Benjamin Goldberg

In this chapter we consider the tension between how pain researchers today typically define pains and the dominant, ordinary conception of pain. While both philosophers and pain scientists define pains as experiences, taking this to correspond with the ordinary understanding, recent empirical evidence indicates that laypeople tend to think of pains as qualities of bodily states. How did this divide come about? To answer, we sketch the historical origins of the concept of pain in Western medicine, providing evidence that during large swaths of this history, medical experts characterized pains as laypeople tend to today—that is, as qualities of bodily states. The conception of pains as experiences that we find in contemporary definitions seems to be a relatively recent development corresponding with changes in the diagnostic tools available to doctors. We argue that this history is important and suggests that the most prominent current scientific definition of pain (IASP) is partly stipulative and fails to match how laypeople most often think of pain. We suggest that either we should acknowledge this stipulative character, or else should amend the IASP definition in a pluralistic fashion that notes both bodily and experiential conceptions of pain.

The first complete Latin edition of Hippocrates’ Opera appeared in Rome in 1525, and in Greek in 1526. Separate translations of the most popular Hippocratic works were available earlier. The most important translations of the Hippocratic works on generation, those by Gorraeus and Cornarius, saw separate publication in 1545 and 1549. Both were extremely popular:There are contradictions and inconsistencies in the ‘Hippocratic’ account. The works combine two distinct theories of the origin of the semen. In one, the semen derives from the brain and spinal cord, while in the other, the dominant one, it comes together from all, or the most important, parts of the bodies of the parents – the theory called pangenesis. Both parents contribute semen and there is no distinction made between the nature or importance of their contributions. The works most likely to have been taken by Renaissance doctors as epitomising Hippocrates’ ideas on generation, De genitura and De natura pueri, together with their companion-treatise, De morbis iv, are probably by the same author, and they present a relatively consistent account. Hippocrates’ explanation of generation is almost entirely mechanical. It requires no guidance by an intelligent, animated soul-substance.

To make clearer the range of associations which pneuma could have, we look at an extreme example of its importance in the work of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. They associated ‘prime matter’ with a single substance. Air, or breath – pneuma – has an observable association with life, so for Anaximenes pneuma or breath became identified with life and hence with soul, in the sense of intelligence, as well.An important successor of Anaximenes was Diogenes of Apollonia. Fragments of one work, “On Nature”, remain. From them we can construct the outlines of a system which considers air as the basic material principle. It also possesses intelligence. The air-soul of all living creatures is the same, since it all is breathed from the same source. Variations in density, temperature, motion and other qualities account for the differences among creatures. The association of air with life and with active intelligence has obvious implications for the activity of the pneuma of the semen.For Aristotle and Galen, the pneuma has lost its central position as the single material and psychic constituent of the universe; but it retains a special importance as breath, present everywhere there is life, soul, intelligent, organised activity.

The most important text for Plato’s theories of generation is the Timaeus, though it is also discussed in the Republic (Book V) in the context of eugenics. Plato turns from the biological question, “where does human seed come from?” to the philosophical question, “how is the immortal soul confined in mortal life?” Plato’s ideas on generation were quoted with respect long after observers had disproved his description of genitals as complete and separate animals. At the centre of the Timaeus is the idea that mortal existence involves ‘trapping’ a separable, immortal soul by binding it in an especially refined and prepared substance. And this substance is possessed of pneuma, breath. The association of ensoulment with pneuma and of both with the semen is a theme which will appear again, as is the notion of a special substance to bridge the gap between soul and body.

The introduction gives the shape and contents of the book as a whole and includes a literature review (of works published by 1980). This review suggests that none of the writers is interested in the Renaissance for its own sake. Most of them concentrate on one group of writers, the anatomists, or alternatively the authors of obstetric treatises. No attempt is made to set their descriptions into any other theoretical context than that of modern embryology.The book distinguishes four main types of sixteenth century writing on generation:Practical treatises and anthologies dealing with the diagnosis of pregnancy and the care of women in childbirth. These are the most common.Anatomical texts which include a description of the parts serving generation and of the development of the foetus.Textbooks of theoretical medicine which include generation, and commentaries or monographs by medical writers.Commentaries on the Generation of Animals of Aristotle and related works, usually by natural philosophers.Virtually all other historical accounts base themeselves on the first two categories, though without distinguishing them from the last two. This book focuses on the last two groups.

