INTRODUCTION Helen King Writing physiology In the history of early modern medicine, physiology -- now understood as the theory of the normal functioning of living organisms -- remains the poor relation. The papers presented here are intended to help scholars in a range of disciplines to consider why it is so difficult to provide a history of physiology; how far is this due to changing notions of what physiology is, and how far does it depend on the methods by which physiology comes to its conclusions? There has been no general history of physiology for the last forty years and, in contrast to anatomy, the topic has received very little attention at all from historians in that period. Within philosophy, the situation is rather different; the work of Dennis Des Chene, particularly his Physiologia. Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 1996) has been welcomed by philosophers but has had surprisingly little impact outside that field. In this book, and in his subsequent monograph Life's Form. Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (2000), Des Chene locates Descartes within his Aristotelian background, exploring the emergence of modern ideas of 'science' from medieval philosophy. The standard modern histories of physiology include Thomas Hall's work, originally published in 1969 and subsequently reissued as History of Physiology 200 BC--AD 1900 in 1975, and the 1953 book in German by Karl Rothschuh, published in English translation in 1973. Hall set out what he regarded as the 'classic questions' of physiology, from the Greeks onwards: these concerned 'motion, generation, nutrition' and 'the life-matter problem, of the nature of life and of its seat in the body'. In his Introduction to the English translation of Rothschuh, Leonard G. Wilson stated that 'Physiology, as a subject of inquiry has a long and remarkably continuous history beginning with studies and speculations of the Greeks in the fifth century BC'. This image of continuity has been challenged by the work of Andrew Cunningham, whose papers published in 2002 and 2003 respectively, cited by a number of contributors to this volume, are among the very few modern studies of the relationship between anatomy and physiology in the Early Modern period. Cunningham emphasised how physiology used reason rather than experiment, and that it remained very close to philosophy, so that 'When explanations in natural philosophy changed, so explanation in physiology also changed'. While the word 'physiology' is thus found in texts written before the nineteenth century, there is a wide range of concepts working underneath the same name. In contrast to the neglect of the unified and functioning body of 'physiology', the history of 'anatomy' -- traditionally seen as concerned with structure, rather than function -- has been the subject of considerable recent study. Trends in medical history towards 'the body in parts' approach have privileged anatomy; literally, the cutting-up or 'division' of the body. They have done this by concentrating on a single body part -- heart, head, foot -- and tracing its representation and interpretation across time. Anatomy has been important in recent histories of early modern medicine partly because of its place in education; for example, Katy Park's Secrets of Women (2006) traced the rise of human dissection from its emergence in the thirteenth century to its establishment in the curriculum of European universities in the mid-sixteenth century, and showed how the quest to understand women's interior 'secrets' informed this anatomical turn to medicine. The division of the body was, she has shown, an important part of early modern cultural practices even before the rise of dissection for educational purposes; parts of the dead, saintly body could be buried separately, and preserved independently as relics. Furthermore, the demonstrations in the anatomy theatres of sixteenth-century Europe were less about anatomical training and more about moral education, with the audiences including civic dignitaries and interested men of learning. What Cunningham characterises as 'old physiology' -- in order to distinguish it from the 'experimental physiology' of the nineteenth century -- emerged as a 'sub-discipline of the experimental discipline of anatomy' in the eighteenth century, and was seen as a speculative activity in which the scientist took the facts of anatomy as the basis of his speculations. In the eighteenth century, physiology was close to physics, since it depended on notions of the nature of matter and of motion. Albrecht von Haller recognised that it was necessary to become an expert anatomist before becoming a physiologist and described physiology as 'animated anatomy'. William Hunter wrote in his Two Introductory Lectures [...] to his Last Course of Anatomical Lectures that 'every good Anatomist, who has a cool head, and keeps a guard over his imagination, knows, that many of the received hypotheses in Physiology, are build on very loose foundations, and liable to weighty objections; or, demonstrably repugnant to what we already know of the structure of our body'. But what of the period before the eighteenth century, on which this collection of essays focuses? What was physiology, before it became the speculative wing of anatomy? Tilly