La Physiologie (review)

In 1655 Charles de Saint-Germain translated Jean Fernel's Physiologia, the first part of the celebrated Medicina (1554). On the title page of his translation he presents himself as "squire, doctor in the faculty of medicine, councilor, and ordinary physician of the king." The dedication to Louis XIII's powerful superintendent of finance, Nicolas Fouquet, witnesses to Saint-Germain's familiarity with the court. In the epistle to the reader, he describes his literary endeavors as part of a plan to contribute to the "public interest." His works comprise a book on midwifery, a treatise on practical medicine, a commentary on Hippocrates' Aphorisms, a translation of the fourth book of Daniel Sennert's Practica medicina, and a translation of Fernel's Febrium curandarum methodus generalis (1577). Charles de Saint-Germain takes medicine in its practical meaning, as an art aiming at the improvement of man's condition. In this connection, he announces in the same epistle that he is currently working on a translation of Fernel's opera omnia (pp. 17-18).

It is significant that, although Saint-Germain was unable to complete his project of translating Fernel's entire corpus, he tried to offer a practical reading of Fernel's famously speculative and theoretical medicine. It is well known that before deciding for medicine Fernel devoted himself to studies of philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and geophysics. As a result of these investigations, he published the Monalosphaerium in 1527 and the Cosmotheoria in 1528. Fernel was greatly drawn to the contemplative side of learning—so much so that, as the story goes, he turned to medicine only because he had to maintain his own family, and under pressure first from his father and then from his father-in-law. But the contemplative side remained the hallmark of Fernel's science, medicine included.

Undoubtedly, Fernel's Physiologia is a highly speculative epitome of traditional humoral anatomy with multilayered and hierarchical levels of organization: one stemming from matter, another from the temperament of the qualities, a third—divine and hidden—from form. Focusing on actions rather than structures, Fernel's physiology is a rationalistic enterprise based on extrapolations from the domain of the senses and the visible qualities to the vital powers, from effects to causes, from body to soul. But Fernel does not merely "Platonize" Galen: he contributes in an original way to an understanding of the natural and vegetative faculties and their interaction with the body and the mind. Most of all, he recasts the old physiological system into a new synthesis that underpins a specific philosophical view of man and the cosmos.

Fernel combines the humanistic emphasis on human dignity and classical learning with the Platonic belief in the irreducibly transcendent and emergent character of life. In keeping with the canons of Plato's anthropology, he considers the body as the main instrument of the soul to such an extent that the perfection, symmetry, purposefulness, and versatility of the bodily structures are viewed as a prerequisite for the sophisticated and complex performances of the soul. Echoing centuries of anatomical rhetoric, Fernel sings the well-known paean to man's upright posture: "a tall and straight figure that, rising toward the sky and its Creator, makes him feel the celestial sparks and the constant tokens of his divine origin" (p. 37). The insistence on the preeminence of the soul and the ensuing anthropocentric view of anatomy also account for Fernel's characteristic blend of aesthetic and moral assumptions. It would be beautiful, he writes in chapter 6, if man's body were made up of just brain, running spirits, and muscles—a sort of ethereal composition of sense and motion. Unfortunately, vital faculties cannot work without viscera. For this reason, Fernel admits disconsolately: "God's eternal providence has placed in a low place and confined the parts destined to receive filth and...