The spiritus is a characteristic feature of Fernel’s physiology. It is an important part of his explanation of generation. And it is an aspect of his physiology which called forth comment from contemporaries. The first section of this chapter gives an account of innate heat and spiritus as Fernel explains them in the Physiologia and Dialogus, the second deals with the action of spiritus in generation and the third considers contemporaries and successors who wrote commentaries on heat and spirits and commented on Fernel’s own system. Those considered are Joannes Argenterius, Jean Riolan the Elder, Zabarella, Paparella, and Caimo on innate heat, and Delphinus, Bertacchius and Bronzerius on spirit.Fernel was in a minority on the question of the celestial origin of spiritus. In his own terms, despite the flaws in his argument pointed out by later writers, Fernel makes a good case, in his own terms, for the necessity of a spiritus, and for its association with a power beyond the elements.

This chapter deals with the first of the compendia topics important to generation.The Elements‘Elements’ were usually defined as the simplest of material constituents. The four writers I have chosen are Fernel (1542); Gaspar Contarenus or Contarini (1483-1542: published 1548); Jacobus Sylvius (1550) and Joannes Baptista Montanus (1498-1531: published 1554). For these writers, the physical world was made up not of one element, but four. On the whole they lie within a common tradition, and at some points are strikingly similar. I think there are three major points. The first is that all of our examples assume some form (or forms) of a four-element theory, based ultimately on that of Aristotle. Secondly, there are areas of confusion among three possible forms of the four-element theory itself, confusions which these writers reflect in various ways. This confusion began with Aristotle. The third point: the suggestion, made most strongly by Fernel, that the elements in their classical form are not enough to explain the material composition and structure of the world, much less the life-activities of plants and animals. A second (or even third or fourth) layer of explanation is necessary: temperament, innate heat and spirits, the soul; or the divine actions of the quintessence and of ‘aethereal heat’.TemperamentsTemperament explains the body’s function. The commentaries of Sylvius and Montanus are very short. Contarini studies temperament types describes the relationship of the four primary qualities with greater complexity and precision than Galen. Function requires a soul, according to Fernel. This makes it difficult to explain the function of the body by appeal to temperament. Whatever the level of explanation – temperament, faculty, soul – it is ultimately related to the one bit of evidence the doctor has at his disposal, the actions of the living body in health and disease. Galen created confusions of terminology (such as the multiple meanings of the verb ‘to heat’). These were not of great moment to those (such as Montanus and Sylvius) who were chiefly concerned to interpret the Galenic texts for medical students. But they presented greater difficulties for those (such as Contarini and Fernel) who approached the problem on a more sophisticated philosophical level. Unlike temperament, which can be explained by touch as well as by its actions, and related to the assumed structure of the rest of the physical world at the level of the elements, soul is an unknown substance. Its use advances physiological understanding very little.

The role of the soul in generation was a subject for controversy, rooted in Aristotle’s definition of anima. The classic questions concerning the soul in generation, which we find in Fernel, his contemporaries and successors, arise from this definition of anima. Put briefly, they are: is the seed animate, or is it an instrument of an “external efficient” as Cremonini called it? If the latter, is this external cause the parents, God, Nature, the heavens? Is the anima (as form) the same thing as species? And, related to this, how are the faculties or actions of a complex living creature such as a man, composed of parts of different forms or species, integrated into a functioning whole?These questions are discussed by Fernel in his Medicina and by others. The de principio effectivo semini insito of Joannes Bronzerius asks “what makes semen fertile?” Archangelo Piccolomini’s Anatomicae Praelectiones is much broader. Scaliger’s discusses the soul in generation in his Exotericarum Exercitationum (1557). What is clear, in this all too brief and sketchy survey of Renaissance ideas of the soul in generation, is that Aristotle’s De generatione animalium is probably the most important single authority for the Renaissance debate.