Tansey's chapter on 'The physiological tradition' in Bynum and Porter's Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine (1993) contained only two pages on 'the Renaissance', one of them being devoted to William Harvey. One of the roles of the present volume is to try to flesh out the period before Harvey. Anatomy claimed as its founder the great hero of classical medicine, the second-century AD writer Galen whose ideas, systematised into 'Galenism', dominated medicine into the Early Modern period. Galen himself had not been able to perform systematic human dissection, but his work on animals led him to stress the importance of understanding the structure in order to comprehend the function. Thus those sixteenth-century writers who argued that the true study of the physician or surgeon should be the 'book' of the human body itself could still call on Galen for support; if only he had been allowed by the conventions of his day to perform dissection, he would have done exactly as they were now able to do. Hence Cunningham, memorably, described the great Renaissance anatomist Andreas Vesalius as 'simply Galen restored to life'. At the peak of the practice of 'anatomy' in early modern Europe there was also a move towards seeing medicine itself as unduly 'divided' by changes in its professional and intellectual structure between the ancient world and the Renaissance. In the Preface to De corporis humani fabrica (1543) Vesalius produced a polemic against the perceived inadequacies of the medicine of his own day. In this text on the fragmentation of the body, the great evil is another sort of 'fragmentation': 'that evil fragmentation of the healing art'. 'So much did the ancient art of medicine decline many years ago from its former glory': Vesalius regards the lost ideal as being the Alexandrian medicine of the third century BC, which he saw as bringing together control of diet, drugs and surgery in a single person, in contrast to the medicine of his own day when nurses supervise diet, apothecaries drugs, and barbers all manual operations. In Vesalius himself -- according to Vesalius -- the three spheres had been reunited; this supposed ideal of classical Greek medicine had been realised afresh. Was physiology part of the role of this ideal, holistic, physician? But, as Vivian Nutton shows in the essay which opens this collection, while Galen wrote a great deal about anatomy, he was less enthusiastic about the role of 'physiologising' in medicine. Lending another dimension to the point that the modern division between anatomy and physiology is itself a historical construct, for Galen, the term physiology extended well beyond later concepts of the normal functioning of an organism and even included far more than those areas which we would label the life sciences and medicine. Deriving from the Greek phusiologia, in the ancient world physiology formed part of what is better translated as 'the enquiry into nature' rather than as 'natural history', and represented a search for a better understanding of the power of nature and of what is 'natural' and 'contrary to nature'. In medicine, Galen believed, these types of speculation should hold only a minor place. In its original meaning, then, phusiologia was the entire tree, rather than only one branch. As a predecessor of Galen wrote, 'The physiological is that which treats of the investigation, theôria, into the power of nature that organises and regulates us'. As for the modern sense of 'physiology', which is commonly traced back to Jean Fernel, this concept can be traced back to the fifth century AD; furthermore, Fernel too included anatomy under the heading of physiology. Nutton argues that Fernel used the term 'physiology' in order to emphasise his Greek credentials, and that it was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that physiology came to be seen as separate from anatomy. The discourse of medical paternity sometimes makes Fernel 'the Father of Physiology', but -- in comparison with anatomy -- the situation is again less clear. While Herophilus is labelled 'the Father of Anatomy' -- Vesalius sometimes rivals him, but as 'Father of Modern Anatomy' -- who holds the corresponding role for physiology? Sometimes it is Herophilus's fellow physician Erasistratus, but this in fact imposes on to these two men a later division, projecting back distinctions that were not made in their period, the third century BC. Other contenders for 'the Father of Physiology' include Herman Boerhaave, William Harvey, and the nineteenth-century William Sharpey or Claude Bernard, for whom -- reversing the priority order of the previous century -- 'Anatomy is indeed only the first step in physiology'. The movement of fluids It has become a commonplace that the pre-modern body was 'a body of fluids' rather than a 'body of organs', but study of these fluids has thus far tended to concentrate on the humours. The colloquium as originally conceived aimed to expand the boundaries and to include studies of non-humoral fluids such as sweat, semen, urine and tears, as well as more individual concepts such as the medieval theories of two types of female seed (discussed here by Karine van 't Land), Boerhaave's 'nervous juice' or Sabuco's chilo, studied in Marlen Bidwell-Steiner's contribution to this