatomy, and while his major discoveries are aptly categorized under those rubrics, his earliest publications and interests were in chymistry. In fact, many of his later ideas cannot be fully understood unless we consider them in this chymical context. Willis explained most actions in the natural world according to various fermentations, which themselves are explicable according to five fundamental, chymical principles—spirit, sulphur, salt, water, and earth—which are naturally those principle substances revealed to the senses by distillation. The use of this "sensible-chymical" analytical method places Willis in a long tradition of chymists and alchemists that stretches back to the Middle Ages, and similarly, it demonstrates a commitment to a quasi-Baconian empiricism. Moreover, it is clear from correspondence in the mid-1650s that Willis enjoyed some form of professional relationship with the prominent Oxford chymist, Robert Boyle (1627–1691). Upon comparison of their works, several aspects of Willis's experimental program appear strikingly similar to Boyle's. For instance, in the second edition of Willis's first publication, Diatribae Duae Medico-Philosophicae (1660), Willis discussed several redintegration experiments which are very similar to those Boyle detailed in later publications. While Boyle used these experiments to argue for a more mechanistic conception of matter, Willis used them to support his alternative system of the five fundamental, chymical principles.
• DINNER FOR PARTICIPANTS

Friday May 9

• 9:30–10:30
  LARRY PRINCIPE, Johns Hopkins University
  The Chymical Anatomy of Plants at the Académie Royale des Sciences
  Abstract: One of the most extensive communal projects of the 17th century Académie Royale des Sciences related to its projected Histoire des Plantes. Beyond the usual descriptions of the external appearances of plants, this project innovatively proposed the use of chymical analysis to describe the composition—the hidden nature—of plants. The project proved controversial and wildly expensive in time and resources, and was eventually abandoned. Arguments proliferated over how the analysis should be done, on whose principles, and to what ends. While the project has been examined previously by other historians, a renewed and closer examination of the project—especially the struggle for control between Samuel Cottereau Duclos and Denis Dodart—can reveal much not only about the chymical ideas circulating within the Academie, but also about divergent views on the role, status, and utility of chymistry in the period.
• 10:30–11:30
  NICO BERTOLONI MELI, Indiana University
  Marcello Malpighi: Between Mechanics and Chymistry
  Abstract: Marcello Malpighi is known for his application of the microscope to anatomy and mechanistic views about animals and plants. A careful analysis of his writings, however, reveals a wealth of chymical preocedures and practices interacting with his better known researches and reflections. From his first publication, the 1661 Epistolae de pulmonibus to his posthumous Vita of 1697, Malpighi referred to alembics and different forms of assaying. My talk focuses on some key texts showing an especially profound interaction between chymical methods, anatomy, and medicine more broadly. In many cases Malpighi used chymistry as a tool to understand anatomical processes as well as disease and therapies.
• BREAK 11:30–12:00
• 12:00–1:00
  MARIA CONFORTI, University La Sapienza, Rome
  Uncertain Remedies: Chemistry and Pharmacy in Late 17th Century Italy
  Abstract: In 1681 the Neapolitan physician Leonardo Di Capua published a lengthy and controversial essay on the uncertainty of medicine. This was no new subject, for physicians as for the lay public: Di Capua used it to advocate the importance of history for medicine. In 1689 Di Capua published a shorter and more technical essay on the uncertainty of remedies (medicamenti), where chemical 'anatomy', Malpighian discoveries and atomistic assumptions were used to show that the action of medical substances on the smallest parts of the body can not be accounted for, nor their effects be properly described. Di Capua's text, despite its underlying scepticism, build upon the rich tradition of Neapolitan and Italian iatrochemistry.
