Early Science and Medicine最新文献

In this paper I focus on the dietetic discussion at the end of the Timaeus (86b–90d) and read it against the background of the medical dietetics of its day. I try to show that Plato’s version of dietetics is deeply rooted in the preceding medical tradition and that it draws in particular on ideas attested in the Hippocratic treatises On Regimen and Airs, Waters, Places. On the other hand, I also argue that Plato is most likely the first author ever to identify intellectuals as a specific dietetic category and to propose a preventive regimen adapted to the specific needs of mathematicians, philosophers, and other men of letters. Therefore, his dietetic discussion in the Timaeus deserves recognition as an important contribution to the history of dietetic therapy and prevention.

This essay focuses on Jewish practical kabbalistic books of recipes that were produced in early modern East-Central Europe. These handwritten sources document the Jewish engagement with practical forms of expertise, which were informed by the theoretical foundations of kabbalistic knowledge. Through two case studies, the article highlights Jewish vernacular ideas about nature and matter, and the techniques used to transform these ideas into practical things during the early modern period. It also explores the phenomenon of recording these ideas and methods in the form of practical kabbalistic books of recipes, which serve as a prime example of practical episteme. In so doing, the article sheds light on the significance of kabbalistic theosophy and practical kabbalistic traditions, particularly those developed in East-Central Europe, in the broader history of Western European knowledge production.

Don Meir Alguades’s Segulot Muvḥanyot, extant in Parma, Biblioteca Palatina MS 2474, offers a rare insight into two converging questions in the history of late-medieval medical practice: how was practical knowledge transmitted? And to what extent did this practice draw on medical theory? The present article closely examines the various features of this collection – namely, the author to whom it was attributed, the text, the codex in which it was copied, and later renditions and mentions of the text. These reveal new information on the work, its formation and its reception, as well as on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Jewish medical practice in Iberia and among Jews of Iberian descent. Considering this text as an exemplar of recorded clinical encounters allows us to advance tentative suggestions regarding the art of tailoring medical practice in the period, and the dynamics between medical theory and the medicine provided by learned physicians. The personalized recipes further demonstrate how the formulation of trust and credibility operated in Jewish medicine of the period, and how these survived through changing social contexts.

The thesis of this paper is that, in De Caelo I.2, the introduction and differentiation of simple bodies is achieved entirely by differentiating simple motions. This runs counter to the traditional interpretations of De Caelo I.2, which consider how, and how completely, Aristotle uses the differentiation of simple magnitudes to differentiate simple bodies, and which assume that he introduces the notion of a simple body independently of the notion of a simple motion. But the traditional interpretations miss the point of Aristotle’s argument in De Caelo I.2, which – so I argue – is to introduce the notion of simple motions, using this to introduce the notion of simple bodies, and to thereby provide an explanatory account of all possible locomotion. This is the reason why Aristotle identifies simple bodies in De Caelo I.2 with the fundamental components of the universe.

The paper explores Galen’s notion of the chreia of bodily parts and activities, and the method of its discovery against the Aristotelian background. It argues that the chreia of an object π (a bodily part or activity) is a connection between the activity ε for the sake of which π has come into existence, and the attributes of π without which ε would cease to exist or would not be as good. The discovery of chreia, then, is an explanation of this connection. Aristotle does not use the word ‘chreia’ in this sense, but in Parts of Animals he employs a partly overlapping notion which he calls ‘ergon’. Finally, the paper points out that Galen’s chreia is equivalent to the middle term of teleological demonstrations, as outlined in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics II 11.

Sébastien Le Clerc was born into a family of goldsmiths in Lorraine, and received classical artisanal training. Yet over the course of a highly successful career as an engraver, he also became a widely published scientific author. This paper argues that geometrical skills played a key role in the dual development of Le Clerc’s career, and in his striving for recognition as a man of letters, as well as an engraver. By a detailed study of the geometrical skills displayed in Le Clerc’s two geometrical publications, this paper revisits the thorny question of the relations between scholars and artisans in the early modern period. Rather than a dependence on his hands-on, bodily experience, it was Le Clerc’s skill in geometry that lent support to his aspiring scholarly career.

This essay offers a new reading of Galileo’s most celebrated anagram, incorporating both the prehistory of his late-1610 disclosure concerning the moon-like phases of Venus, and the awkward “leftover letters,” o and y, of the eventual cypher. It argues for a sustained analogy between components of the optical instrument, musical instruments, and particular anatomical structures described by Galen and elaborated by early modern anatomists in Padua. It proposes, finally, the cypher as a calculated response to the Neapolitan magus and playwright Giambattista della Porta’s challenge to Galileo’s claims about the telescope itself.

In sixteenth-century Lisbon, Aires Vaz and Manuel Rodrigues were summoned to the Inquisition on account of their astrological practices. Records of the trial of Vaz and Rodrigues provide valuable information regarding the training and practice of an astrologer in sixteenth-century Portugal. Prior to this study, however, our knowledge on these matters was scarce and mostly indirect. In this article, we argue that the study of these trial records is crucial to understanding both the practice and the regulation of astrology. Studies on the censorship of astrology usually emphasize the importance of the Roman Index, the Tridentine Rules, and the papal bulls against astrology. By looking at these two trials, this article sheds new light on the application of the Roman rules and allows us to trace the general profile of an astrologer in early modern Portugal.

Two Latin manuscripts in Oxford and Florence preserve diverging recensions of a previously unnoticed astronomical treatise beginning Infra signiferi poli regionem (Oxford recension) or Circulorum alius est sub quo (Florence recension). It can be shown that this anonymous text was originally intended to accompany the Tables of Marseilles in Raymond of Marseilles’s twelfth-century Liber cursuum planetarum (ca. 1141). While the core tables for planetary longitudes in this set were founded on Ptolemy’s kinematic models, as known from the Almagest, this new source frequently deviates from the Ptolemaic norm, for instance by explicitly rejecting an epicyclic explanation of planetary stations and retrogradations. In place of the latter, it argues in favour of a heliodynamic theory inspired by Roman sources such as Pliny, which underwent certain developments in the works of twelfth-century Latin writers such as William of Conches. Rather than being wholly exceptional, these features are indicative of a degree of disconnect between planetary theory and computational practice in twelfth-century Latin astronomy, which is also detectable in other sources from this period.