Mechanism, the Senses, and Reason: Franciscus Sylvius and Leiden Debates Over Anatomical Knowledge After Harvey and Descartes (2016)
By the mid-seventeenth century, philosophy, anatomy, and chymistry were inextricably bound together, and concentrated in lively debates over the action of the heart. In the wake of Harvey’s anatomical demonstration of the circulation of the blood, and Descartes’s provocative but error-prone anatomical speculations, Dutch physicians adopted varied positions on the sources and status of anatomical knowledge. This article attends to Leiden professor Franciscus Sylvius’s central place in this history, beginning with his early demonstrations of the circulation and his dissections and disputes with Descartes. His collaboration with Johannes Walaeus produced innovative experimental work on the circulation and the origins of the blood in digestion. Sylvius and his colleagues were generally comfortable with mechanical explanations, which they had already met in Galen’s depictions of the mechanical anatomy of Erasistratus, but only as far as they squared with sensory experience. Even prominent mechanistic anatomists such as Sylvius’s student Nicolaus Steno would accept ideals and methods of mechanistic explanation, while rejecting extant mechanisms for their sensory and experimental inadequacy. Our own, anachronistic sense of early moderns’ errors is of little use to our historical understanding, but their perceptions of error, especially in the combination of philosophical systems and the autoptic anatomical tradition, were essential to their history.
...MoreBook Benjamin Goldberg; Peter Distelzweig; Evan R. Ragland (2015) Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy.
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