History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning

1. Bodies Past

Chapter One BODIES PAST n a famous passage, Sylvius, teacher and subsequently critic of Vesalius, explained to the readers of his Introduction to Anatomy (1555) the reason why a few things in our bodies today appear somewhat different than [they were] in the time of Hippocrates, Galen, or others among the ancients. If I did not think this testimony super›uous for you, I would prove, both from the writings of the ancients and from tombs that survive to this day, that our bodies have greatly diminished from their original size. You will agree that this [size] is very much reduced today, especially in those regions where marriage is permitted too freely and before the proper age. Many testimonies in both sacred and profane literature plainly convince one that the life span of the ancients was also longer than that of people in our own time. Indeed, the internal parts differ in size, number, and shape in different parts of the world, and both the writings of the ancients and our bodies abundantly testify that the same things that the ancients observed are not still found in all our bodies. So it is believable that the people of particular regions, just like other animals and indeed the very plants, either receive something peculiar to the region [in which they are found] or have undergone some change from their earlier nature.1 In short, when Galen reported that the sternum had seven segments and Vesalius observed only six, Sylvius concluded, “It is not an error of Galen, but 25 I a change of nature in us.”2 Vesalius, of course, turned out to have the better case. Sylvius’s remarks have earned him “the enormous condescension of posterity ”3 (or at least of historians of science and medicine), yet his assertion that the human body itself had a temporal as well as a natural history, in the sense of having undergone physical change since antiquity, was neither an argument hastily constructed ad hominem nor an idea peculiar to rabidly Galenic learned physicians. Rather, it drew on ideas that, in one form or another, were pervasive in medieval and Renaissance learned culture, were supported by both sacred texts and an array of ancient secular authorities, and were continuously addressed in a variety of contexts other than medical or anatomical debate. The belief that the human body had changed since early times belonged to the larger pattern of thought that viewed all of nature—indeed, the world itself—as subject to aging and deterioration. As a number of well-known studies have shown, such ideas, which drew on both classical and Christian sources, were widespread in the Middle Ages and persisted in one form or another into the seventeenth century.4 Sylvius’s appropriation of these ideas is only one of many possible examples of Renaissance and early modern discussions of ancient and modern human bodies. When physicians addressed this theme (which emerges not only in relation to anatomy but also in claims and counterclaims about changes over time in human life span, susceptibility to disease, physical appearance, and body culture ), they took up a historical topic that was at once uniquely close to their special professional interests and expertise and a prime instance of the integration of their learning with broader contemporary currents of humanist historical and antiquarian erudition and developments in historiography. This chapter illustrates that integration from four different vantage points across the sixteenth and ‹rst half of the seventeenth centuries. One is the role within medical literature of historical concepts and information in controversies over supposedly new diseases and new ‹ndings in anatomy. The second is the contributions of medically trained authors, in both medical and antiquarian works, to debates over the putative existence of giants in antiquity . Finally, two works seem to constitute particularly notable individual examples of the integration of medical and antiquarian or historical culture in treating the human body of the past. These are the De arte gymnastica of Girolamo Mercuriale (an investigation of ancient athletics and physical training in which this famous and highly esteemed Italian physician presented the results of his cooperation with classicizing antiquarians) and a treatise that the German polymath Hermann Conring (equally celebrated for his histori26
History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning cal, legal, and medical erudition) devoted to comparison of the anatomy and physiology of the ancient and the modern Germans. But ‹rst, some aspects...