HIST 249 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Spasms, Carl Linnaeus, Cowpox
Medicine in the 17th & 18th Centuries
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Reading :
• Guenther B. Risse - “Medicine in the Age of Enlightenment”
• Modern medicine
• Start chronologically
• Readings - important for other lectures
• Time scale @ this point
• Newton before the French Revolution
• Doctors as professionals in charge of medicine
• Medical systems of the 17th century
1. Mechanism
• Mechanical forces (blood vessels, muscles)
2. Vitalism
• Vital force (nerves)
• Both
• Away from invisible, hypothetical entities (humours, spirits)
• Towards solid, anatomically defined structures
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Systems:
1.
Iatrochemistry - focus on the natural chemistry of the body
•
John Baptista Van Helmont
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Body chemical reaction - ferments (enzymes)
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Disease = entity
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Adopts Paracelsus' idea of disease as active, parasitic entity
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Franz de la Boe
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Acids & bases
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Chemical laboratories
2.
Corpusularism - Particles as basic elements
3.
Iatromechanics
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Giovanni Alfonso Borelli - body as a a machine of muscles that follows
mechanical laws
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Hermann Boerhaave - physiology as hydrodynamics
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Disease - disturbance between fluids (block vessels) fever - friction of
solids & vessels
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Explained through mechanical methods
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Friction = heat = fever
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2
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Same thing that happens in the body & in the blood vessels
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Applied to understanding health
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Friedrich Hoffmann
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Body - fibres
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Fibres - respond to 'tonus;
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Tonus - generated by 'nervous ether'
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Follows from the nerves
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Causes the fibers to tense up
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Tension & relaxation causes disease (disease = too little or too much
tension)
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Tonus - irritability in the body
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Vitalism:
• Counter-reaction to mechanism
• Reaction to the body being a machine
• Thought there is something else - cant just be explained by fibres
• Maybe something that protects the body from getting sick
• Vital soul / force
• Related to Galen
• EX - Georg Ernst Stahl
• Vital force = Anima
• Not the same as the immortal soul as religion
• Anima - body's protector from health / disease
• Fever / vomiting - not disease in itself
• Were signs that the anima was trying to get control of the body
again
• Functional unity of the organism
• Blood letting
• Mechanism did not go away
• Remained important
• Focus on irritability
• Albrecht Von Haller
• Animated anatomy - look @ function & structures of the body
• Experimental physiology
• Sensibility, nerves
• Irritability, muscles
• Researched through using animal experiments
• Explained body functions with 2 basic forces
• Coming up with simple laws & forces - sensibility & irritability
• These two forces - immanent qualities, cant be reduced to anything
• All these systems were set up to deal with making a new rationale
• No universal consent with doctors/scholars
• Different systems without 1 system dominating
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