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Seeking Intellectual Evidence in the Sciences: The Role of Botany in Descartes’ Therapeutics

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Evidence in the Age of the New Sciences

Abstract

While improving medicine through physics had the capacity to liberate seventeenth-century thinking from traditional beliefs about souls and spirits, mechanics generated complications. Descartes’ mechanical physics is a perfect example, for his efforts to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical medicine, steering intellectual evidence into this second field, were ultimately unsteady. His view of biomechanics had reduced living bodies to automated machines, thereby making definitions of life and health and the active treatment of diseases difficult. However, Descartes’ rarely-studied notes on botany reveal a new scenario, wherein he understood bodily therapeutics to be connected to physiology, making botany a lever to introduce the intellectual evidence of theoretical medicine into its practical counterpart. These documents enable a greater comprehension of the functional unity within bodies, instance refined definitions of bodily individualities, and reveal Descartes’ use of disease to define health and to produce therapeutics, thus demonstrating a strong relationship between the life sciences and his philosophy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ohad Nachtomy and Justin E. H. Smith, eds, The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford: University Press, 2014). Raphaële Andrault, La raison des corps. Mécanisme et sciences médicales (1664–1720) (Paris: Vrin, 2016). Cf. Oreste Trabucco, “Thomas Willis e l’Italia: Iatrochimica e biologia cartesiana,” in Descartes e l’eredità cartesiana nell’Europa sei-settecen-tesca, ed. M. T. Marcialis and F. M. Crasta, 311–325 (Lecce: Conte Editore, 2002).

  2. 2.

    René Descartes, Lettre-Préface, in René Descartes: Œuvres completes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, vol. IX-2 (Paris: Vrin, 1969–1978) [hereafter AT], 14–15.

  3. 3.

    Regulae ad directionem ingenii, II, AT X, 366: “sed tantummodo rectum veritatis iter quaerentes circa nullum objectum debere occupari, de quo non possint habere certitudinem Arithmeticis et Geometricis demonstrationibus aequalem.” On Descartes’ evidence, see Jean Vuillemin, “Note sur l’évidence cartésienne et le préjugé qu’elle implique,” Revue des Sciences humaines 61 (1951): 41–49; Leonardo Polo, Evidencia y realidad en Descartes (Pamplona: Eunsa, 1996); Gilles Olivo, “L’évidence en règle. Descartes, Husserl et la question de la mathesis universalis,” Les études philosophique 1–2 (1996): 189–221; François-Xavier de Peretti, Certitude, évidence et vérité chez Descartes. La question du fondement cartésien de la connaissance (Doctoral dissertation, Marseille, 2014).

  4. 4.

    Descartes to Mersenne, 23 December 1630, AT I, 196.

  5. 5.

    Regulae ad directionem ingenii, II, AT X, 366: “Non pharmaca a Medicis mutuabor, quae humore quosdam expellant, alios retineant.” Vincent Aucante, La philosophie médicale de Descartes (Paris: PUF, 2006), 416.

  6. 6.

    Medicine in this period represented something uneasily reducible. Paul O. Kristeller, Philosophy and Medicine in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Dordrecht: Raidel, 1978); Roger French and Andrew Wear, eds, The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: University Press, 1989); Nancy Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine. An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University Press, 1990); Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: University Press, 1999); Roger French, Medicine before Science. The Rational and Learned Doctor from Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Cambridge: University Press, 2003); Idiko Csepregi and Charles Burnett, eds, Ritual Healing. Magic, Ritual and Medical Therapy from Antiquity until the Early Modern Period (Firenze: del Galluzzo, 2012); Avicenna, The Canon of Medicine, ed. Oskar Cameron Gruner and Mazar H. Shah (Chicago: Great Books, 1999), 9–10.

  7. 7.

    The formal association of medicine as a science submitted to natural philosophy was not always plainly accepted. See James Weisheipl, “The Nature, Scope, and Classification of the Sciences,” in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg, 461–482 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978). Charles B. Schmitt, “Aristotle among the Physicians,” in The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Andrew Wear et al., 1–15 (Cambridge: University Press, 1985). Roger French, “Where the Philosopher Finishes, the Physician Begins: Medicine and the Arts Course in Thirteenth-Century Oxford,” Dynamis 20 (2000): 75–106. Per-Gunnar Ottosson, Scholastic Medicine and Philosophy. A Study of Commentaries on Galen’s Tegni (ca. 1300–1450) (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1982), 77–98.

