Preindustrial Europe: Science, the Economy, and Political Reorganization 297translation of original Galenic texts by the humanists
popularized his teachings, and by the early sixteenth
century his influence dominated academic medicine.
In response, a Swiss physician and alchemist who
called himself Paracelsus (1493–1541) launched a
frontal attack on the entire medical establishment. De-
claring that “wise women” and barbers cured more pa-
tients than all of the Galenists put together, he
proposed a medical philosophy based upon natural
magic and alchemy. All natural phenomena were chem-
ical interactions between the four elements and what he
called the three principles: sulphur, mercury, and salt—
the combustible, gaseous, and solid components of
matter. Because the human body was a microcosm of
the universe and because diseases were produced by
chemical forces acting upon particular organs of the
body, sickness could be cured by chemical antidotes.
This chemical philosophy was widely accepted. Its
hermetic and neoplatonic overtones recommended it to
many scholars, while those who practiced it may have
killed fewer patients than their Galenist opponents.
Paracelsus believed in administering drugs in small,
carefully measured doses. He rejected bleeding, purges,
and the treatment of wounds with poultices whose vile
ingredients almost guaranteed the onset of infection.
As a result, the bodies of his patients had a fighting
chance to heal themselves and he was credited with
miraculous cures.
The war between the Galenists and the Paracel-
sians raged throughout the mid-sixteenth century. In
the end, the Galenists won. Their theories, though vir-
tually useless for the treatment of disease, produced
new insights while those of Paracelsus did not. Andreas
Vesalius (1514–64) was shocked to discover that
Galen’s dissections had been carried out primarily on
animals. Using Galenic principles, he retraced the mas-
ter’s steps using human cadavers and in 1543 published
his De humani corporis fabrica(On the Structure of the
Human Body). Though not without error, it was a vast
improvement over earlier anatomy texts and a work of
art in its own right that inspired others to correct and
improve his work (see illustration 16.3). The long de-
bate over the circulation of the blood, culminating in
William Harvey’s explanation of 1628 (see document
16.3), was also a Galenist enterprise that owed little or
nothing to the chemical tradition.
By the time microscopes were invented in Holland
at the beginning of the seventeenth century, theDOCUMENT 16.3
William Harvey: Conception
William Harvey (1578–1657) is best known as the physician who
first described the circulation of the blood, but as this selection indicates,
he was no more consistent in his application of scientific method than
most of his contemporaries. Old modes of thinking had survived along
with the new. In this description of conception he reverts to inadequate
observation, metaphorical language, philosophical idealism, and sheer
male vanity.[As] the substance of the uterus, when ready to conceive,
is very like the structure of the brain, why should we not
suppose that the function of both is similar, and that there
is excited by coitus within the uterus something identical
with, or at least analagous to, an “imagination” or a “desire”
in the brain, whence comes the generation or procreation
of the ovum? For the functions of both are termed “con-
ceptions” and both, although the primary sources of every
action throughout the body, are immaterial, the one of
natural or organic, the other of animal actions; the one
(viz., the uterus) the first cause and beginning of every ac-tion which conduces to the generation of the animal, the
other (viz., the brain) of every action done for its preser-
vation. And just as a “desire” arises from a conception of
the brain, and this conception springs from some external
object of desire, so also from the male, as being the more
perfect animal, and as it were, the most natural object of
desire, does the natural (organic) conception arise in the
uterus, even as the animal conception does in the brain.
From this desire, or conception, it results that the fe-
male produces an offspring like its father. For just saw we,
from the conception of the “form” or “idea” in the brain,
fashion in our works a form resembling it, so, in like man-
ner, the “idea” or “form” of the father existing in the uterus
generates an offspring like himself with the help of the
formative faculty, impressing, however, on its work its
own immaterial form.
Harvey, William. “On Conception.” InThe Works of William Harvey,
trans. R. Willis. London: 1847.