Religio Medici - Enhanced Version

I suggest that medically influenced materialism in the Radical Enlightenment e. With us there was a doctor of Physic. Well read was he in Esculapius, and. Chaucer , Prologue, l. See also more generally Smith, ed. This is patent in the case of debates on the status of the soul: Beginning in the late Renaissance, through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there is a clear sense in some authors, not that medical observations e.

In that sense, historians of philosophy claiming that medicine is irrelevant to early modern disputes on atheism or the status of the soul, which are purely metaphysical Henry , ; Garber , , would be well advised to leaf through any of the writings of the above-mentioned physicians. V, book VI, ch. For the latter view, see Corneanu ms. This is not to say that debates on the soul were necessarily debates on atheism, but that both reveal more of a medical coloration than the historian of philosophy generally acknowledges.

Physicians however, placing undue emphasis upon nature, in general encroach upon the rights of the author of nature by their opposition to faith. I am not accusing all of them of error although I have heard very many of them arguing about the soul, virtue and its works, growth and decay of body, the resurrection of the same, and 7Of course, one should not confuse the interpenetration of medicine with metaphysics something of an auberge espagnole, where many tendencies coexisted and evolved: But both of these the general and the specific forms run counter to assertions in Henry and Garber regarding the distance between medicine and metaphysics.

In early modern Europe, accusations that physicians were atheists — that they favored Hippocrates or Galen over the revealed Word of God — were common. The Constitution of the Society of Jesus the Order of the Jesuits , written in , forbids the study of medicine, and the study of law, as neither of these was seen as contributing to the ultimate goal of Jesuit study, the glory of God Edwards , This tension between religion and medicine traces back to the doctrine of original sin Epistle to Romans, V, 12 , from which death and by extension all forms of bodily corruption flow.

On the first side of the balance sheet, Augustine and others taught, famously, that it was first and foremost the soul that had to be healed, 8 Mothu , , Indeed, faced with this situation there was a real need to defend the ethical legitimacy of calling for a doctor when sick. VI to discussing and rebutting the charge that physicians were atheists, including by an appeal to Galen Mothu observes that Mersenne earlier had denounced physicians as potential atheists, so this is 9Maria Conforti observes that most histories of medicine written between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries make no mention of the Christian religion, not even to gesture towards the relation between illness and original sin Conforti , One can add that histories of medicine written in the past two centuries never mention the atheist motif, perhaps also because they were usually written by physicians who did not desire to highlight the more controversial aspects of their profession.

Here a Hippocratic motif is impugned: Cranefield , Wolfe So, reflecting on this and the above cases: Here, my concern is with the specifically radical motif: It is not clear that any of these figures, and certainly not Spinoza himself, emphasize either the atheistic or otherwise radical implications of medicine. Sometimes it was presented as a positive claim, e. He also declared, in a kind of mock warning: But most often these expressions the non-ironic ones are instances of the fear of a radical medicine — a medicine that denies the existence of an immortal soul, or even defends materialism and atheism.

Attacks on this doctrine are vastly more common like medical versions of natural theology in general than statements identifying with it.

Where are we to find positive statements of this doctrine? Mortalism was a recognized heresy, the view that the universe is entirely material, and the soul is as mortal as the body, sometimes on the definition that the soul is just a mode of the body … yet the universe is nevertheless a divine creation. Mortalists generally held that the word and idea of an immortal soul was a Catholic invention, nowhere to be found in Scripture.

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The Resurrection of the same person. For more on these accusations of atheism specifically in the English context, see Kocher Sometimes it was additionally argued that the soul has been mortal ever since the Fall. But there could also be more concrete causes for worry: Thus the Leuven theologian Libertus Fromondus, in his controversy with Descartes and Plempius over the heartbeat, felt, as Lucian Petrescu puts it, that if some of the operations normally attributed to the soul are presented as actually taking place as a result of the functioning of a mechanism, then we are in danger of explaining all operations of the soul, including its purely intellectual ones, through this mechanism.

However, the danger of atheism can come from anywhere: Of primary interest here is the question of the soul or mind the 13 This story could also be told as a tale of post-Galenic medicine of the mind. Here, Gaub suggests a clinical perspective on the problem of mind-body interaction for he is speaking of mens rather than anima; Wright , , in which the metaphysical distinction between mind and body is irrelevant.

More significantly, Gaub also denounced La Mettrie in a letter to 15There is of course earlier discussion often based on Cicero of the relation between animus and anima, where the former becomes interchangeable with mens and the latter with the notion of the organic soul I thank an anonymous reviewer for this observation.

In La Mettrie, this becomes: It must thus have been disturbing to Gaub that La Mettrie spoke so favourably about the ideas he heard at the lecture, not least since his enthusiasm makes sense: Gaub had defended the view that for the physician, the metaphysical distinction between mind and body is irrelevant.