  8. 8.

    Ernst Cassirer, “The Place of Vesalius in the Culture of the Renaissance,” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 16 (1943): 109–120. Charles Donald O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514–1564 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964). Andrea Carlino, Books of the Body. Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999).

  9. 9.

    Owsei Temkin, Galenism. Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973). Andrew Cunningham, “The Pen and The Sword. Recovering the Disciplinary Identity of Physiology and Anatomy before 1800. I: Old Physiology-The Pen,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 33 (2002): 631–665. Ibid., “The Pen and The Sword. … II: Old Anatomy-The Sword,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 34 (2003): 51–76. Manfred Horstmanshoff et al., Blood, Sweat and Tears. The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

  10. 10.

    Harold J. Cook, “The New Philosophy and Medicine in Seventeenth-century England,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David Lindberg and Robert Westman, 397–436 (Cambridge: University Press, 1990), 398.

  11. 11.

    Physicians did not merely cure diseases. Eleazer Dunk, The Copy of a Letter Written by E. D. Doctor of Physicke to a Gentleman, by Whom it was Published (London, 1606), 22–25.

  12. 12.

    Harold J. Cook, “Victories for Empiricism, Failures for Theory: Medicine and Science in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge. Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, ed. Charles Wolfe and Ofer Gal, 9–32 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 11.

  13. 13.

    Karen Reeds, Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities (New York: Garland, 1991), 24. Pearl Kibre, “The Faculty of Medicine at Paris, Charlatanism, and Unlicensed Medical Practices in the Later Middle Ages,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 27 (1953): 1–20.

  14. 14.

    Cook, Victories for Empiricism, 12. Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange. Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

  15. 15.

    Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in The Oxford Francis Bacon IV, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), vol. 4, 99.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., 101.

  17. 17.

    Andrew Wear, Knowledge & Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: University Press, 2000). Nancy Siraisi, “Medicine, 1450–1620, and the History of Science,” Isis 103 (2012): 491–514.

  18. 18.

    French, Medicine before Science, 188.

  19. 19.

    Rudollph Siegel, Galen’s System of Physiology and Medicine. An Analysis of his Doctrines and Observations on Bloodflow, Respiration, Humors and Internal Diseases (Basel: Karger, 1968). Walter Pagel, Paracelsus. An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (Basel: Karger, 1958). Walter Pagel, From Paracelsus to Van Helmont. Studies in Renaissance Medicine and Science (London: Variorum, 1986). Charles Webster, Paracelsus. Medicine, Magic, and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

  20. 20.

    Wolfgang Schneider, “Chemistry and Iatrochemistry,” in Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance, ed. Allan G. Debus (London: Henemann, 1972), vol. 1, 141–150. François Duchesneau, “Malpighi, Descartes and the Epistemological Problems of Iatromechanism,” in Raison, Experiment, and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, ed. Maria Righini Bonelli and William Shea, 111–130 (London: The Macmillan Press, 1975).

  21. 21.

    Jole Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine. The Ideas, Intellectual Context, and Influence of Petrus Severinus (1540/2–1602) (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004). Georgiana D. Hedesan, An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge. The ‘Christian Philosophy’ of Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579–1644) (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).

  22. 22.

    Annie Bitbol-Hespériès, “La vie et les modèles mécaniques dans la médecine du dix-septième siècle,” in Questions vitales, vie biologique, vie psychique, ed. F. Monnoyeur, 47–81 (Paris: Kimé, 2009).

  23. 23.

    Mirko D. Grmek, La première révolution biologique. Réflexion sur la physiologie et la médecine du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Payot, 1990).

  24. 24.

    Claire Crignon, “The Debate about methodus medendi during the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century in England,” Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013): 339–359, 342.

  25. 25.

    Laureen Brokliss and Colin Jones, eds, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 151.

  26. 26.

    David Wolfe, “Sydenham and Locke on the Limits of Anatomy,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 35 (1961): 193–220. Peter Anstey, “The Creation of the English Hippocrates,” Medical History 55 (2011): 457–478. Fabio Zampieri, Da Morgagni alla patologia molecolare (Padova: Libraria Padovana Editrice, 2012).

  27. 27.

    See Jean-Paul Pitton, “Scepticism and Medicine in the Renaissance,” in Scepticism from the Renaissance to Enlightenment, ed. Richard Popkin and Charles B. Schmitt, 103–132 (Weisbaden: Harrasowitz, 1987).

