The Renaissance (1 gen 1300 anni – 1 gen 1700 anni)

Descrizione:

The Renaissance occurred in Europe over several centuries between 1300 and around 1600. It can be characterized as a transition out of the Middle/Dark ages by renaissance humanists who rebelled against medieval scholasticism. They strove to return to the achievement of the ancients, to revive Greek classics, translate and restore pure Galen and destroy its “Islamic corruption”. In returning to Galenic method, empiricism was revived, and one outlet of these was human dissections in order to study anatomy. These began to take place in the 1300s and were at first very public spectacles with one person dissecting and another reading Gaelic texts aloud. However through these, some dissectors noticed differences between what they saw and what Galen had written, and began to rewrite anatomical textbooks (with rich images to accompany). The most well known was Vesalius’s “De humanists corporis fabrica” published in 1543, which emphasized the unity of hand and mind, challenging Galenic teachings while reinforcing Galenic method.

These new anatomical textbooks as well as the renaissance-fostered spirit of new thinking also pushed medicine in the direction of other sciences such as physics (iatrophysics) and chemistry (iatrochemistry). Both of these were introduced as new ways of explaining the body and disease. William Harvey, for example, published a work called “De Motu Cordis” in 1628 that gave a physics-based model of the body with blood flowing in 1 direction; Descartes gave an iatromechanical model for the heart as a pump and cardiovascular system as hydraulics. Another leap forward occurred with the advent of Thomas Sydenham and his belief that knowledge should be practice-based. He revolutionized clinical medicine, grounding it in an ontological conception of disease using case histories that he recorded over his whole career to ultimately look at patterns.

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