From his standpoint, he is carrying on a project of the scientific study of the living body which is both distinct from and in fact serves to refute materialism not unlike Boylean physico-theology, but in a vaguer sense. The soul also undergoes a gradual process of naturalization in a medical context with figures of Epicurean medicine as the seventeenth-century physician Guillaume Lamy Del Lucchese Here, anatomical arguments about body and soul are used in support of an anti-finalism, an Epicurean appeal to chance, and a more or less overt atheism.

His first work, the De Principiis rerum, was an explicit piece of early modern Epicurean atomism, favoring Gassendi over Descartes who was also viewed as a covert supporter of atomism , to show that Epicurus was right in the first place although, in a gesture we will find often in works of this period, e. He discusses atoms and the nature of matter at some length, hesitating as to which theory he finds most convincing, but we shall chiefly focus on his medical-materialist approach to the soul.

Lamy verbally still maintains a difference between the sensitive soul and the rational soul but ultimately locates all of these distinctions within a physiological frame f. But even if the soul is material, the ontological status of this materiality is not generic: One might ask, how medical is this, then?

I shall mention two features in which this radical medicine retains at the very least a strong rhetorical usage of the medical motif: But this is, of course, rhetoric, not clinical or experimental medicine. When, at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, a Thomas Browne or a La Mettrie invoke medical authority in their metaphysical pronouncements, it is just that: To be clear, I am not arguing either a that all forms of medicine of the mind are materialist or crypto-materialist, or b that the project of a medicine of the mind ends up leading to a materialist philosophy of mind.

Rather, c I argue that of the various forms of medicine of the mind, its more reductionist or reduction-friendly versions end up, through eclectically composed paths of articulation and development elements of Galen, Cartesianism, Epicureanism, etc. Medicine of the mind can be broadly distinguished into two strands: Le 21 To be clear and for more discussion see Corneanu, ms.

I thank Sorana Corneanu for her help and many fruitful discussions on these topics. In Gaub and Le Camus, it is a full mind-body integration to be studied by the physician with implications for materialist philosophy, as La Mettrie saw in Gaub and Diderot did in Le Camus. While terminologically he still refers to these as two substances, in practice he gives, e. It is neither purely medical nor purely philosophical: I, in La Mettrie , I, In this case, soul is being construed as a functional definition: In either case, the soul is being reconfigured as a part of medico-natural discourse, and nothing more: Diderot asserts the primacy of medicine over both medicine and morals: If the good moralist has to be a physician, we are no longer dealing just with a medicine of the mind or earlier types of medico-atheistic radicalism; we are dealing with a medicalization of morals.

That is, he deplores the fact that judgments of life and death are typically made without any knowledge of the physiological level of determination of action. It is the deep structure of the man-machine, which is organic and follows the norm of health: The medicalization of morals here takes on the form of radical hedonism, with potentially immoralist consequences for more discussion, see Wolfe But even here, the normative force of medical authority still makes itself felt.

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Even some twentieth-century scholars e. Wolfe ; thereby, it was mistaken of some scholars to claim that medicine played no role in metaphysical debates. Far from Medicine leading us to atheism and libertinage, I argue on the contrary that of the natural sciences, there is none that elevates man to the knowledge of God more than Medicine. Acknowledgments I wish to thank Sorana Corneanu for her valuable input — both critical and constructive. Regius and Gassendi on the Human Soul.

Intellectual History Review 23 4: Dictionnaire historique et critique. A Treatise of Melancholie: Description This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of Sir Thomas Browne Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, the edition demonstrates the breadth of the author of some of the most brilliant and delirious prose in English Literature. Sebald, Browne's distinct style and the musicality of his phrasing have long been seen as a pinnacle of early modern prose. However, it is Browne's range of subject matter that makes him truly distinct.

His writings include the hauntingly meditative Urn-Burial, and the elaborate The Garden of Cyrus, a work that borders on a madness of infinite pattern. Religio Medici, probably Browne's most famous work, is at once autobiography, intricate religious-scientific paradox, and a monument of tolerance in the era of the English civil war. This volume also includes his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, an encyclopaedia of error which contains within its vast remit the entire intellectual landscape of the seventeenth centuryits science, its natural history, its painting, its history, its geography and its biblical oddities.

The volume enables students to experience the ways in which Browne brings his lucid, baroque and stylish prose to bear across this range of diverse material, together with a carefully poised wit. This volume contains almost all of the author's work that was published in his lifetime, as well as a selection of writings published after his death. Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Browne. The Best Books of Check out the top books of the year on our page Best Books of Looking for beautiful books?

Visit our Beautiful Books page and find lovely books for kids, photography lovers and more. Other books in this series. Elizabeth Barrett Browning Josie Billington.