Although the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is associated primarily with the dramatic changes in astronomy and mechanics that precipitated a new perception of the universe, a third field that had been dominated by Greek thought in the Later Middle Ages, that of medicine, also experienced a transformation. Late medieval medicine was dominated not by the teachings of Aristotle but by those of the Greek physician Galen (GAY-len) who had lived in the second century C.E.
Galen’s influence on the medieval medical world was pervasive in anatomy, physiology, and disease. Galen had relied on animal, rather than human, dissection to arrive at a picture of human anatomy that was quite inaccurate in many instances. Even when Europeans began to practice human dissection in the Later Middle Ages, instruction in anatomy still relied on Galen. While a professor read a text of Galen, an assistant dissected a cadaver for illustrative purposes. Physiology, or the functioning of the body, was also dominated by Galenic hypotheses, including the belief that there were two separate blood systems. One controlled muscular activities and contained bright red blood moving upward and downward through the arteries; the other governed the digestive functions and contained dark red blood that ebbed and flowed in the veins.
Treatment of disease was highly influenced by Galen’s doctrine of four bodily humors: blood, considered warm and moist; yellow bile, warm and dry; phlegm, cold and moist; and black bile, cold and dry. Since disease was supposedly the result of an imbalance of humors that could be discerned from the quantity and color of urine, the examination of a patient’s urine became the chief diagnostic tool. Although purging and bleeding to remedy the imbalance were often harmful to patients, treatment with traditional herbal medicines sometimes proved beneficial.
Three figures are associated with the changes in medicine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Paracelsus (par-uh-SELL-suss), Andreas Vesalius (ahn-DRAY-uss vuh-SAY-lee-uss), and William Harvey. Philipp us Aureolus von Hohenheim (1493-1541), who renamed himself Paracelsus (“greater than Celsus,” an ancient physician), traveled widely and may have been awarded a medical degree from the University of Ferrara in Italy. He achieved a moment of glory when he was appointed city physician and professor of medicine at Basel in 1527. But this, like so many other appointments, proved short-lived due to his vanity and quick temper. He could never disguise his contempt for universities and physicians who did not agree with his new ideas:
I am monarcha medicorum, monarch of physicians, and I can prove to you what you cannot prove....It was not the constellations that made me a physician: God made me....I need not don a coat of mail or a buckler against you, for you are not learned or experienced enough to refute even one word of mine....Let me tell you this: every little hair on my neck knows more than you and all your scribes, and my shoebuckles are more learned than your Galen and Avicenna, and my beard has more experience than all your high colleges.
Paracelsus was not easy to get along with, and he was forced to wander from one town to another until his death in 1541.
Paracelsus rejected the work of both Aristotle and Galen and attacked the universities as centers of their moribund philosophy. He and his followers hoped to replace the traditional system with a new chemical philosophy that was based on a new understanding of nature derived from fresh observation and experiment. This chemical philosophy was in turn closely connected to a view of the universe based on the macrocosm-microcosm analogy. According to this view, a human being was a small replica (microcosm) of the larger world (macrocosm). All parts of the universe were represented within each person. As Paracelsus said, “For the sun and the moon and all planets, as well as the stars and the whole chaos, are in man.... For what is outside is also inside; and what is not outside man is not inside. The outer and the inner are one thing.” In accordance with the macrocosmic-microcosmic principle, Paracelsus believed that the chemical reactions of the universe as a whole were reproduced in human beings on a smaller scale. Disease, then, was not caused by an imbalance of the four humors, as Galen had argued, but was due to chemical imbalances that were localized in specific organs and could be treated by chemical remedies.
Although others had used chemical remedies, Paracelsus and his followers differed from them in giving careful attention to the proper dosage of their chemically prepared metals and minerals. Paracelsus had turned against the Galenic principle that “contraries cure” in favor of the ancient Germanic folk principle that “like cures like.” The poison that caused a disease would be its cure if used in proper form and quantity. Despite the apparent effectiveness of this use of toxic substances as treatment (Paracelsus did have a strong reputation for actually curing his patients), his opponents viewed it as the practice of a “homicide physician.” Later generations came to regard Paracelsus more favorably, and historians who have stressed Paracelsus’s concept of disease and recognition of “new drugs” for medicine have viewed him as a father of modern medicine. Others have argued that his macrocosmic-microcosmic philosophy and use of “like cures like” drugs make him the forerunner of both homeopathy and the holistic medicine of the postmodern era.
The new anatomy of the sixteenth century was the work of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564). His study of medicine at Paris involved him in the works of Galen. Especially important to him was a recently discovered text of Galen, On Anatomical Procedures, that led Vesalius to emphasize practical research as the principal avenue for understanding human anatomy. After receiving a doctorate in medicine at the University of Padua in 1536, he accepted a position there as professor of surgery. In 1543, he published his masterpiece, On the Fabric of the Human Body.
