The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences was published anonymously in Leiden in 1637 as a preface to three scientific essays, the Dioptrics, the Meteors and the Geometry. Descartes wrote it in French rather than Latin so that readers using their natural reason, including women, could judge it without scholastic training, and he presented it not as a treatise but as a history or fable of his own mind.
Medical tag
Anatomy Dissection
Anatomy, dissection, body-snatching, the anatomical theatre.
Works
Fathers and Sons is set in the Russian countryside in the spring and summer of 1859, two years before the emancipation of the serfs. Arkady Kirsanov, a newly graduated student, returns to his father's modest, poorly run estate, Maryino, bringing his friend and mentor Yevgeny Bazarov, a brusque, brilliant medical student of humble origins who calls himself a nihilist: he accepts no principle on authority and values only what is useful, especially natural science.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Galen: Selected Works introduces a physician whose ambition was encyclopedic. The surviving Galenic corpus ranges from technical anatomy and pulse lore to philosophical defenses of method, from therapeutics and compound drugs to autobiography and polemic against rivals.
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, presents itself as the sober memoir of a ship's surgeon. In Part I, shipwrecked, Gulliver wakes on the shore of Lilliput tied down by people six inches tall.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Meditationes de prima philosophia, published in Paris in 1641, compresses Descartes's metaphysics into six meditations, each imagined as a day's reflection by a solitary thinker seated by the fire in a dressing gown. The book was issued with six sets of Objections from learned readers (Caterus, Mersenne's circle, Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi and others) and Descartes's Replies, which are longer than the Meditations themselves; a second edition (Amsterdam, 1642) added the Jesuit Bourdin's Seventh Objections.
On the Making of Man is Gregory of Nyssa's theological anthropology, written as an extended reflection on Genesis and the claim that human beings are made in the image of God. Gregory combines scriptural exegesis, Platonizing philosophy, and late antique physiology to ask why humanity is embodied, rational, sexual, mortal, and capable of divine likeness.
Sts. Cosmas and Damian are the physician saints par excellence: twin or paired martyrs, healers without payment, patrons of doctors and surgeons, and subjects of one of medieval art's strangest surgical miracles.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a comic and nostalgic novel of boyhood set in the 1840s in St. Petersburg, a small Missouri town on the Mississippi modelled on Twain's Hannibal.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T.
The Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
The Iliad tells of a few weeks in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy, and its subject, announced in the first line, is the wrath of Achilles. A plague sent by Apollo ravages the Greek camp because Agamemnon, commander of the Achaeans, has refused to return the captive daughter of Apollo's priest Chryses.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T.
Les Passions de l'âme, published in Amsterdam and Paris in November 1649, was Descartes's last book and his fullest account of how mind and body interact in emotional life. It grew out of his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who in 1643 had asked him how an immaterial thinking soul could move a body, and who later pressed him on the regulation of grief and the good life.
Timaeus offers Plato's most elaborate cosmological account, framed by Socrates' wish to see the ideal city in motion and Critias's story of ancient Athens and Atlantis. Timaeus then delivers a likely story about the cosmos, not a demonstration with mathematical certainty.
Passages
- Discourse on Method, Part V
Detailed mechanical account of cardiac motion, valves and auricles, explained by heat rarefying the blood, with an invitation to dissect the heart of a large animal.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 3–5
Bazarov collects and dissects frogs at Maryino to study physiology.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 27
Bazarov cuts himself during a post-mortem on a typhus victim; he describes his symptoms clinically, accepts his death and sends for Odintsova.
- Frankenstein, Vol. I, Ch. III (1818) / Ch. 4 (1831)
Studies in anatomy and decay; gathering materials from charnel houses, dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses; secretive, sleepless labour that damages his health.
- Galen: Selected Works, Anatomical Procedure traditions
Animal dissection and vivisection traditions support claims about nerves, organs and bodily function.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part II, Ch. 1 and 4
Magnified bodies: the nurse's breast, and beggars with a breast cancer, a monstrous wen and lice.
- Leviathan, Introduction
The body as clockwork (heart as spring, nerves as strings, joints as wheels) and the state as an artificial man.
- Leviathan, Part II, Ch. XXIV, 'Of the Nutrition, and Procreation of a Common-wealth'
Money compared to blood circulating through the veins and arteries of the commonwealth, an explicit use of Harvey's discovery.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation VI
Nerves compared to a cord whose pull at any point produces the same motion in the brain; the dropsical patient's thirst as a natural signal that harms the sick body.
- On the Making of Man, Sex, death, and resurrection
On the Making of Man gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens includes anatomy, generation, bodily organs, sex difference, mortality, resurrection, and the porous border between medicine and theology
- Sts. Cosmas and Damian: Physician Saints, Miracle of the black leg
The saints perform a miraculous limb replacement, making medieval viewers imagine diseased tissue, surgical instruments, donor bodies, and postoperative identity.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 9
Dr. Robinson, Muff Potter and Injun Joe dig up a fresh grave to obtain a body; Injun Joe murders the doctor.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'Herbert West—Reanimator', Parts I–II
Medical students steal fresh corpses for reanimation trials; a typhoid epidemic in Arkham supplies bodies and kills the medical dean.
- The Histories, Book 2.84–88
Egyptian medical specialization and the three grades of embalming, with removal of brain and viscera.
- The Iliad, Book 5
Diomedes' rampage: detailed anatomical wounds, and the healing of the wounded gods by the divine physician Paieon.
- The Metaphysical Poets, Andrew Marvell, 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body'
Soul and Body each complain of imprisonment by the other, with images of bones, nerves and diseases.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part One, opening articles (c. Art. 7–16)
Brief description of the body's parts: the heat in the heart, circulation of the blood, the animal spirits formed in the brain and travelling through the nerves to move the muscles.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part One (c. Art. 30–34)
The soul joined to the whole body but exercising its functions chiefly in a small gland in the middle of the brain, which the spirits move and which in turn moves the spirits.
- Timaeus, Embodiment and disorder
Timaeus gives this tag concrete force through timaeus is unusually rich for medical history because it links soul, body, marrow, organs, disease, diet, and psychic disorder inside a single cosmic anatomy
Quotes
“I could not read the description of any malady without thinking it mine, and, had I not been already indisposed, I am certain I should have become so from this study”
“I need only mention in reply what has been written by a physician of England, who has the honor of having broken the ice on this subject”
“Such persons will look upon this body as a machine made by the hands of God, which is incomparably better arranged, and adequate to movements more admirable than is any machine of human invention”
“To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death”
“The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials”
“For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life”
“For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body”
“Teeth, throat, and bowels are objectified hunger; the organs of generation are objectified sexual desire”
“How long have I investigated this one thing, the brain of the leech, so that here the slippery truth might no longer slip from me”