362. Just What the Doctor Ordered: Renaissance Medicine
Connections between philosophy and advances in medicine, including the anatomy of Vesalius.
Themes:
• W.F. Richardson and J.B. Carman (trans.), Andreas Vesalius: On the Fabric of the Human Body (San Francisco: 1998).
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• F. Bigotti, Physiology of the Soul: Mind, Body and Matter in the Galenic Tradition of the Late Renaissance (1550–1630) (Turnhout: 2019).
• J. Bylebyl, “The School of Padua: Humanistic Medicine in the Sixteenth Century,” in C. Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine, and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (New York: 1979), 335-70.
• A. Carlino, Books of the Body, Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning, trans. J. Tedeschi and A.C. Tedeschi (Chicago: 1999).
• A. Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance (Aldershot: 1997).
• G. Giglioni, “Health in the Renaissance,” in P. Adamson, Health: a History (Oxford: 2019), 141-73.
• H. Hirai, Medical Humanism and Natural Philosophy: Renaissance Debates on Matter, Life and the Soul (Leiden: 2011).
• I. Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: the Case of Learned Medicine (Cambridge: 2002).
• K. Park, Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton: 1985).
• J. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: 1995).
• N.G. Siriasi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: an Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: 1990).
• A. Wear et al. (eds), The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: 1985).
Comments
Placebo
Hi Peter
Thanks for this interesting episode. Somewhere at the start you are saying that:
"Placebo works and they knew it". But did they really know ? Because what follows are mostly explanations derived from natural philosophy. I was wondering whether they really had some philosophical thoughts about how placebo could work or how immaterial pain (at least what is felled) could be resolved by thinking it not to be.
In reply to Placebo by Erik Holkers
Placebo
Well, it's a fair question - I wouldn't go so far as to say that they had a general account of the placebo effect. What I refer to specifically is Cardano giving the example of someone believing that a cure will work and thus recovering from toothache, which is more like an observation about the effect than an explanation of it. Similarly, I notice, in my footnote on that part of the chapter in the book version, I mention that Ficino refers back to Galen and others for the idea that if a patient trusts a doctor they will be more likely to recover.
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