This book was based on his personal dissection of a body to illustrate what he was discussing. Vesalius’s anatomical treatise presented a careful examination of the individual organs and general structure of the human body. The book would not have been feasible without both the artistic advances of the Renaissance and technical developments in the art of printing. Together, they made possible the creation of illustrations superior to any done before.
Vesalius’s hands-on approach to teaching anatomy enabled him to rectify some of Galen’s most glaring errors. He did not hesitate, for example, to correct Galen’s assertion that the great blood vessels originated from the liver since his own observations made it apparent that they came from the heart. Nevertheless, Vesalius still clung to a number of Galen’s erroneous assertions, including the Greek physician’s ideas on the ebb and flow of rwo kinds of blood in the veins and arteries. It was not until William Harvey’s work on the circulation of the blood nearly a century later that this Galenic misperception was corrected.
William Harvey (1578-1657) attended Cambridge University and later Padua, where he received a doctorate in medicine in 1602. His reputation rests on his book On the Motion of the Heart and Blood, published in 1628. Although questions had been raised in the sixteenth century about Galen’s physiological principles, no major break from his system had occurred. Harvey’s work, which was based on meticulous observations and experiments, led him to demolish the ancient Greek’s erroneous contentions. Harvey demonstrated that the heart and not the liver was the beginning point of the circulation of blood in the body, that the same blood flows in both veins and arteries, and most important, that the blood makes a complete circuit as it passes through the body. Although Harvey’s work dealt a severe blow to Galen’s theories, his ideas did not begin to achieve general recognition until the 1660s, when capillaries, which explained how the blood passed from the arteries to the veins, were discovered. Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood laid the foundation for modern physiology.
Although Paracelsus had proposed a new chemical philosophy in the sixteenth century, it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that a science of chemistry arose. Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was one of the first scientists to conduct controlled experiments. His pioneering work on the properties of gases led to Boyle’s law, which states that the volume of a gas varies with the pressure exerted on it. Boyle also rejected the medieval belief that all matter consisted of the same components in favor of the view that matter is composed of atoms, which he called “little particles of all shapes and sizes” and which would later be known as the chemical elements.
In the eighteenth century, Antoine Lavoisier (AHN-twahn lah-vwah-ZYAY) (1743-1794) invented a system of naming the chemical elements, much of which is still used today. In helping to show that water is a compound of oxygen and hydrogen, he demonstrated the fundamental rules of chemical combination. He is regarded by many as the founder of modern chemistry. Lavoisier’s wife, Marie-Anne, was her husband’s scientific collaborator. She learned English in order to translate the work of British chemists for her husband and made engravings to illustrate his scientific experiments. Marie-Anne Lavoisier is a reminder that women too played a role in the Scientific Revolution.
During the Middle Ages, except for members of religious orders, women who sought a life of learning were severely hampered by the traditional attitude that a woman’s proper role was as a daughter, wife, and mother. But in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, new opportunities for elite women emerged as enthusiasm for the new secular learning called humanism encouraged Europe’s privileged and learned men to encourage women to read and study classical and Christian texts. The ideal of a humanist education for some of the daughters of Europe’s elite persisted into the seventeenth century, but only for some privileged women.
Much as they were drawn to humanism, women were also attracted to the Scientific Revolution. Unlike females educated formally in humanist schools, women interested in science had to obtain a largely informal education. European nobles had the leisure and resources that gave them easy access to the world of learning. This door was also open to noblewomen who could participate in the informal scientific networks of their fathers and brothers. One of the most prominent female scientists of the seventeenth century, Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673), came from an aristocratic background. Cavendish was not a popularizer of science for women but a participant in the crucial scientific debates of her time. Despite her achievements, however, she was excluded from membership in the Royal Society (see “The Scientific Societies” later in this chapter), although she was once allowed to attend a meeting. She wrote a number of works on scientific matters, including Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and Grounds of Natural Philosophy. In these works, she did not hesitate to attack what she considered the defects of the rationalist and empiricist approaches to scientific knowledge and was especially critical of the growing belief that through science, humans would be masters of nature: “We have no power at all over natural causes and effects...for man is but a small part....His powers are but particular actions of Nature, and he cannot have asupreme and absolute power."
As an aristocrat, Cavendish was a good example of the women in France and England who worked in science. In Germany, women interested in science came from a different background. There the tradition of female participation in craft production enabled some women to become involved in observational science, especially entomology and astronomy. Between 1650 and 1710, one of every seven German astronomers was a woman.
A good example of female involvement in the Scientific Revolution stemming from the craft tradition was Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), who had established a reputation as an important entomologist by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Merian’s training came from working in her father’s workshop, where she learned the art of illustration, a training of great importance since her exact observation of insects and plants was demonstrated through the superb illustrations she made. In 1699, she undertook an expedition into the wilds of the Dutch colony of Surinam in South America to collect and draw samples of plants and insect life. This led to her major scientific work, the Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam, in which she used sixty illustrations to show the reproductive and developmental cycles of Surinam’s insect life.
