Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe ed. by Stephen Pender and Nancy S. Struever (review)

This collection of ten essays, edited by Stephen Pender and Nancy S. Struever, seeks to ‘address the relationship between rhetoric and medicine’ (p. 23) by examining a wide range of texts and placing them within their cultural and intellectual communities. In doing so, this volume shows how closely rhetoric and medicine are intertwined in both the theory and practice of medicine in the early modern period. The essays are framed by an Introduction by Pender and an Afterword by Struever.

The volume opens with two essays that demonstrate how physicians used rhetoric as a mechanism to promote cures in the early modern period. Pender takes an historical view of how classical authorities, such as Hippocrates, Plato, and Aristotle, showed the relationship between medicine and rhetoric. He argues that this relationship exists because rhetoric was recognised as a means of determining how clinical reasoning could be shaped. This reasoning took not only the condition of the body into account, it was also employed to examine the condition of the soul and the polity. Through this discussion, Pender introduces two of the major themes of later essays: the early modern view of the passions of the soul; and how ideas of dissection influenced ideas of political frameworks in the early modern period. Pender also examines how these classical ideas of rhetoric and medicine influenced early modern physicians, not only in developing systematic processes to identify disease but also as an aid to healing. The physicians used their rhetorical skills as a means ‘to conjure, to grasp through “mental sight”, the absent presence of disease’ (p. 59).

In the second essay, Jean Dietz Moss describes how rhetoric was employed to promote the benefits of one cure over another. This essay examines how pamphlets and other advertising material persuaded many that taking the waters at Bath was more efficacious than at other spas. It was this promise of cure that fuelled Bath’s popularity as its attractions broadened to become a social venue to meet the right people and enjoy other entertainments.

The next three chapters examine the intersection between anatomy, politics, and language. Richard Sugg explores how the definition of dissection not only related to anatomy but was also used to dissect the necessary attributes of statecraft. Andrea Carlino looks at how language shaped the development of anatomical texts by focusing on Andreas Vesalius’s milieu in Padua, arguing that these texts were based on humanist rather than scientific principles. Daniel M. Gross looks at how modern political science evolved from the humanist principles that sought to ‘reshape humankind’ (p. 129) rather than scientific knowledge that described or experimented with humankind.

The next three chapters look at the notion of the passions in early modern thought. In her contribution, Amy Schmitter examines how the passions could be used to define an individual’s vulnerability and examines the differences between Descartes’s and Spinoza’s methods of overcoming these vulnerabilities. Guido Gillioni discusses how Cardano saw the use of rhetoric in the practice of the early modern physician, while Julie R. Solomon explores the concept of the passions and their effect on the workings of the early modern mind.

In the final two essays, both Grant Williams and Struever return to a discussion of language. Williams investigates how Burton’s attempts to develop a system of defining melancholy by its symptoms were frustrated. Each description of melancholy he collected from a sufferer produced a new depiction of symptoms, making it almost impossible to systematically describe the common symptoms of this condition. Struever discusses how Bertini used rhetoric and language to renegotiate the status of medicine in society.

Overall, the essays are well written, but are rather dense and occasionally difficult to read, and previous knowledge of the source texts is generally assumed. Recommended to early modern scholars who have a solid grounding in the history and philosophy of...