204 Numbers
and physica, the study of nature. Partly to avoid such stigmatizing as-
sociations, physicians often made a point of distancing themselves from
surgeons, who bloodied their hands cutting sick bodies.^11 Through the
late Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, the word science continued to
be used colloquially to describe virtually any body of knowledge or skill.
In the fi fteenth century, for example, England’s Privy Council, in issuing
regulations for barbers who practiced and taught surgery, referred to “the
science of barbery.”^12
Throughout the Renaissance, scholars continued to dispute the in-
tellectual status of medicine and related disciplines such as anatomy. A
common solution allowed the precepts, but not the practice, of medicine
to count as natural philosophy. As Franciscus Valleriola, the celebrated
sixteenth- century Provençal physician explained, the “work of healing...
being uncertain and having an uncertain outcome,” could never rise above
conjecture. Science, in contrast, required incontrovertible demonstration.
Some university- trained physicians, drawing on their training in Aristote-
lian logic, argued that their diagnoses rose to this level. Despite appearances,
insists the historian Ian Maclean, the continuing debate over status was “not
a vain squabble over words, but ha[d] substantial effects in the real world,
which [could] be associated with the rising value attributed to therapeu-
tics, to clinical precepting, and to the design of hospitals at this time.”^13
By the early- modern period, university- trained practitioners of “physic”
had successfully linked themselves to natural philosophy or science, as
they sometimes called it.^14 Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the
blood in 1628 reinforced the connection, as did various chemical discover-
ies. Medical schools offered the only formal training available in such dis-
ciplines as anatomy, physiology, and botany, and medical professors held
the only paying jobs in those fi elds.^15 In 1695 the professor of medicine at
the University of Jena, Friedrich Hoffmann, declared that “as far as medi-
cine uses the principles of physics [i.e., natural philosophy] it can properly
be called a science.”^16 By the early eighteenth century numerous observers
were praising medicine as a science, increasingly understood as knowledge
of the natural world. The author of the essay “Medicine” in the second
edition of Chambers’s Cyclopedia captured the growing enthusiasm for
medicine as science when he credited “the experiments and discoveries of
chymists and anatomists,” especially those of “the immortal Harvey,” with
laying “a new and certain basis of the science.”^17 Although most medical
practitioners did not see themselves primarily as men of science, many
viewed their art as resting on scientifi c truths. Skeptics, however, dismissed
all the talk about natural philosophy and mathematics as mere intellectual
foppery, aimed at building up a bigger practice. In the early eighteenth