I consider how theoretical questions were treated in a textbook form which I call the compendium. The compendium had topics: on the materials of which living things were built, elements, temperaments, humours and the simple and composite parts; and the processes according to which they operated: heat, spirits and the soul.Fernel’s Physiologia contains a section on each of these topics and one on generation. I believe that the Physiologia became the model for later writers into the seventeenth century, but he did not invent the form. The First Fen of the Canon of Avicenna (980–1037). covers the topics used by Fernel. Fernel’s earliest important Western predecessor appears to have been the fourteenth century Paduan medical and philosophical writer, Peter of Abano, known as Conciliator.Jean Fernel wrote two major works of theoretical medicine. The first was published as On the natural part of medicine (1542) and in 1554 as Physiology, the first section of a general medical work, On medicine. The other (1548) was a dialogue, De abditis rerum causis (On the hidden causes of things). I examine the questions Fernel and his contemporaries ask on one particular topic, generation, within one particular context, the ‘compendium’.

In a class by itself is the De Rerum Natura juxta propria principia of Bernardino Telesio. This is a commentary on the natural philosophical works of Aristotle, and a rejection of the Philosopher Telesio argues that the world is constructed of two substances, heaven and earth, shaped by paired opposing qualities of heat and cold. Generation involves spiritus with its qualities of heat and motion. The two seeds contribute to the foetus by fusion, not as agent and patient. Telesio rejects Aristotle’s claim for the primacy of the heart in generation. He tackles a much trickier question: the operation of the soul in generation. The role of spiritus in Telesio’s writings seems designed to counter a major problem of unity. Galen’s solution, the multiplication of ‘faculties’ to control the body’s diverse operations, compounds the problem. Spiritus is one, and performs the actions of the soul throughout the body. Telesio’s monistic system, with its emphasis on unity, has considerable claims to originality. He is included because his work follows the standard format of Aristotle commentaries, and treats many of the same problems.

In Part II, generation is considered within the context of natural philosophy. The Generation of Animals is one of the ‘animal works’: the group of treatises in which Aristotle applied his philosophy to animate nature. These works are often grouped in a single volume in Renaissance editions of the Opera. As well as this logical framework, Renaissance editors sought to place the work within a didactic framework. The assumptions were carefully spelled out by translator/editors such as Gaza. In the Renaissance; certain specific questions are taken up as the focus for debate: questions concerning the place of the soul in generation; and a series of other questions which can be traced back to the “commentary” on De generatione by Galen.These questions are prominent in the paraphrase-commentary on De generatione by Averroes, in the Renaissance translation of Jacob Mantinus. And they are taken up in an “Averroist” form by most of the commentators in this section. His Renaissance successors were in a position to use Averroes’s authority as he had used those of Galen and Aristotle: not for slavish obedience, but as a guide to their own interpretations.

The Italian natural philosopher Cesare Cremonini takes up the “many controversies between Aristotle and Galen in the books on animals” in a spirit of controversy. The topics he chooses are almost exactly those emphasised by Averroes in his Paraphrase. Cremonini’s De calido innato (1626) and De semine (1634) deal with the status of the geniture and the role of male and female contributions to generation; and his Apologia de origine et principatu membrorum (1627) treats exhaustively the question of the primacy of the heart over the other members. Cremonini is more partisan in his opinions than Averroes or Nifo, who were doctors themselves. His works on generation seem to have arisen from a dispute between Cremonini and a doctor and anatomist, Pompeius Caimus (or Caimo) which may explain their monotonous Galen-bashing. And he seems to have taken Averroes as his guide to chinks in the medical armour. His printed works on natural philosophy contain three themes which are of importance to the narrower question of the Generation of Animals: the importance of celestial influence in the sublunar world; the divisions of natural knowledge and their order; and the relationship of medicine and natural philosophy.

Galen’s contributions are De semine (Works 1490; separately 1533), De foetuum formatione (1535 and in French 1559) and De usu partium (1528 and in French 1566). Galen opposes Aristotle on four points especially: the existence of female semen; the material constitution of the embryo; the role of the testes (which for Aristotle had no part in forming semen); and the choice of the liver, rather than the heart, as the earliest centre of foetal development. These points of difference are central to academic debate in the Renaissance.In De semine Galen speaks of the operations of heat and spirit. In part this recalls the Hippocratic pneuma, and the activities of the physical qualities – hot, cold, moist and dry – which Galen says form the simple parts. But the spirit appears to do more, intelligently arranging and composing the parts. If pressed on the nature of the essence lying behind this formative faculty, Galen is willing to say that it clearly reveals intelligence, but not to speculate on whether this essence, or soul, is mortal or immortal, corruptible or incorruptible, unitary or existing in parts. The result is a system which is far from logical.

