Les styles de raisonnement médical à l’épreuve du concept de santé dans les années 1630–1670

Abstract

The concept of health forms a main issue for the medical theory. In as much as it depends on a special time, place, epistemology and metaphysics, it gets a specifi c thickness. In the modern medicine of the years 1630–1670s, on the one hand, it delineates an ideal characterised by a just proportion, that anatomy studies; on the other hand, a frequency noticed by new technologies of knowledge. Those scientifi c reorganizations bear a new conception of health in the frame of a political anatomy, which aims not only to cure, but also to prevent epidemics and optimize the general state of the population. The alternative to generalizing individual data through two anatomical objects – either through the humani corporis fabrica or the «politick body» – captures the thickness of modern health conception, which characterizes the cumulative ways of proceeding in science inducing a foliated pluralism in western medicine.