The Secrets of Health; Views on Healing from the Everyday Level to the Printing Presses in Early Modern Venice 1500--1650 (2009)
Visconti, John Gordon (Author)
Hsia, Ronnie
Pennsylvania State University
Edition Details: Advisor: Hsia, Ronnie
Physical Details: 410 pp.
Language: English
In early modern Venice, and, to a large extent, the entire European continent, medical practitioners from a wide variety of social levels shared many similar ideas and common assumptions about the body, health, sickness and healing. Ideas regarding moderation in lifestyle, physiological balance within the body, the need to physically eliminate badness from the sick body, and the significance of temperature, moisture and dryness, can be found in healing practices across the social spectrum. The idea that the human body and the heavenly cosmos were divinely linked and that good health depended upon a harmonious relationship with nature can be found at all different social levels of early modern thought. The main reason for these similarities is that ideas about such things, even at the most scholarly levels, were intuitively derived, intellectually plausible, and commonsensical, hence, they occurred to many different people. Modern historians of medicine impose artificial distinctions upon early modern healing, dividing medical practitioners, knowledge, and healing practices up into separate categories for their own organizational needs. Renaissance medical philosophers did much the same thing. During the early modern period, scholarly medicine suffered a discursive crisis. In a period of professional upheaval characterized by the expansion and fragmentation of their field, the major players in Renaissance universities investigated the past, seeking information by which to affirm and secure their own scholarly positions at the expense of others. Both then and now, the stories such people produce oversimplify the rich and complex history of early modern medicine and pigeon-hole its practitioners into narrow stereotypes.
...MoreDescription Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. . ProQuest Doc. ID 304983602.
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