Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy

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This volume presents an innovative look at early modern medicine and natural philosophy as historically interrelated developments. The individual chapters chart this interrelation in a variety of contexts, from the Humanists who drew on Hippocrates, Galen, and Aristotle to answer philosophical and medical questions, to medical debates on the limits and power of mechanism, and on to eighteenth-century controversies over medical materialism and ‘atheism.’

The work presented here broadens our understanding of both philosophy and medicine in this period by illustrating the ways these disciplines were in deep theoretical and methodological dialogue and by demonstrating the importance of this dialogue for understanding their history.

Taken together, these papers argue that to overlook the medical context of natural philosophy and the philosophical context of medicine is to overlook fundamentally important aspects of these intellectual endeavors.