Medicine and the Body in Early Modern Europe

This volume brings together essays on a wide range of topics, from the popular notion of ‘climacterical’ years believed to recur every seventh year, and the origins and development of the concept of ‘palliative’ care in premodern medicine, to the early modern understanding of ‘melancholia’ as a disease rather than just a temperament, and its visual representation in the famous ‘Melancholia’ paintings of Lukas Cranach the Elder. It examines the casuistic training, empirical observations, and public self-fashioning of learned physicians, and explores major concepts of early modern medical theory, such as ‘innate heat’ and diseases of the ‘total substance’ as presented and elaborated in Avicenna's ‘Canon medicinae and in Daniel Sennert's atomistic interpretation of body and soul. Published for the first time in an English translation, these essays offer readers many illuminating insights into the fascinating world of early modern medicine.