In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.1 (2002) 135-137



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

Écrits physiologiques et médicaux


René Descartes. Écrits physiologiques et médicaux. Selected, edited, translated, and annotated by Vincent Aucante. Épiméthée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000. 288 pp. F 298.00 (paperbound, 2-13-050623-2).

In spite of the central role played by medicine in Descartes's intellectual enterprise, we still lack a comprehensive account of his views on anatomy, physiology, and therapeutics. We still have to rely on a number of studies that from different points of view focus on specific aspects of Descartes's medical thought, such as the works by H. Dreyfus-Lefoyer,1 Martial Gueroult (the second volume of his [End Page 135] classic study Descartes selon l'ordre des raisons, 1952), G. A. Lindeboom (Descartes and Medicine, 1979), Richard B. Carter (Descartes' Medical Philosophy, 1983), and Annie Bitbol-Hespériès (La principe de vie chez Descartes, 1990). It is true that in recent years there has been a renewed interest in Descartes's understanding of medicine, largely in response to the proliferation of simplistic accounts of his dualism. A number of committed interpreters have sought to preserve the richness and true complexity of Descartes's medical views against such attacks, attacks that are all too easily made. Vincent Aucante is certainly one of these interpreters.

Aucante thought it best to go directly to the texts, indeed to precisely those texts which have usually been neglected by scholars. The restoration of texts philologically is the necessary first step to recovering their ideas philosophically. Aucante chose to focus on some of the medical writings that Descartes left in an unfinished and fragmentary state--writings, as Aucante notes, that "make unpleasant as well as difficult reading" (p. 1), and that were relegated to volume 11 of the Adam-Tannery edition with only a cursory philological treatment: the Cogitationes circa generationem animalium, some of the Excerpta anatomica, the Remedia et vires medicamentorum, and the last two parts of the Description du corps humain. Aucante has given us a scrupulous, textually critical reading, followed by a faithful translation of the Latin texts into French. In some cases he has added some information on the chronology of the excerpts. The rich apparatus of explanatory notes helps the reader to set Descartes's investigations in the context of contemporary anatomo-physiology. In addition to the short introduction prefixed to each section, the nine appendixes at the end of the volume provide a rich historical and bibliographic background to the main themes investigated by Descartes. As a whole, we can say that the edited texts represent a suggestive facet of Cartesian science.

One of the merits of Aucante's book is its focus on life phenomena that have been usually and hastily dismissed as irrelevant to Cartesian anatomo-physiology. By carefully reading between the lines of these fragments, we discover that Descartes was not only intrigued by such topics as spontaneous generation, sympathies among the parts of the body, and birthmarks impressed on the fetus by maternal imagination, but indeed that he was creatively challenged by these topics. Received opinion has it that Descartes rid himself of all this vitalistic bric-a-brac by way of his terse mechanical explanations--but in fact, the archive of anatomical and medical notes, which can also be seen as the laboratory from which his mature views on life emerged, reveals a less predictable, less hackneyed story. First, Descartes took spontaneous generation as the basic reproductive pattern from which to observe on its simplest level the original chemico-mechanical reactions underlying all processes of life ("tam pauca requirantur ad animal faciendum," p. 30). Second, his interest in the sympathetical relationships among the different organs of the body--a routine matter in the medical literature of the time that did not connote any of the cosmic and pansensistic assumptions typical of radical philosophical naturalisms--demonstrates the extent to which he was aware of the need to find an anatomo-physiological basis for [End Page 136] his hypothesis of the link between...

pdf

Share