Domenico Bertoloni Meli

The representation of insects in the seventeenth century: a comparative approach.

Summary The investigation and representation of insects in the seventeenth century posed huge problems: on the one hand, their size and texture required optical tools and fixation techniques to disentangle and identify their tiny parts; on the other, the esoteric nature of those parts required readers to make sense of images alien to their daily experiences. Naturalists and anatomists developed sophisticated techniques of investigation and representation, involving tacit and unusual conventions that even twentieth-century readers found at times baffling. This essay develops a comparative approach based on seven pairs of investigations involving Francesco Stelluti, Francesco Redi, Giovanni Battista Hodierna, Robert Hooke, Marcello Malpighi, and Jan Swammerdam. Seen together, they document an extraordinary time in the study of insects and reconstruct a number of iconographic dialogues shedding light on the conventions and styles adopted.

The Role of Numerical Tables in Galileo and Mersenne

Numerical tables are important objects of study in a range of fields, yet they have been largely ignored by historians of science. This paper contrasts and compares ways in which numerical tables were used by Galileo and Mersenne, especially in the Dialogo and Harmonie Universelle. I argue that Galileo and Mersenne used tables in radically different ways, though rarely to present experimental data. Galileo relied on tables in his work on error theory in day three of the Dialogo and also used them in a very different setting in the last day of the Discorsi. In Mersennes case they represent an important but so far unrecognized feature of his notion of universal harmony. I conclude by presenting a classification of different ways in which tables were used within the well-defined disciplinary and temporal boundaries of my research. In doing so, however, I provide a useful tool for extending similar investigations to broader domains.

Early Modern Experimentation on Live Animals

Starting from the works by Aselli (De lactibus sive lacteis venis, 1627) on the milky veins and Harvey (1628, translated in 1993) on the motion of the heart and the circulation of the blood, the practice of vivisection witnessed a resurgence in the early modern period. I discuss some of the most notable cases in the century spanning from Aselli’s work to the investigations of fluid pressure in plants and animals by Stephen Hales (Vegetable Staticks, 1727). Key figures in my study include Johannes Walaeus, Jean Pecquet, Marcello Malpighi, Reinier de Graaf, Richard Lower, Anton Nuck, and Anton de Heide. Although vivisection dates from antiquity, early modern experimenters expanded the range of practices and epistemic motivations associated with it, displaying considerable technical skills and methodological awareness about the problems associated with the animals being alive and the issue of generalizing results to humans. Many practitioners expressed great discomfort at the suffering of the animals; however, many remained convinced that their investigations were not only indispensable from an epistemic standpoint but also had potential medical applications. Early modern vivisection experiments were both extensive and sophisticated and cannot be ignored in the literature of early modern experimentation or of experimentation on living organisms across time.

The Collaboration between Anatomists and Mathematicians in the mid-Seventeenth Century with a Study of Images as Experiments and Galileo's Role in Steno's Myology

Moving from Paris, Pisa, and Oxford to London, Amsterdam, and Cambridge, this essay documents extensive collaborations between anatomists and mathematicians. At a time when no standard way to acknowledge collaboration existed, it is remarkable that in all the cases I discuss anatomists expressed in print their debt to mathematicians. The cases I analyze document an extraordinarily fertile period in the history of anatomy and science and call into question historiographic divisions among historians of science and medicine. I focus on Stenos Myology, showing how his collaboration with mathematician Viviani led to a geometrical treatment of muscular contraction and to an epistemology inspired by Galileo. The collaboration between Steno and Viviani enables us to interpret a major text in the history of anatomy, one whose implications had so far eluded historians.

Authorship and teamwork around the Cimento Academy: mathematics, anatomy, experimental philosophy.

Multiple authorship is so common and pervasive in our world that it is tempting to take it for granted. Prior to the twentieth century, however, multiple authorship was exceedingly rare. This essay addresses the issue of whether in the past collaboration was less common or was acknowledged in different forms. I focus on the 1660s circle of intellectuals fluctuating around the Cimento Academy because the Cimento is generally considered the first academy devoted to experimental philosophy, this essay highlights the existence of a wide range of conventions about authorship even within a geographically and temporally limited area, and suggests that collaboration was more common than title pages would suggest.

Leibniz's excerpts from the Principia mathematica

Summary The present paper contains a full transcription, with commentary and introduction, of two hitherto unknown manuscripts by Leibniz on Newtons Principia mathematica. Both manuscripts were probably written in Rome in 1689. Leibnizs interest focused in particular on Newtons concept of vanishing quantities and last ratios, on the notion of force and on the cause of gravity. An edition of further unknown manuscripts by Leibniz on the Principia and on planetary motion is in progress and will appear in the sequel.

Machines of the Body in the Seventeenth Century

This essay discusses the role of new mechanical devices put forward in the seventeenth century in anatomy and pathology, showing how several of those devices were promptly deployed in anatomical investigations. I also discuss the role of dead bodies as boundary objects between living bodies and machines, highlighting their problematic status in experimentation and vivisection.