Similar points concerning the logic behind the order of the “Animal Books” are developed by Felix Accorambonius in his Interpretatio obscuriorum locorum et sententiarum omnium operum Aristotelis… (1590). The section “De Generatione Animalium Annotationes” of his Interpretatio is concerned with a discussion of the major controversies and questions arising from the text and from commentaries, in particular those of Galen in the work De semine. Accorambonius concentrates on four linked problems which are important to the philosophical, as distinct from the medical, debate on De generatione: the problems of spontaneous generation and of species; the mind and its relation to the semen and to the virtus formativa; and the relation of elemental, animal and celestial heat. Accorambonius also takes up the difficult question of the origin of the mind. His Interpretation is an attempt, in the manner of Averroes, to discuss controversial questions and reconcile Peripatetic doctrine with Catholic faith; Aristotle with Plato; and even, often, Aristotle with Galen. He seems particularly interested in examining the controversies which divide Aristotle and Galen.

Plato, Hippocrates, Galen and Aristotle – the four main classical examples – are considered as sources for the speculation surrounding the question of generation in the Renaissance They are important as the most accessible, and by far the most valued, of the classical authorities on generation known to Renaissance writers. Part I tries to make clear the answers of the four writers to such questions as: how is the semen formed? where, and of what substance? how does it transmit life, organised form and even detailed likeness to the offspring? how are the parts of the foetal body generated and distinguished? what does each parent contribute to this process? It also hopes to suggest the major sources, and clarify the major themes, of Renaissance theoretical discussions of generation. This is an attempt to look back at the major Greek medical writers not from the twentieth century but from the sixteenth.

Nifo produced commentaries and translations for major Aristotelian treatises. His medical activities as a practising doctor and university professor of medicine bring to his commentary on De generatione animalium the perspective of the medical tradition at Padua in the late fifteenth century. The Expositio of de generatione animalium is largely a section-by-section paraphrase of the text, with occasional points of difference raised by later commentators. Nifo begins his commentary with a summary of the themes of each of the five books of De generatione. He touches on a number of questions which we have already met, including the role of spiritus and heat in generation, the sense in which the seed or conceptus is ensouled, the generation of the mens. Nifo argues that sexual and spontaneous generation, though the mechanism by which they operate is different, are parallel and equivalent processes. All he could say was that similar effects (i.e. generation) must have had similar causes (similar measures of heat). It may well be that these differences in the kinds of explanation which were acceptable to Renaissance doctors and natural philosophers had more profound effects in determining their approach than the simple division into ‘Aristotelians’ and ‘Galenists’.

The most important of the Aristotelian texts for generation is naturally De generatione animalium, his treatise on animal generation. Greek manuscripts of De generatione exist from throughout the medieval period; the earliest has been dated at c.1000 A.D. It was made available to Latin audiences in the translation of William of Morbeke (c.1260) and in that of Theodore Gaza (c.1450) which was printed, together with those of the History and Parts of Animals, in 1476. A printed Greek text became available in the 1497 (Aldine) edition of the Opera.In briefly noting the distinctive features of Aristotelian generation theory, one would have to mention the separation of motive and material cause into male and female contributions; the origin of semen as a homogeneous residue of the blood; the insistence that parts are formed successively, beginning with the heart; and the importance of the pneuma – resembling the Stoic notion and yet quite distinct.

In this chapter we consider the tension between how pain researchers today typically define pain and the dominant, ordinary conception of pain. While both philosophers and pain scientists define pains as experiences, taking this to correspond with the ordinary understanding, recent empirical evidence indicates that laypeople tend to think of pains as qualities of bodily states. How did this divide come about? To answer, we sketch the historical origins of the concept of pain in Western medicine, providing evidence that during large swaths of this history, medical experts characterized pains as laypeople tend to today—that is, as qualities of bodily states. The conception of pains as experiences that we find in contemporary definitions seems to be a relatively recent development corresponding with changes in the diagnostic tools available to doctors. We argue that this history is important and suggests that the most prominent current scientific definition of pain (IASP) is partly stipulative and fails to match how laypeople most often think of pain. We suggest that either we should acknowledge this stipulative character, or else should amend the IASP definition in a pluralistic fashion that notes both bodily and experiential conceptions of pain.