The craft organization of astronomy also gave women opportunities to become involved in science. Those who did worked in family observatories; hence daughters and wives received training as apprentices to fathers or husbands. The most famous of the female astronomers in Germany was Maria Winkelmann (1670-1720). She was educated by her father and uncle and received advanced training in astronomy from a nearby self-taught astronomer. When she married Gottfried Kirch, Germany’s foremost astronomer, she became his assistant at the astronomical observatory ope rated in Berlin by the Academy of Science. She made some original contributions, including a hitherto undiscovered comet, as her husband related:
Early in the morning (about 2:00 A.M.) the sky was clear and starry. Some nights before. I had observed a variable star, and my wife (as I slept) wanted to find and see it for herself. In so doing, she found a comet in the sky. At which time she woke me, and I found that it was indeed a comet....I was surprised that I had not seen it the night before....
Moreover, Winkelmann corresponded with the famous scientist Gottfried Leibniz (who invented the calculus independently of Newton), who praised her effusively as “a most learned woman who could pass as a rarity.” When her husband died in 1710, she applied for a position as assistant astronomer for which she was highly qualified. As a woman - with no university degree - she was denied the post by the Berlin Academy, which feared that it would establish a precedent by hiring a woman (“mouths would gape”).
Winkelmann’s difficulties with the Berlin Academy reflect the obstacles women faced in being accepted in scientific work, which was considered a male preserve. Although no formal statutes excluded women from membership in the new scientific societies, no woman was invited to join either the Royal Society of England or the French Academy of Sciences until the twentieth century. All of these women scientists were exceptional, since a life devoted to any kind of scholarship was still viewed as being at odds with the domestic duties women were expected to perform.
The nature and value of women had been the subject of an ongoing, centuries-long debate known as the querelles des femmes - arguments about women. Male opinions in the debate were largely a carryover from medieval times and were not favorable. Women were portrayed as inherently base, prone to vice, easily swayed, and “sexually insatiable.” Hence men needed to control them. Learned women were viewed as having overcome female liabilities to become like men. One man in praise of a woman scholar remarked that her writings were so good that you “would hardly believe they were done by a woman at all.”
In the early modern era, women joined this debate by arguing against these male images of women. They argued that women also had rational minds and could grow from education. Further, since most women were pious, chaste, and temperate, there was no need for male authority over them. These female defenders of women emphasized education as the key to women’s ability to move into the world. How, then, did the era of tbe Scientific Revolution affect this debate over the nature of women? As an era of intellectual revolution in which traditional authorities were being overthrown, we might expect significant change in men’s views of women. But by and large, instead of becoming an instrument for liberation, science was used to find new support for the old, stereotypical views about a woman’s place in the scheme of things.
An important project in the new anatomy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the attempt to illustrate the human body and skeleton. For Vesalius, the portrayal of physical differences between males and females was limited to external bodily form (the outlines of the body) and the sexual organs. Vesalius saw no difference in skeletons and portrayed them as the same for men and women. It was not until the eighteenth century, in fact, that a new anatomy finally prevailed. Drawings of female skeletons between 1730 and 1790 varied, but females tended to have a larger pelvic area, and, in some instances, female skulls were portrayed as smaller than those of males. Eighteenth-century studies on the anatomy and physiology of sexual differences provided “scientific evidence” to reaffirm the traditional inferiority of women. The larger pelvic area “proved” that women were meant to be childbearers, and the larger skuJl “demonstrated” the superiority of the male mind. Male-dominated science had been used to “prove” male social dominance.
At the same time, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women even lost the traditional spheres of influence they had possessed, especially in the science-related art of midwifery. Women serving as midwives had traditionally been responsible for birthing. Similar to barber-surgeons or apothecaries (see Chapter 17), midwives had acquired their skills through apprenticeship. But the impact of the Scientific Revolution caused traditional crafts to be upgraded and then even professionalized as males took over. When medical men entered this arena, they also began to use devices and techniques derived from the study of anatomy. These were increasingly used to justify the male takeover of the traditional role of midwives. By the end of the eighteenth century, midwives were simply accessories to the art they had once controlled, except among the poor. Since little money was to be made in serving the lower classes, midwives were allowed to continue to practice their traditional art among them.
Overall, the Scientific Revolution reaffirmed traditional ideas about women. Male scientists used the new science to spread the view that women were inferior by nature, subordinate to men, and suited by nature to play a domestic role as nurturing mothers (see the box on p. 463 ). The widespread distribution of books ensured the continuation of these ideas. Jean de La Bruyere, the seventeenth-century French moralist, was typical when he remarked that an educated woman was like a gun that was a collector’s item, “which one shows to the curious, but which has no use at all, any more than a carousel horse.”