  28. 28.

    Johannes Clauberg, Disputationes physica, in Opera Omnia philosophica (Amsterdam, 1691), vol. 1, 11: “Medicina quodcunque boni habuit non ex illis, quae in Scholis Physicis frequentabantur disputationibus hasuit; sed potius ab experientia & observatione.” Francesco Trevisani, Descartes in Germania. La ricezione del cartesianesimo nella Facoltà filosofica e medica di Duisburg (1652–1703) (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1992), 94–101. Theo Verbeek, ed., Johannes Clauberg (1622–1665) and Cartesian Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999). Massimiliano Savini, “Johannes Clauberg e l’esito cartesiano dell’ontologia,” Quaestio 9 (2009): 153–172.

  29. 29.

    Clauberg, Differentia inter Cartesianam, et in Scholis vulgo usitatam Philosophiam, III: “Philosophia est fundamentum, cui Jurisprudentia, Medicina aliaeque artes potissimum superstructae sunt.” Descartes, Lettre-Préface to the French translation of the Principia philosophiae, AT IX-2, 14: “toute la Philosophie est comme un arbre, dont les racines sont la Métaphysique, le tronc est la Physique, et les branches qui sortent […] sont les autres sciences […]: Médicine, Mécanique, Morale.”

  30. 30.

    Principia philosophiae, AT VIII-1, 315. Lettre-Préface, AT IX-2, 14–19.

  31. 31.

    Lettre-Préface, AT IX-2, 13. English translations are from The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1991), [Hereafter CSM], vol. 1, 185. Where not indicated, translations are my own.

  32. 32.

    Principia philosophiae, IV, art. 203, AT VIII-1, 326.

  33. 33.

    Leslie J. Beck, The Method of Descartes. A Study of the Regulae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). John Schuster, Descartes-Agonistes. Physico-mathematics, Method & Corpuscolar-Mechanism 1618–33 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013).

  34. 34.

    Regulae ad directionem ingenii, I, AT X, 359–360. See Jean-Luc Marion, Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes. Science cartésienne et savoir aristotélicien dans les «Regulae» (Paris: Vrin, 1981), 29.

  35. 35.

    Regulae ad directionem ingenii, III, AT X, 366.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 367: “neque enim unquam […] Mathematici evaderemus, licet omnes aliorum demonstrationes memoria teneamus, nisi simus etiam ingenio apti ad quaecumque problemata resolvenda; vel Philosophi, si omnia Platonis et Aristotelis argumenta legerimus, de propositis autem rebus stabile judicium ferre nequeamus: ita enim, non scientias […] sed historias.”

  37. 37.

    Ibid., II, AT X, 362; 366–368; IV, AT X, 371–379: “Necessaria est. methodus ad rerum veritatem investigandam.”

  38. 38.

    Ibid., IX, AT X, 400.

  39. 39.

    Discours de la Méthode, II, AT VI, 18–19.

  40. 40.

    I present this link between intellectual evidence and experimentation in F. Baldassarri, “«[P]er experientiam scilicet, vel deductionem». Descartes’ Battle for Scientia in the Early 1630s,” Historia philosophica 15 (2017): 115–133.

  41. 41.

    Discours de la Méthode, AT VI, 78; CSM I, 151.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., 63; CSM I, 142–3. Descartes to Newcastle (October 1645, AT IV, 329), and to Chanut (15 June 1646, AT IV, 441), wherein an illustration of the sciences relationship is provided.

  43. 43.

    Discours, AT VI, 62; CSM I, 143. Cf. ibid., 55–58.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 62; CSM I, 143. See La Description du corps humain, AT XI, 223–224.

  45. 45.

    Studium bonae mentis, AT X, 202.

  46. 46.

    Fabrizio Baldassarri, “Descartes e il Principe. Il declino della politica nell’ordine della ragione,” Intersezioni XXXIV, 3 (2014): 361–380.

  47. 47.