This essay explores the idea of experience and its epistemological and practical role in maintaining the health of a household among early modern English Royalists. A number of prominent royalists during the mid-seventeenth century British Civil Wars expended quite some effort in the collection of medical recipes, including Queen Henrietta Maria herself, as well as William and Margaret Cavendish, and the Talbot sisters—Elizabeth Grey and Alethea Howard. This essay looks at these Royalists and four of their collections: three published (Henrietta Maria, Grey, Howard), and one manuscript (the Caven­dishes), in order to determine how they conceptualized experience and its role in medical practice. The claim that such recipe collections represent a new, anti-Aristotelian idea of experience as a specific, particular event is disputed through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of these collections. Instead, it is argued that there a number of related conceptions of experience found in these Royalist recipe collections, but the basic idea is one where experience indicates long experience or expertise, an idea that can traced back at least to humanist medicine of the Renaissance, and likely back to Galen.

This essay explores the idea of experience and its epistemological and practical role in maintaining the health of a household among early modern English Royalists. A number of prominent royalists during the mid-seventeenth century British Civil Wars expended quite some effort in the collection of medical recipes, including Queen Henrietta Maria herself, as well as William and Margaret Cavendish, and the Talbot sisters—Elizabeth Grey and Alethea Howard. This essay looks at these Royalists and four of their collections: three published (Henrietta Maria, Grey, Howard), and one manuscript (the Caven­dishes), in order to determine how they conceptualized experience and its role in medical practice. The claim that such recipe collections represent a new, anti-Aristotelian idea of experience as a specific, particular event is disputed through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of these collections. Instead, it is argued that there a number of related conceptions of experience found in these Royalist recipe collections, but the basic idea is one where experience indicates long experience or expertise, an idea that can traced back at least to humanist medicine of the Renaissance, and likely back to Galen.

This essay explores a familiar concept from the philosophy of science—underdetermination—in an unfamiliar context: explanation. Underdetermination is usually deployed in the realism debate, or in discussions of theory confirmation. Here, instead, I am concerned with how underdetermination, interpreted as the necessity of background assumptions, can help us understand a specific historical case involving a dispute about explanatory success. In particular, I look at the work of William Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood, and his rejection of materialist modes of explanation in the course of his De generatione animalium. I articulate the nature of three background assumptions at work here, which affect Harvey’s conception of: how to explain; what to explain; and the larger explanatory stakes.

This volume deals with philosophically grounded theories of animal generation as found in two different traditions: one, deriving primarily from Aristotelian natural philosophy and specifically from his Generation of Animals; and another, deriving from two related medical traditions, the Hippocratic and the Galenic. The book contains a classification and critique of works that touch on the history of embryology and animal generation written before 1980. It also contains translations of key sections of the works on which it is focused. It looks at two different scholarly communities: the physicians and philosophers, that share a set of textual resources and philosophical lineages, as well as a shared problem, but that nevertheless have different concerns and commitments. The book demonstrates how those working in these two traditions not only shared a common philosophical background in the arts curricula of the universities, but were in constant intercourse with each other. This book presents a test case of how scholarly communities differentiate themselves from each other through methods of argument, empirical investigation, and textual interpretations. It is all the more interesting because the two communities under investigation have so much in common and yet, in the end, are distinct in a number of important ways.

The generation of animals was a difficult phenomenon to explain in the seventeenth century, having long been a problem in natural philosophy, theology, and medicine. In this paper, I explore how generation, understood as epigenesis, was directly related to an idea of rational nature. I examine epigenesis—the idea that the embryo was constructed part-by-part, over time—in the work of two seemingly dissimilar English philosophers: William Harvey, an eclectic Aristotelian, and Margaret Cavendish, a radical materialist. I chart the ways that they understood and explained epigenesis, given their differences in philosophy and ontology. I argue for the importance of ideas of harmony and order in structuring their accounts of generation as a rational process. I link their experiences during the English Civil war to how they see nature as a possible source for the rationality and concord sorely missing in human affairs.