Fabrizio Bigotti

Surviving the demise of his humoral pathology and anatomy, Galen’s works on simple and compound remedies (the so-called ‘galenicals’) formed the backbone of Western pharmacology up until the Industrial Revolution. Over its long and multicultural tradition—spanning the Roman Empire and Byzantium, through Islamicate societies, India, and China, to the New World and even Japan—Galenic pharmacopoeia evolved to incorporate new remedies, foods, philosophical rationales, and modes of preparation, including chemical ones. Despite its endurance, a systematic exploration of the use of galenicals beyond the Renaissance remains overdue. Addressing this gap, the contributions in this volume bring together leading scholars who illuminate how this medical tradition unfolded in the early modern period and its underlying dynamics, often drawing on new or overlooked archival material. Challenging the prevailing narrative of decline, they examine how pharmacological knowledge was transmitted across languages and medical traditions. Each contribution highlights an aspect of the various conceptual adaptations this process entailed, including textual transmission, debates over the structure of matter, occult qualities, dosage quantification, apothecary regulations, patient treatment, and the integration of galenicals into household medicine. Special attention is also given to the commodification of materia medica in Atlantic trade, while a comprehensive introduction contextualises the main themes of Galen’s post-Renaissance legacy and explores the reasons for its enduring vitality. Chapter 13 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Aristotle had left his pupils with a conundrum to solve: the nature of prime matter. Throughout the centuries, this concept remained the most obscure and elusive in Aristotle’s philosophy. While there were a number of conflicting opinions about the nature of prime matter, the debate was revived at the end of the sixteenth century when the logician and natural philosopher Jacopo Zabarella (1533–1589) proposed to identify prime matter as a material body of indefinite extension (quantitas interminata) that is bound within precise limits and shapes by the intervention of the actualising form (forma substantialis). Zabarella’s solution was further refined by his colleagues, including the theologian Paolo Sarpi (1557–1623), the physicians Girolamo Fabrici da Acquapendente (1533–1618) and Santorio Santori (1561–1636) and eventually by Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). They turned prime matter into a quantifiable substratum and developed some early forms of corpuscularianism or atomism. My aim in this paper is to recapture the essence of these developments starting from Zabarella’s own formulation of the problem of the extension of prime matter. In the second part, I will analyse its impact on the natural philosophies of Sarpi, Santorio, and Galileo, showing how the debate on prime matter constituted the background against which early forms of quantified experimentation emerged.

ZusammenfassungAuf der Grundlage einer Vielzahl von Quellen, darunter Manuskriptnotizen und eine breite Auswahl an veröffentlichtem Material, bietet dieser Artikel zum ersten Mal in englischer Sprache eine Analyse von Landis Werken vor ihrem medizinischen und philosophischen Hintergrund. Ich behaupte, dass Landis Werk zwar charakteristisch für das paduanische Milieu des 16. Jahrhunderts ist, dass aber seine Herangehensweise an methodische Fragen der Anatomie und der Kunst sowie seine Paraphrase von Aristoteles’ De anima es ermöglichen, ihn in der Mitte der häretischen Tradition zu verorten, die von Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) bis Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623) reicht.

Throughout the pre-modern era, plants, animals, and humans shared a deep ontological continuity as different levels in the hierarchical organisation of life. Popularised by Lovejoy as ‘the great chain of being’, such continuity relied on extensive use of metaphors, as well as on functional and psychological analogies in which the vegetable realm was understood as the primary and most fundamental manifestation of life. An appeal to the vegetable powers and to the plant-like functions of animals continued even during the golden period of mechanical philosophy and was actually revived as part of different theoretical strategies, stretching from Renaissance naturalism to eighteenth-century vitalism and materialism. From this standpoint, the survival of a classical model poses questions as to the kind of applications, implications, and transformations the vegetal imagery was susceptible to. In this paper I take a longue-durée approach to the notion of vegetable life in order to show the complexity of the theme and its variations in medical and philosophical sources as well as in its technological applications and visual renderings. Notably, in the first part, I consider the analogical assumptions underlying the use of vegetable metaphors in ordering, classifying, and visualising of the materia medica. In the second, I analyse the survival of the notion of vegetable soul in the seventeenth century and its interaction with various trends proper to the new mechanical philosophy. Finally, in the third part, I dwell on the anthropological implications of ‘the vegetable’ as a means to highlight the ‘material’ and ‘natural’ side of human existence, an approach that runs counter to but parallels the dualist accounts of mind and body in Descartes and his epigones.

The early history of thermometry is most commonly described as the result of a continuous development rather than the product of a single brilliant mind, and yet scholars have often credited the Italian physician Santorio Santori with the invention of the first thermometers. The purpose of using such instruments within the traditional context of Galenic medicine, however, has not been investigated and scholars have consistently assumed that, being subject to the influence of atmospheric pressure and en­vironmental heat, Santorio’s instruments provided unreliable measurements. The discovery that, as early as 1612, Santorio describes all vacuum-related phenomena as effects of the atmospheric pressure of the air, provides ample room for reconsidering his role in the development of precision instruments and the early history of thermometry in particular. By drawing on a variety of written and visual sources, some unpublished, in the first part of this article I argue that Santorio’s appreciation of phenomena related to the weight of the air allowed him to construct the first thermometers working as sealed devices. Finally, in the second part, I consider Santorio’s use of the thermometer as related to the seventeenth-century medical practice and his way to measure the temperature as based on a wide sample of individuals.