In the seventeenth century, the discrepancy between the taste of some drugs and their effects on the body was used to criticize Galenic medicine. In this paper, I argue that such contradictions were brought to light by the sixteenth-century study of drug properties within the Galenic tradition itself. Investigating how the taste of a drug corresponded to the effects it had on the body became a core problem for maintaining a medical practice that was both rational and effective. I discuss four physicians, connected to the University of Leiden, who attempted to understand drug properties, including taste, within a Galenic framework. The sixteenth-century discussions about the relationship between the senses, reason and experience, will help us understand the seventeenth-century criticism of Galenic medicine and the importance of discussions about materia medica for ideas regarding the properties of matter proposed in this period.
While some seventeenth-century scholars promoted natural history as the basis of natural philosophy, they continued to debate how it should be written, about what and by whom. This look into the studios of two Amsterdam physicians, Jan Swammerdam (1637–80) and Steven Blankaart (1650–1705), explores natural history as a project in the making during the second half of the seventeenth century. Swammerdam and Blankaart approached natural history very differently, with different objectives, and relying on different traditions of handling specimens and organizing knowledge on paper, especially with regard to the way that individual observations might be generalized. These traditions varied from collating individual dissections into histories, writing both general and particular histories of plants and animals, collecting medical observations and applying inductive reasoning. Swammerdam identified the essential changes that insects underwent during their life cycle, described four orders based on these ‘general characteristics’ and presented his findings in specific histories that exemplified the ‘general rule’ of each order. Blankaart looked to the collective observations of amateurs to support his reputation as a man of medicine, but this was not supposed to lead to any kind of generalization. Their work alerts us to the variety of observational practices that were available to them, and with what purposes they made these their own.
artikel is voortgekomen uit een paper geschreven in het kader van de masteropleiding History and Philosophy of Science aan de Universiteit Utrecht. Met dank aan mijn docenten, Bert Theunissen in het bijzonder. 1 Hyman Binger was in zijn studietijd lid van het literaire genootschap 'Misceamus Utile Dulce'. Hij schreef ook gedichten, die in tal van jaarboekjes en tijdschriften werden gepubliceerd. Als uitgever gaf hij met Jacob van Lennep de werken van Joost van den Vondel uit. Zie het lemma Hyman Binger op de website van het Joods Historisch Museum (www.jhm.nl), geraadpleegd op 14 december 2008. 2 Twee van de prenten zijn met initialen gesigneerd: 'H.t.K' en 'v.L.'. Wellicht zijn hiermee de graficus Herman ten Kate (1822-1891) en de schrijver-tekenaar Jacob van Lennep (1802-1868) bedoeld.
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