    Descartes to Plempius, 3 October 1637, AT I, 430. His mechanics was both criticized (cf. Fromondus to Plempius for Descartes, 13 September 1637, AT I, 406) and embraced (by Regius, Henricus. Disputatio medica prima […]. De Illustri aliquot quaestionibus physiologicis, par. IX, 1641; and by Van Hogelande, Corneliis. Cogitationes, quibus Dei existentia…, 1646). See Daniel Garber, “Descartes, Mechanics and the Mechanical Philosophy,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXVI (2002): 185–204. Fabrizio Baldassarri, “From Extension to Individual Bodies. Descartes’ Complex Theory of Matter,” in Understanding Matter. Volume 1: Perspectives in Modern Philosophy, eds. A. Le Moli, A. Cicatello, 61–74 (Palermo: New Digital Frontiers, 2015).

  48. 48.

    Descartes to Mersenne, 15 April 1630, AT I, 137; CSMK III, 21.

  49. 49.

    Descartes to Mersenne, January 1630, AT I, 106.

  50. 50.

    Descartes to Huygens, 4 December 1637, AT I, 649.

  51. 51.

    Bernard Joly, Descartes et la chimie (Paris: Vrin, 2011).

  52. 52.

    Descartes to Mersenne, 20 February 1639, AT II, 525–526. Cf. Descartes to Mersenne, 23 November 1646, AT IV, 565. Writing to Chanut (15 June 1646, AT IV, 440–442), Descartes confessed dissatisfaction with his medical studies.

  53. 53.

    Marcel Fosseyeux, Les études anatomiques de Descartes en Hollande (Anvers: De Vlijt, 1923), 4. Several scholars agree with this claim: see Steven Shapin, “Descartes and the Doctor. Rationalism and its Therapies,” British Journal for the History of Science 33 (2000): 131–154 and Aucante, La philosophie médicale de Descartes, 375–416. Others have interpreted the correspondence with Elisabeth as not a serious source of medicine. Descartes to Newcastle, April 1645, AT IV, 191.

  54. 54.

    Descartes to Mersenne, 20 February 1639, AT II, 526. See Martial Gueroult, Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons (Paris: Aubier, 1953), vol. 2, 250. See Theo Verbeek, “Les Passions et la fièvre. L’idée de la maladie chez Descartes et quelques cartésiens néerlandais,” Tractrix 1 (1989): 45–61.

  55. 55.

    Descartes to Mersenne, 16 October 1639, AT II, 595.

  56. 56.

    Robin Buning studied these aspects within his PhD dissertation, Henricus Reneri (1593–1639). Descartes’ Quartermaster in Aristotelian Territory (Utrecht: Zeno, 2013). Descartes’ botanical studies are in Fabrizio Baldassarri, “Between Natural History and Experimental Method. Descartes and Botany,” Society & Politics 8 (2014): 43–60.

  57. 57.

    Writing to Chanut, Descartes awaited new botanical experiences in order to carry out his physics, see AT IV, 442.

  58. 58.

    Conversation with Burman, AT V, 178.

  59. 59.

    Reeds, Botany in Medieval and Renaissance, 3. Caspard Bauhin, De compositione medicamentorum sive Medicamentorum componendorum ratio & methodus (Offenbachi: Typis C. Nebenii, 1610), 3: “verum tractatio haec de medicamentorum compositionibus in duobis consistit, in Simplicium cognitione, & cognitorum conveniente mixtione.” Fabrizio Baldassarri, “Libri inutili, compendi e libri ‘primarii’. Descartes tra finzioni, letteratura e filosofia,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana XII (2016): 324–342. Descartes knew Bauhin’s work and occasionally consulted it: see Anatomica, AT XI, 587, 591. Cf. Franco Aurelio Meschini, “La dottrina della digestione secondo Descartes. Itinerari tra testi, contesti e intertesti,” Physis 50 (2015): 113–163. Fabrizio Baldassarri, “Né l’alchimia, né la chimica. Minerali, pietre, metalli: Descartes, la meccanica dei corpi naturali e la medicina,” in Storia e Fondamenti della Chimica, ed. Marco Taddia, 243–252 (Roma: Accademia dei XL, 2016).

  60. 60.

    L’Homme, AT XI, 120–121. Discours, AT VI, 56. Description, I, AT XI, 226. Descartes to More, February 1649, AT V, 277. Raphaële Andrault, “Anatomy, Mechanism and Anthropology: Nicolas Steno’s Reading of L’Homme,” in Descartes’ Treatise on Man and its Reception, eds. D. Antoine-Mahut and S. Gaukroger, 175–192 (Switzerland: Springer, 2016).

  61. 61.

    Luigi Belloni, Per la storia della medicina (Sala Bolognese: Arnaldo Forni, 1980).