Of Snails and Horsetails

This chapter addresses the issue of medical empiricism from a different perspective, focusing not primarily on therapy but rather on anatomy and specifically on the problem of generalization of knowledge and the tension between the uniformity and diversity of nature. In order to come to grips with this issue, it considers three levels of diversity: diversity among species; diversity among organisms within a species; and diversity within an individual organism, with regard to age, for example. The two perspectives, one based primarily on therapies and the other on anatomy, are not entirely unrelated, because the anatomical study of diversity within an organism, or among organisms within the same species, for example, have profound medical and therapeutic implications; moreover, in the early modern period, different animal species were used for physiological and medical investigations, with differences among species proving of crucial significance. Snails and horsetails proved especially challenging in the chapter. Keywords: anatomy; horsetails; medical empiricism; Snails; therapies

The representation of animals in the early modern period

The five essays brought together in this special issue were originally delivered at a workshop organised in March 2009 by the Centre for the History of Medicine at Indiana University, Bloomington. The authors revised and expanded the essays in response to that day’s discussions and numerous subsequent exchanges. We wish to thank all participants for their help and suggestions in the discussions, and particularly to thank Trevor Levere for his enthusiasm for this project and his editorial acumen. The papers in this issue span the period from the Renaissance to the late seventeenth century and cover a number of topics ranging from the sources of the animals illustrated and the role of colour to the multiple functions of animal representation at the court of Louis XIV. The differing formats of illustrations, including manuscripts and varieties of print media, equally display a wide range. The development of printing and engraving techniques during this period allowed for the extensive use of illustrations in printed texts, and this new use of illustration had important consequences for the intellectual content and disciplinary scope of natural history and comparative anatomy. At the same time, manuscript illustrations served as models for print but also carried their own visual weight. Illustrations also served as templates for assigning names and identities to previously unknown animals. Sachiko Kusukawa’s detective work has identified a variety of sources for the illustrations in Conrad Gessner’s Historia animalium (1551 1558), both declared and undeclared: they include live and dried specimens, as well as images from manuscripts and printed books. Kusukawa’s detailed analysis shows that while Gessner’s criteria for selecting his sources were not necessarily based on direct visual inspection, they were not arbitrary either, and need to be examined in a historically sensitive way. Her account complicates earlier historiographical discussions of Renaissance natural history illustration and expands our notion of just what constituted ‘experience’ in this era. In her study of Hieronimus Fabricius and William Harvey, Karin Ekholm has analysed three forms of representation of animal generation, namely printed engravings, colour plates, and verbal descriptions. Ekholm’s detailed analysis of images and texts offers a strikingly original iconographic and verbal triangulation which reveals contrasting views of the value of visual representation. Moreover, based on the peculiar features of the copy of Fabricius’s work in Philadelphia, Ekholm has suggested that the hand-coloured plates Fabricius deposited at the Marciana Library in Venice were the likely inspiration for the printed coloured plates in Gasparo Aselli’s De lactibus (1627). Her suggestion provides a novel context for grasping the origin of what is widely considered as the first anatomical book with printed coloured plates.

Mechanistic Pathology and Therapy in the Medical Assayer of Marcello Malpighi

Around 1700 the Italian medical world witnessed a major controversy involving, among the others, Giovanni Girolamo Sbaraglia, Marcello Malpighi, and the young Giovanni Battista Morgagni, touching on a number of key features of the theory and practice of medicine. Sbaraglia defended empirical medicine and questioned the therapeutic significance of recent anatomical investigations, especially those of minute parts carried out with the microscope, and of the anatomy of animals and plants, as opposed to the human body. The last three-quarters of the seventeenth century had brought profound transformations in the understanding of the human body, yet their therapeutic significance was not obvious. Sbaraglia seemed to react to the lack of clear therapeutic advances and to what he perceived as the pointless excesses of anatomical investigations, most notably those by Malpighi. The controversy involved quite a large number of texts, but the principal ones were Sbaraglia’s opening salvo, De recentiorum medicorum studio dissertatio epistolaris ad amicum (dated 1687, but possibly from 1689), Malpighi’s posthumous Risposta (1697), Sbaraglia’s beautifully titled and rather profound reply, Oculorum et mentis vigiliae, ad distinguendum studium anatomicum, et ad praxin medicam dirigendam (1704), and Morgagni’s two-letter rejoinder published under the pseudonyms of Orazio de Floriani and Luca Terranova, titledEpistola, qua plus centum, & quinquaginta errores ostenduntur (1705).It seems plausible that this controversy may have contributed to reshaping the nature of eighteenth-century anatomical investigations, at least in Italy. A brief outline may help clarify my point. In 1661 Malpighi had published his first work, Epistolae de pulmonibus, where relying on rather interventionist techniques of microscopic investigation he had explored the structure of the lungs of frogs and other animals. Although in later publications Malpighi did investigate diseased states, his primary focus remained the investigation of structures. Exactly a century later, Morgagni’s De sedibus, et causis morborum per anatomen indagatis (1761) dealt with anatomy without having recourse to the microscope, focusing on the location and causes of diseases in human cadavers, and in establishing a link with symptoms he had observed in his patients. Although Morgagni