The papers collected in this special issue of Perspectives on Science discuss the roles and notions of experience in the works of a range of early modern natural philosophers and physicians, including Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, the Dutch atomist David Gorlaeus, William Harvey, and Christian Wolff. There are three reasons for considering medicine in connection with natural philosophy when studying early modern views on experience. First, influential discussions of experience since antiquity, including those of Aristotle (e.g., Metaphysics, 981 a 9–21) and his authoritative medieval commentators (Agrimi and Crisciani 1990, p. 24), make reference to medicine and employ medical examples. Second, early modern vocabulary relating to experience contains several terms and distinctions that emerged in medical circles following the recovery of ancient medical texts and then entered philosophical contexts. They include “observation,” “phenomenon,” and the contrast between first-hand and vicarious observation, autopsia and historia (Pomata 2011a, pp. 23–4; Pomata 2011b, pp. 65, 69). Third, looking at medical writings allows scholars to weaken or correct a number of general claims on the transformations of the notion of experience in the early modern period. Consider two examples.
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