  62. 62.

    Franco Aurelio Meschini, Materiali per una storia della medicina cartesiana. Dottrine, testi, contesti e lessico (Udine: Mimesis, 2013). Sophie Roux, “Descartes atomiste?,” in Atomismo e continuo, ed. Egidio Festa and Romano Gatto, 211–273 (Napoli: Vivarium, 2000).

  63. 63.

    Regulae VI, AT X, 381–387. See Descartes to Morin, 12 September 1638, AT II, 368. Jean-Luc Marion, “Ordre et relation. Sur la situation aristotélicienne des ‘Regles V et VI’,” Archives de Philosophie 37 (1974): 243–274. Glenn Statile, “The Necessity of Analogy in Cartesian Science,” The Philosophical Forum XXX (1999): 217–232. Massimiliano Savini, “‘Comparatio vel ratiocinatio’. Statuto e funzione del concetto di comparatio/comparaison nel pensiero di R. Descartes,” in desCartes et desLettres. Epistolari e filosofia nell’età cartesiana, ed. Francesco Marrone, 132–169 (Firenze: Le Monnier, 2008). Regulae V, AT X, 379.

  64. 64.

    Regulae VI, AT X, 381; CSM I, 21.

  65. 65.

    Cf. Cogitationes privatae, AT X, 218–219: “Cognitio hominis de rebus naturalibus, tantum per similitudinem eorum quae sub sensum cadunt: et quidem eum verius philosophatum arbitramur, qui res quaesitas felicius assimilare poterit sensu cognitis.” Regulae VII, AT X, 391.

  66. 66.

    Cf. Erik-Jan Bos and Theo Verbeek, “Conceiving the Invisible. The Role of Observation and Experiment in Descartes’s Correspondence, 1630–1650,” in Communicating Observations in Early Modern Letters (1500–1675). Epistolography and Epistemology in the Age of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Dirk van Miert (London-Turin: The Warburg Institute-Nino Aragno, 2013), 161–177. See also, Fabrizio Baldassarri, review of “Conceiving the Invisible,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 89 (2016): 148–150.

  67. 67.

    Regula XIV, AT X, 439. See La Dioptrique, I, AT VI, 83: “two or three comparisons […] help the conception of light.”

  68. 68.

    See Principia IV, art. 203, AT VIII-1, 326. Gianni Micheli, “Il metodo nel Discours e negli Essais,” and Alan Gabbey, “Explanatory Structures and Models in Descartes Physics,” in Descartes: il metodo e i saggi, ed. G. Belgioioso et al. (Roma: Enciclopedia, 1990), vol. I, 211–221 and 273–286. Francesca Bonicalzi, L’ordine della certezza. Scientificità e persuasione in Descartes (Genova: Marietti, 1992).

  69. 69.

    L’Homme, AT XI, 120–121.

  70. 70.

    Peter Galison, “Descartes’s Comparisons: From the Invisible to the Visible,” Isis 75 (1984): 311–326. See Descartes to Vatier, 22 February 1638, AT I, 562. Principia philosophiae, IV, art. 203, AT VIII-1, 326.

  71. 71.

    Dennis Des Chene, Spirits & Clocks. Machine & Organism in Descartes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 10.

  72. 72.

    Description, AT XI, 252–273. Descartes to Elisabeth, 31 January 1648, AT V, 112. Conversation with Burman, AT V, 171. Grmek. La première révolution, 128. Franco Aurelio Meschini, Neurofisiologia cartesiana (Firenze: Olschki, 1998), 107–109.

  73. 73.

    On dispositional and functional unity, see Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks, 125–140. Peter M. Distelzweig, “The Use of Usus and the Function of Functio: Teleology and Its Limits in Descartes’ Physiology,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 53 (2015): 377–399.

  74. 74.

    Descartes to Reneri for Pollot, April or May 1638, AT II, 40–41.

  75. 75.

    For a reconstruction of Descartes’ methodological procedures with the mimosa, see Baldassarri, “Descartes and Botany,” 48–50.

  76. 76.

    Description, AT XI, 277. Jacques Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1993), 140–160.

  77. 77.

    Alan G. Morton, History of Botanical Science (London: Academic Press, 1981), 132. Linda Taub, “Physiological Analogies and Metaphors in Explanations of the Earth and the Cosmos,” in Blood, Sweat, and Tears, ed. M. Horstmanshoff, 41–64 (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

  78. 78.

