In the Beginning Was the Plant: The Plant-Animal Continuity in the Early Modern Medical Reception of Galen

Abstract

In the early modern period, the reception of Galen’s treatise On the Formation of the Foetus drove embryological study. When in On Formative Power (De virtute formativa, 1506, 1524) Niccolò Leoniceno (1428–1524) reconstructs Galen’s view, he acknowledges the importance of the latter’s original interpretation of the similarity between the formation of the fetus and the formation of plants. While rebuking Aristotle on this issue, Galen’s uses of the animal-plant analogy importantly help specify the questions of embryology and the study of the basic functions of life. Accordingly, in the beginning animals are plants – that is, a temporal beginning concerning the first stages of embryological life and a functional beginning, insofar as animals perform vegetal operations in the liver. This original interpretation surfaces again in seventeenth century medicine, when physicians developed the animal-plant analogy in their medical studies, following the Galenic tenet, and using it to ground a functional identity between bodies. In this chapter, after a brief reconstruction of Galen’s interpretation of such a continuity, I explore the texts of a few seventeenth century physicians who re-appropriated and reinterpreted Galen’s theory, ultimately revealing the flexibility of the latter’s medical science and its influence on the early moderns, but also anticipating the emergence of comparative anatomy in later seventeenth-century medicine.