ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Frequent Rare: Cases and Generalization in Early Modern Medicine

• In Event: Rarity in Medicine 1: New Narratives

English Abstract

To look again at rarity in early modern medicine, I introduce the oxymoron ‘frequent rare’ as a category that physicians did not explicitly articulate, but that shaped their practice. I revise that influential narrative in the history of science of the rising attention to rare phenomena in the Renaissance as key to the eventual replacement of the Aristotelian focus on what happens most of the time with experimental philosophy. Physicians led the process, including by describing rare pathological cases in the genre of observationes, and through a form of thinking that always returned to the particular. Yet, far more than has been recognised, physicians continued to be interested in relations between the individual and the general, not least because they made individual diagnoses by drawing on an age-old literature that highlighted the common characteristics of diseases. I test the notion on the collection of cases by Domenico Panaroli, a physician active in mid-seventeenth-century Rome. I suggest that he constructed the rare and unusual as sitting on a continuum of pathological manifestations rather than in stark opposition to the common or ordinary. Panaroli included cases of extreme retention of excrements which were explained by humoral pathology, and of ‘monstrous’ formations found post-mortem that fed into discussions of aneurysms. Reference to previously described cases was critical. This did not lead to counting, but implied the accumulation of similar cases, which then became ‘the frequent rare’—the unusual that was not unique—and met physicians’ pressing interest in generalization.

Author

• Silvia De Renzi, The Open University