Expanding the Scope of Late Renaissance Medicine and Anatomy

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Later Renaissance physicians and anatomists increasingly moved into new cultural debates and practices in post-Reformation Europe, and adopted knowledge, materials, and techniques from a variety of sources, from New World indigenous peoples to chymical authors, empirics, and their own contrived experiences and experiments. Scholars have increasingly realized that this was not a stale period of rigid Galenism or bookish pedantry, but what was the scope of learned medicine from the several decades around 1600? This session moves from pedagogy at a new and increasingly popular medical school at Leiden University, to Venetian physicians' philosophical-theological interventions in the care of patients' souls and minds at times of their deaths, to a Jesuit priest's anatomical-optical reconstruction of experience to include novelties and set-piece experiments within an Aristotelian axiomatic science. These papers present new research that demonstrates the productive tension between tradition and innovation in the medicine of this time, and points to future directions.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Evan R Ragland, University of Notre Dame

Commentator

• Meagan S. Allen, Science History Institute

Individual Presentations

• Death in Venice: the Role of Physicians in the late Renaissance - Cynthia Klestinec, Miami University

• Sources of Knowledge and Practice in Early Modern Medical Education: Leiden University, 1575-1640 - Evan R Ragland, University of Notre Dame

• Christoph Scheiner’s The Eye, That is, The Foundation of Optics (1619) and Aristotelian Experimental Methods - Tawrin Baker, University of Notre Dame

Session Organizer

• Evan R Ragland, University of Notre Dame