book chapter

1. reconciliation of Aristotle and Galen (tasks that had preoccupied some scholastic physi-
cians of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) was no longer the only option. The
enthusiasm of Renaissance humanists for every aspect of the written heritage of ancient
Greece brought attention not only to hitherto unknown or less studied ancient medical
books but also to a range of non-Aristotelian philosophies from Platonism to skepticism.
At the same time, humanist scorn for medieval translators (often unjustified) and com-
pendia soon turned to criticism of ancient authorities themselves. One result of the
expanded knowledge of ancient sources was that the sixteenth was above all Galen’s
century. But another was that intensive study of Galen provided the foundation for
critiques of Galen modeled in part on his own works, the first book of Vesalius’s De
humani corporis fabrica libri septem being only the most famous example.
Moreover, the search of some humanists, notably the fifteenth-century Florentine
neo-Platonist physician Marsilio Ficino and his followers, for sources of wisdom older
than either of the standard academic authorities, Aristotle and Galen, seemed, however
delusively, to hold out the possibility of yet other routes to true knowledge in the imagined
ancient Egypt of Hermes Trismegistus or elsewhere.11
Two generations later, Renaissance
neo-Platonism (including its religious and magical aspects) shaped the ideas of another
influential figure: the Paris professor of medicine and royal physician Jean Fernel (d.
1558). Fernel was the author of a famous treatise, On the Hidden Causes of Things, and
of a comprehensive textbook of physiology, pathology, and therapy that remained one of
the most widely read general works on medicine until well into the seventeenth century.
He positioned himself as a reformer of medicine, although for the most part he espoused
a modified Galenism. But Fernel played a significant role in undermining Galenic disease
theory through his denial that imbalance in the body’s complexio, or temperament (that is,
the mixture of the humoral qualities of hot, wet, cold, and dry), could account for all
diseases, especially pestilential epidemics. His alternative explanation, which drew on his
ideas about hidden forces in nature to postulate a separate category of “diseases of the total
substance,” was one component in the long series of sixteenth-century controversies about
the causes, nature, and transmission of disease.12
Yet other physicians—notably Daniel
Sennert, professor of medicine at the University of Wittenberg in the early seventeenth
century—espoused and developed a corpuscular theory of matter.13
In other medical circles, a reinvigorated Renaissance Aristotelianism flourished; for
some midcentury physicians a revived interest in Aristotle’s works on animals seems to
have provided part of the context for the composition of new encyclopedic works on
11
For the various aspects of Ficino’s thought see James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden:
Brill, 1990), Vol. 1, pp. 267–360; and Michael J. B. Allen, Valery Rees, and Martin Davies, eds., Marsilio
Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy (Leiden: Brill, 2001).
12
Jean Fernel, De abditis rerum causis libri duo (Paris, 1548) (and numerous later editions); and Fernel, De
naturali parte medicinae libri septem (Paris, 1542). The latter was subsequently incorporated as the physiolog-
ical section of his Medicina (Paris, 1554) and Universa medicina (Paris, 1567). Some idea of the diffusion of
the last-named work can be gained from the fact that the holdings of the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda,
Maryland, include more than twenty-five editions of Universa medicina published between 1567 and 1683. See
also James J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1995); Linda
Deer Richardson, “The Generation of Disease: Occult Causes and Diseases of the Total Substance,” in The
Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Wear et al. (cit. n. 10), pp. 175–194; and Hiro Hirai, “Ficin,
Fernel et Fracastor autor du concept de semence: Aspects platoniciens de seminaria,” in Girolamo Fracastoro
fra medicina, filosofia e scienze della natura, ed. Alessandro Pastore and Enrico Peruzzi (Florence: Olschki,
2006), pp. 245–260.
13
See William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific
Revolution (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2006), Chs. 4, 5.
NANCY G. SIRAISI 497
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