Descartes' Bones Read Online Free

came into being in Descartes’ generation.
    This new way of viewing the human body was bewildering when it was first aired. Many people, in fact, equated it with atheism. It was frankly at odds with the overall approach to knowledge in the period against which modernity arose. Aristotelianism, or Scholasticism, was a blend of Christian theology and thinking derived from Aristotle and other ancient Greeks. These streams of thought had stewed together for centuries and resulted in a worldview that, often spiced with astrology and folklore, treated every subject under the sun, from the story of creation to the roles of men and women. It explained why a stone dropped from a window fell to the earth rather than floating upward (because objects want to move toward the center of the earth, which is the center of the universe); it told what happened when you died; it gave an account of the end of all things.
    The premodern medical establishment—which Descartes had dedicated himself to overthrowing—was built around the teachings of the ancient Greek physician Galen, whose work in turn was dependent on Aristotle’s division of the physical world into the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water. Corresponding to these were the bodily “humors,” or fluids: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Diseases and disorders were seen as the result of a humoral imbalance. This system—augmented by folk medicine, witchcraft, Christianity, and astrology—had the advantage of completeness. My body and its little world of concerns—toothaches and fevers, lovesickness and moodiness—was part of the wide world and the wider universe. This doesn’t mean that the view was that the body was made of the same material as everything else in the universe or that physical forces controlled everything. The ineffable was a genuine and necessary part of reality. Jesus walked on water; miracles happened; the Devil stalked the land. The supernatural—magic—existed within the natural; it was woven into the fabric of the world and the stars, including the sinews of the human body.
    At the same time, the system was practical. As a physician in ancient Rome (with a list of clients that ran from Marcus Aurelius to gladiators), Galen himself had favored close observation of the patient—he was the first to recognize the pulse rate as an indicator of health—so that his approach had much to offer it, which explains why it endured for so long. One problem was that the underlying account of the physical world—Aristotle’s four elements, which combined in different ways to create all the stuff of reality, from mountains to lily pads to manatees to earwax—did not serve as an especially sturdy foundation. Diagnosis and treatment via the system of humors—a melancholic, or “earthy,” illness called for an “airy” compound, and so on—were dodgy if not lethal, as patients well knew and as Molière, for whom the medical profession was a favorite target, suggested with the observation “most men die of their remedies and not of their diseases.”
    And that was establishment medicine. There were many other options that were considered valid. A sufferer from fever or stomach pain or gout or nosebleed might get, by way of professional service, an astrological reading, an amulet to be tied around the neck with a ribbon, or a squinty examination of his or her urine (“uroscopy” was looked to as a general indicator of health, as when Shakespeare’s Falstaff asks a page, “What says the doctor to my water?”). The person administering the attention might be a physician, but astrologers and other sorts of healers were often seen as on a par, and some of the most esteemed medical men, including members of the College of Physicians in London, used astrology as part of their diagnostic tool kit.
    Often, the caregiver was a clergyman. In any event,