Ekholm, Karin Jori (Author)
Indiana University
Bertoloni Meli, Domenico
Edition Details: Advisor: Bertoloni Meli, Domenico
Physical Details: 255 pp.
Language: English
The generation of animals and humans posed some of the most intractable challenges to mid-seventeenth-century efforts to supplant Aristotelian and Galenic natural philosophy and anatomy. Two major projects of the period--eliminating vital principles and investigating the functions of anatomical parts through vivisection--met with significant problems when anatomists tackled conception and fetal formation. I examine these struggles by focusing on the work of two English physicians, William Harvey and Nathaniel Highmore, who experimented together but published surprisingly different theories of generation. Robert Boyle cites the incongruities between their accounts as an exemplary case of anatomists examining the same phenomena, yet arriving at different conclusions. Their disparate explanations pose major philosophical problems that I explore in their cultural and intellectual contexts. I identify and analyze reasons why Harvey and Highmore provide strikingly different accounts despite their use of largely the same methods. They had fundamentally different views on the nature of principles responsible for organizing and maintaining living bodies. Harvey clung to an Aristotelian conception of vital forces and denied that the substructure of matter could shed light on living processes. At the same time, he disagreed with Aristotle at every step of the generative process. Highmore rejected traditional faculties of souls and appeals to atoms and alchemical procedures to explain life processes. Highmore's work is intriguing because it shows difficulties involved both in abandoning Aristotelianism and provides a contemporary critique of attempts to eliminate immaterial forces. Their methods and techniques demonstrate a broad range of problems unique to studying living beings, and they greatly enrich our understanding of early modern experimentation. Their investigations discern patterns amidst variations in the structure and actions of plants and animals. Challenges inherent in observing nascent living beings led Harvey and Highmore to rely heavily on analogies and anomalies from which they deduced very different conclusions. Their accounts thus reveal how generation served as a crucial site in negotiations of central metaphysical and epistemological problems of the mid-seventeenth century.
...MoreDescription Focuses on the work of two English physicians, William Harvey and Nathaniel Highmore. Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. . ProQuest Doc. ID 915229151.
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