    Le Monde, VII, AT XI, 37.

  79. 79.

    Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil, Œuvres inédites de Descartes (Paris: Durand, 1859–1860). See Johann Dankmeijer, “Les travaux biologiques de René Descartes,” Archives internationales des sciences IV (1951): 675–680. Gianni Micheli, ed., Opere scientifiche di René Descartes, vol. I (Torino: UTET, 1966), 9–41. Vincent Aucante, Descartes. Ecrits physiologiques et médicaux (Paris: PUF, 2000), 3–5. Excerpta Anatomica, AT XI, 595, 597–598: “in eo convenit formatio plantarum et animalium.” See Cartesius, AT XI, 653. See Baldassarri, “Descartes and Botany,” 50–54.

  80. 80.

    Descartes to Mersenne, 11 June 1640, AT III, 73.

  81. 81.

    Gideon Manning, “Descartes’ Healthy Machines and the Human Exception,” in The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Sophie Roux, 237–262 (Boston: Springer, 2013): 250. Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, AT VII, 84–85.

  82. 82.

    Stephen Gaukroger, “The Resources of a Mechanist Physiology and the Problem of Goal-Directed Processes,” in Descartes’ Natural Philosophy, ed. Stephen Gaukroger et al., 383–400 (London: Routledge, 2000). Daniel Garber, “Descartes and the Scientific Revolution: Some Kuhnian Reflections,” Perspectives on Science 9 (2001): 405–422.

  83. 83.

    Lisa Shapiro, “The Health of the Body-Machine? Or Seventeenth Century Mechanism and the Concept of Health,” Perspectives on Sciences 11 (2003): 421–442, 424. Meditationes, AT VII, 85, 87: “with respect to the composite, […] what is involved [in adverting to a disordered ‘nature’] is not a mere label but a true error of nature”; “the nature of man as a combination of mind and body is such that it is bound to mislead him from time to time.”

  84. 84.

    Verbeek, “Les Passions et la fièvre,” 49.

  85. 85.

    Cogitationes privatae, AT XI, 215.

  86. 86.

    Descartes to More, 5 February 1649, AT V, 270. Cf. Des Chene, Spirits & Clocks, 108–11.

  87. 87.

    Description, AT XI, 249–250. Mirko D. Grmek, “On Ageing and Old Age,” in Monographiae Biologicae (Den Haag: Junk, 1958). Mirko D. Grmek, “Réflexions sur des interprétation mécanistes de la vie dans la physiologie du XVIIe siècle,” Episteme 1 (1967): 17–30. Sarah Byers, “Life as ‘Self-Motion’: Descartes and ‘the Aristotelians’ on the Soul as the Life of the Body,” The Review of Metaphysics 59 (2006): 723–755.

  88. 88.

    Anatomica, IV, AT XI, 597: “and so nourish body hair, nails, horns, mushrooms, tubers, and all parts of animals and plants; and in the same manner, plants that lack seeds, and perhaps also the most imperfect animals, like oysters, which do not generate their similar.” “[I]t also ceases nutrition and life.”

  89. 89.

    Descartes to Mersenne, November or December 1632, AT I, 263: “j’entreprends d’expliquer toutes ses principales fonctions. J’ai déjà écrit celles qui appartiennent à la vie, comme la digestion […].”

  90. 90.

    Ian M. Lonie, “Fever Pathology in the Sixteenth Century: Tradition and Innovation” and Don G. Bates, “Thomas Willis and the Fevers Literature of the Seventeenth Century,” Medical History 25 (1981): 19–44, 45–70. L’Homme, I, AT XI, 123–124.

  91. 91.

    Descartes to Elisabeth, 18 May 1645, AT IV, 201. Elisabeth to Descartes, 24 May 1645, AT IV, 208. Gerrit Lindeboom, Descartes and Medicine (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1978), 91–92. For a correct translation of the French “fièvre lente,” see “Fever” in The Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 862.

  92. 92.

    Descartes to Elisabeth, 1 September 1645, AT IV, 282–283. Descartes to Newcastle, October 1645, AT IV, 327.

  93. 93.

    Descartes to Regius, December 1641, AT III, 457. Descartes to Newcastle, April 1645, AT IV, 190–191.

  94. 94.