       The Teatro farmaceutico dogmatico e spagirico by the apothecary Giuseppe Donzelli was first published in Naples in 1667, becoming a bestseller and undergoing republishing until the end of the 18th century. Donzelli's text shows to what extent chemical knowledge and expertise had become common among learned practitioners. Discussions on the action of remedies involved, at a learned level, the assessment of the role of bodily fluids (prominently blood) in causing or healing diseases, and thus, implicitly, the choice of a viable model of the constitution of matter in general and of the texture of the living bodies in particular. But the adoption of a chemical pharmacy also meant that a widening portion of practitioners—hospital physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, barber-surgeons, and obviously chimici—were addressed as, and had perceived themselves as, 'experts'. It fostered the adoption of new techniques, such as the chirurgia infusoria. It encouraged experimentation on patients in hospitals.
       Di Capua, himself a follower of Boyle, was also reacting against an ongoing crisis of iatrochemistry in medical practice. This was not only caused by the Church of Rome prohibition of atomism, or by the reaction of traditional physicians or Galenists. In fact, it came from practice itself, and from the many cases of uneffectiveness—or worse—of chemical remedies. At the beginning of the 18th century, Giorgio Baglivi would transform the disappointment over chemistry in a Baconian hope for extensive therapeutical experimentation that could in the end lead to certain results.
• LUNCH BREAK FOR PARTICIPANTS 1:00–3:00
• 3:00–4:00
  JUTTA SCHICKORE, Indiana University
  Spiky Salts: Richard Mead's "Mechanical Account of Poisons"
  Abstract: The English physician Richard Mead published his Mechanical Account of Poisons in 1702. The book—actually a collection of essays on various poisonous things, including mad dogs, tarantulas, opium, and bad airs—was a great success; numerous editions and revisions, some of which were even pirated, appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century. My paper examines Mead's account of the working of viper venom. Mead published his first book on poison shortly after completing his studies, when he had just begun practicing medicine in his home town. His theory of the working of poison was rather eclectic, pieced together from contemporaneous iatrochemistry, iatromechanics, Newtonian methodology, and Newtonian thought on matter. He claimed that the venom primarily affected the blood, arguing that the symptoms of poisoning were an outcome of the mechanical properties of the salt of the venom.
       By 1745, when the third regular edition of his works was published, Mead had completely changed his views about the working of the poison. He now claimed that poison instilled in wounds harmed the fluid of the nerves first. My paper considers the reasons for this change. In particular, I seek to establish to what extent the transformation of his view was driven by experiments and what role methodological concerns played in it. I am struck by the flexibility of the association between empirical evidence and explanatory hypotheses that Mead's work demonstrates. Much of the evidence of the 1702 text—especially the results from animal experiments and the microscopical observations—is presented again in the later edition, but supports a completely different theoretical explanation.
• BREAK 4:00–4:30
• 4:30–5:30
  JOHN POWERS, Virginia Commonwealth University
  Analyzing the Humors: Chemical Physiology at Leiden, 1680–1740
  Abstract: Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738) has traditionally been portrayed as a mechanist in medicine. Indeed, his public orations at the University of Leiden were unabashedly critical of Leiden's earlier school of chemical physiology associated with Franciscus Sylvius. His lectures on human physiology were structured around the Cartesian notion of the "animal economy," which posited that the body was a machine whose functioning was understood through the motion of its solid and fluid parts. Yet, this was not the complete story. For Boerhaave the underlying causes of this motion, especially that of the fluids or "humors," were often their chemical properties. In fact, a quick perusal of Boerhaave's textbook of medical theory, Institutiones medicae, or any of his courses on physiology reveals the importance of the chemical analysis of bodily humors in Boerhaave's approach to physiology. In this paper, I will discuss the origins of Boerhaave's approach in the work of one of his medical mentors, the Leiden anatomist, Anton Nuck (d. 1692). I will then look at the function of chemical properties and chemical analysis in Boerhaave's physiology, suggesting ways in which chymical theories shaped Boerhaave's thinking on the causes of diseases and their treatments. Ultimately, I will argue for the increased role of chemical approaches in mainstream medicine during the Eighteenth Century, even while many seventeenth-century iatrochemical approaches were rejected as overly speculative.