John Locke and Helmontian Medicine

Anstey, Peter R.

doi:10.1007/978-90-481-3686-5_6

Cited by 25 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Locke's insistence that earth's living bodies are owned by mankind in common evokes a sense of solidarity among Adam and Eve's descendants as a species, set apart from all others by the uniquely consequential moral significance of their biological acts of eating, drinking, and copulating. Common property connotes Locke encountered van Helmont's upstart iatrochemical medicine (Webster 1976, 245-300;Anstey 2010). But the Helmontian movement had little appreciable impact on understandings of menstruation or treatment of its disorders (Read 2013, 12-14).…”

Section: Common Property and Rightful Eatingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 8. Galen’s humoral paradigm did have critics in the seventeenth century, including figures in the Hartlib circle and especially at Christ Church, Oxford, where Locke encountered van Helmont’s upstart iatrochemical medicine (Webster 1976, 245–300; Anstey 2010). But the Helmontian movement had little appreciable impact on understandings of menstruation or treatment of its disorders (Read 2013, 12–14).…”

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Everyone Poops: Consumer Virtues and Excretory Anxieties in Locke’s Theory of Property

Ephraim

2021

Political Theory

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It is a problem that the environment is often seen and treated as a reservoir of resources awaiting human use. How did this outlook arise? This essay analyzes a formative moment in the constitution of the environment as a buffet of goods to be consumed: seventeenth-century efforts by agricultural improvers, including John Locke, to eradicate waste. Locke’s theory of property prohibits the wasteful spoilage of food and charges mankind with a responsibility to cultivate, incorporate, and thereby appropriate earth’s nonhuman eatables—what I call his “partition of the digestible.” But eating both underwrites and unhinges Lockean property rights, for all food contains materials that cannot be used by the body and must be excreted from it. Poop and pee serve as visible (and smelly) reminders that consumption is inhabited by, and thus cannot resolve, waste. Even the improvers’ ostensible solution of repurposing excrement as manure to produce more food just creates more waste: this “peristaltic circle,” as I describe it, is voracious and expansive. Circular waste-eradication projects are best understood as enabling preconditions for the wastefulness of linear, take-make-waste political economies, not their antidote.

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Section: Common Property and Rightful Eatingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Everyone Poops: Consumer Virtues and Excretory Anxieties in Locke’s Theory of Property

Ephraim

2021

Political Theory

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“…Locke also practiced medicine and reflected on the connections between diet, the body, and the mind. His medical training was generally hostile to Galenism and humoral medicine; he studied and practiced what was known in seventeenth-century England as chymical medicine (Anstey 2010; see Clericuzio 2012; Rattansi 1964). Just like Descartes, though, Locke provided advice largely consistent with the Galenic tradition, despite his radical medical background.…”

Section: Humoral Dietetics and The Incorporation Of Qualitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Politics of Diet

Rebrovick

2015

Political Research Quarterly

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By situating contemporary food movements within a larger history of dietary advice, this study demonstrates both that diet has long been an important topic in Western political thought and that eating, not just speaking, voting, and legislating, is an important political act. Three distinct discursive formations have shaped the history of Western dietetics. Historians have already described two, the humoral and nutritionist traditions. I contend that a third discourse, eco-dietetics, emerged in the mid-twentieth century in the form of fresh, local, organic, and “Slow” food movements. Dietetic discourses can be distinguished by their conceptualizations of the body, healthy food, moral eating, and authoritative knowledge about aliment. Just as humoral and nutritionist dietetics, respectively, created knowledge of humors and nutrients, eco-dietetics has created a new object of knowledge: the effects of eating on the environment. But eco-dietetics contains two distinct variants, one agrarian, the other corporate, and the failure to distinguish between them has obscured the radical political potential of agrarian eco-dietetics, leading some critics to argue that it represents a disguised endorsement of neoliberalism. Agrarian eco-dietetics, however, challenges rather than bolsters neoliberalism by prioritizing food that is pleasurable rather than profitable and grown rather than purchased by the eater.

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Locke and Natural Philosophy

Anstey¹

2015

A Companion to Locke

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John Locke and Helmontian Medicine

Cited by 25 publications

References 20 publications

Everyone Poops: Consumer Virtues and Excretory Anxieties in Locke’s Theory of Property

Everyone Poops: Consumer Virtues and Excretory Anxieties in Locke’s Theory of Property

The Politics of Diet

Locke and Natural Philosophy

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