    Primae cogitationes, AT XI, 536–537. Anatomica, AT XI, 595: “ephemeral fever […] quotidian fever […] tertian […] quartan;” “it may occur that in the same time the food makes us sweat from the forehead and feel cold in the extremities.”

  95. 95.

    L’Homme, IV, AT XI, 168–170.

  96. 96.

    Anatomica, AT XI, 603.

  97. 97.

    Principia, IV, art. XCII, AT VIII-1, 256–257.

  98. 98.

    Anatomica, AT XI, 605.

  99. 99.

    Description, AT XI, 227, 245.

  100. 100.

    Descartes to Regius, December 1641, AT III, 456.

  101. 101.

    Aucante, Philosophie médicale, 387–396. Cf. Peter Dear, “A Mechanical Microcosm: Bodily Passions, Good Manners, and Cartesian Mechanism,” in Science Incarnate. Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, ed. Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin, 51–82 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Stephen Voss, “Descartes: Heart and Soul,” in Psyche and Soma. Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment, ed. J. P. Wright and P. Potter, 173–196 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).

  102. 102.

    Descartes to Newcastle, October 1645, AT IV, 330. Descartes to Elisabeth, November 1646, AT IV, 531.

  103. 103.

    L’Homme, I, AT XI, 127. Discours, AT VI, 54.

  104. 104.

    Descartes to Wilhelm, 13 June 1640, AT III, 91.

  105. 105.

    Descartes to Mersenne, 23 November 1646, AT IV, 565–566.

  106. 106.

    Descartes to Elisabeth, December 1646, AT IV, 589–590. Elisabeth to Descartes, 29 November 1646, AT IV, 579. See Remedia, AT XI, 642–643 on mercury, antimony and tartrate.

  107. 107.

    Aucante, Philosophie médicale, 405. Descartes to Mersenne, 9 February 1639, AT II, 498. Cf. Baldassarri, “Né l’alchimia, né la chimica,” 243–252.

  108. 108.

    Descartes to Elisabeth, December 1646, AT IV, 590.

  109. 109.

    Regulae I, AT X, 360. Descartes to Elisabeth, June 1645, AT IV, 238.

  110. 110.

    Anatomica, IV, AT XI, 596–598; 628–629.

  111. 111.

    Ibid., 596.

  112. 112.

    Ibid., 597.

  113. 113.

    De saporibus, AT XI, 539–542.

  114. 114.

    Anatomica, 622.

  115. 115.

    Ibid., 606–607.

  116. 116.

    See Conrad Gesner, Trésor de Evonime Philiatre des rèmedes secretz, livre physic, médical, alchymic (Lyon: Arnoullet, 1555). Andrea Caravita, I codici e le arti a Monte Cassino, vol. II (Monte Cassino: Badia, 1869), 240. Antoine Mizauld, Secrets contre la peste (Paris: 1623), 18–19. Baldassarri, “Libri inutili, compendi e libri ‘primarii’.”

  117. 117.

    The role of disbalancing temperature in affecting the body was a claim of both Santorio’s Ars de statica medicina (1614) and Bacon’s Historia vitae et mortis (1623), where they exhalted a cold diet to cool and heal the body. See Daniel Schäfer, Old Age and Disease in Early Modern Medicine (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).

  118. 118.

    Remedia, AT XI, 642. Cf. L’Homme, AT XI, 163.

  119. 119.

    Remedia, AT XI, 642–644.

  120. 120.

    Morton, History of Botanical Science, cit., 165–231. François Delaporte, Nature’s Second Kingdom. Explorations of Vegetality in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982). F. Zampieri, Il metodo anatomo-clinico fra meccanicismo ed. empirismo. Marcello Malpighi, Antonio Maria Valsalva e Giovanni Battista Morgagni (Roma: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 2016).

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Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Professor Fabio Zampieri (Università di Padova) and Professor Franco Aurelio Meschini (Università del Salento), with whom I discussed some of the contents of this chapter. I also profited from comments during conferences and workshops held in Wien, Lecce, Berlin, and Bran. The help I received and the financial support of the Project Excellence Research Scholarship for Young Researchers 2015 through the Institute for Research in the Humanities of the University of Bucharest and the DAAD have been crucial to the completion of this chapter.

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Baldassarri, F. (2018). Seeking Intellectual Evidence in the Sciences: The Role of Botany in Descartes’ Therapeutics. In: Lancaster, J., Raiswell, R. (eds) Evidence in the Age of the New Sciences. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 225. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91869-3_3

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