volume . Specifically, when Manfred Horstmanshoff and Helen King began to draft the original Call for Papers, Horstmanshoff was beginning a project on tears, focusing in particular on the French physician Pierre Petit (Petrus Petitus, 1617-1687). Pliny the Elder had claimed the capacity to shed tears as something that defined human beings against other animals, stating that 'Man alone Nature deposits naked on the naked ground at the time of his birth, immediately to wail and cry' (Natural History 7.2). Horstmanshoff noted that the classically-rooted work of Petit, De lacrymis libri tres (1661), was published in the same year as the Danish anatomist, geologist, mathematician, theologian, and craftsman Niels Stensen (Nicolaus Stenonius) defended at the University of Leiden his thesis on the glands of the human face. While the thesis did not discuss the lachrymal glands, in December of the same year Stensen published De glandulis oculorum novisque earundem vasis observationes anatomicae, quibus veri lacrymarum fontes deteguntur. It was then printed again, with the 1661 dating, within a more accessible book: Observationes anatomicae (1662). Horstmanshoff was struck by the synchronicity of the 1661 events. The same year saw a thoroughly 'classical' discussion of questions such as how tears are produced and 'Whether the substance of tears is already in the body before weeping, or comes into existence by weeping itself', structured in Aristotelian terms, drawing on Greek and Latin sources as well as the Bible and the Church fathers (all seen by Petit as making up a single, living tradition) and using the concepts of spiritus and humours: but also a 'modern' analysis, based on observation of animal dissection, coming to the conclusion that the function of tears is simply to irrigate the eyes. The role of tears forms part of a wider discussion on the role of the emotions, and how far this changed in the Enlightenment, but the synchronicity of Petit and Stensen also illustrates well how arguments based on analogy, and arguments derived from observation and experimentation, were both being made in 1661. However, at this period, 'experiment' could simply mean 'experience'. Structure and function, movement and stability How does physiology fit into the ideals of seeing for oneself, and of a unified medical science? Whereas structure can be discovered by dissection, function cannot easily be seen in the same way; Galen used his observations from dissection as the basis for his theories of physiology but, as Véronique Boudon-Millot points out in her chapter in this collection, he was trying to account for 'a reality that is, by its very nature, unobservable'. His theories of vision, specifically, relied on the invisible pneuma, which he believed was so thin and light that it escaped even before the dissection commenced. Boudon-Millot thus extends to the ancient world Cunningham's point that physiology could be seen as the speculative narrative based on the structures shown by anatomical investigations, but adds the further idea that invisible substances could be used as the basis of the speculation. But it is important to acknowledge that even structure is not 'given' to experience; while some bodily structures, such as a bone or an organ, may appear to be self-evident entities, even here interpretation is needed. For example, early modern treatises often regarded the vagina not as a different organ, but as part of the womb. In early modern medical Latin, the word vagina could mean what we call 'the womb', with what we call the vagina being regarded as 'the neck of the womb'. In European Sexualities, 1400-1800 Katherine Crawford notes that 'Female parts were not distinct enough to merit separate names'. This is rather overstating the situation; while the late medieval infertility treatises studied by Amy Lindgren show 'blurry or even nonexistent' boundaries between the womb, vulva and female testes, writers in this period who focused on anatomy did separate out the 'neck' of the womb as a separate structure. By the early seventeenth century, works such as Bauhin's Theatrum anatomicum (1605) included the fundus, the os, the cervix and the various parts of the pudendum externum, among them the clitoris and labia. Because early seventeenth-century medical writers accepted Galen's view that women as well as men produce seed, they organised their discussions of the female generative parts on the model of the male body, first describing the vessels that produce, store and evacuate this seed, before moving to the organ of evacuation: the penis or the womb. The perception of structure could thus derive from beliefs about function. Sometimes function led to a belief in a part of the body that we no longer accept. In this collection, Michael Stolberg draws our attention to a previously-unstudied aspect of the early modern body, a space 'between the flesh and the skin', which appears to result from a greater interest in sweat as a means of excreting unhealthy substances. Valeria Gavrylenko goes back to the Homeric poems to ask when 'skin' became a body part, and argues that, while the terms for animal skin, or hide, could be applied to humans in poetic language, the Homeric heroic body is Excerpted from Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
