Can Mixtures Be Identified by Touch?  The Reception of Galen’s De complexionibus in Italian Renaissance Medicine

Von Hoffmann, Viktoria

doi:10.1163/15733823-20230084

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Can Mixtures Be Identified by Touch? The Reception of Galen’s De complexionibus in Italian Renaissance Medicine

Von Hoffmann, Viktoria

2023 • In Early Science and Medicine, 28 (3-5), p. 498–525

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10.1163/15733823-20230084

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Keywords :

touch; complexion; Galen; anatomy; Renaissance

Abstract :

[en] This article uses Galen’s De complexionibus and its reception as a thread to examine the part played by the sense of touch in the assessment of bodily mixtures. According to Galen, complexions were assessed by touching patients with the skin of the palm of the hand because it is “at the precise midpoint between all the extremes” and, thus, well-mixed. This article examines how this extraordinary claim about the discriminative power of touch was received from the late Middle Ages up to the early modern period, with a special focus on Renaissance thought. By following Galen’s text and its various forms and appropriations, the aim is to illuminate the fluid understanding of the Galenic notion of “complexion” (complexio) in relation to changing epistemologies of touch in Renaissance medicine, notably by shedding light on the anatomical concept of “substance” (substantia).

Disciplines :

History

Author, co-author :

Von Hoffmann, Viktoria ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département des sciences historiques > Histoire culturelle

Language :

English

Title :

Can Mixtures Be Identified by Touch? The Reception of Galen’s De complexionibus in Italian Renaissance Medicine

Publication date :

21 November 2023

Journal title :

Early Science and Medicine

ISSN :

1383-7427

eISSN :

1573-3823

Publisher :

Brill, Netherlands

Special issue title :

Special Issue: Complexio. Across Disciplines

Volume :

Issue :

3-5

Pages :

498–525

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Available on ORBi :

since 11 July 2023

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Bibliography

Galen: Works on Human Nature, vol. I Mixtures (De Temperamentis), transl. with introduction and notes by P.N. Singer and Philip van der Eijk, with the assistance of Piero Tassinari (Cambridge, 2018), 115.
“[T]he human being is the best-mixed [being], not just among animals or plants, but also among all other things. Since, however, he is composed of many different parts, it is quite evident that that part which is in the middle of all of them with regard to mixture will also be well-mixed in the absolute sense. […] And it was shown that within human beings this part is that known as skin, and more especially the skin on the inner side of the hand […]”; see below for a longer development about the skin of the palm of the hand as the organ of touch.
I use “mixture” as a translation of krasis when discussing Galen's original text, relying on the translation proposed by Singer and Van der Eijk, and I use “complexion” (complexio) when discussing later engagements with the work, after Constantine the African. Subsequently, in the Renaissance there were also frequent uses of the words temperatura or temperamentum, which I tried to avoid here for clarity. On translations of complexional concepts and theories
see Danielle Jacquart, “De crasis à complexio: note sur le vocabulaire du tempéra-ment en latin médiéval,” in Textes Médicaux Latins Antiques, ed. Guy Sabbah (Saint-Étienne, 1984), 71-76.
Richard T. Bellis, “'The Object of Sense and Experiment': The Ontology of Sensation in William Hunter's Investigation of the Human Gravid Uterus,” The British Journal for the History of Science, 55 (2022), 227-246;
Hannah Murphy, “Skin and Disease in Early Modern Medicine: Jan Jessen's De cute, et cutaneis affectibus (1601),” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 94 (2020), 179-214;
Pablo Maurette, “The Organ of Organs: Vesalius and the Wonders of the Human Hand,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 48 (2018), 105-124;
Cynthia Klestinec, “Touch, Trust, and Compliance in Early Modern Medical Practice,” in The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, ed. Anne Whitehead, Angela Woods, Sarah Atkinson, et al. (Edinburgh, 2016), 209-224;
Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio, “Anatomie der Hand und anatomisches Handwerk vor und nach Andreas Vesal,” in Die Hand: Elemente einer Medizin und Kulturgeschichte, ed. Gadebusch Bondio (Berlin, 2010), 79-116;
Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio, “La carne di fuori: Discorsi medici sulla natura e l'estetica della pelle nel '500,” in La pelle umana/The Human Skin, Special issue Micrologus: Natura, scienze e società medievali, 13 (2005), 537-570.
Relevant works on complexion include Chiara Beneduce, “John Buridan on Complexion: Natural Philosophy and Medicine in the Fourteenth Century,” in Oeconomia corporis: The Body's Normal and Pathological Constitution at the Intersection of Philosophy and Medicine, ed. Chiara Beneduce and Denise Vincenti (Pisa, 2018), 41-49;
Joel Kaye, A History of Balance, 1250-1375: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and its Impact on Thought (Cambridge, 2014), 128-240;
Joël Chandelier and Aurélien Robert, “Nature Humaine et Complexion du Corps chez les Médecins Italiens de la Fin du Moyen Âge,” Revue de synthèse, 134 (2013), 473-510;
Valentin Groebner, “Complexio/Complexion: Categorizing Individual Nature. 1250-1600,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago, IL, 2004), 361-383;
Per-Gunnar Ottosson, Scholastic Medicine and Philosophy: A Study of Commentaries on Galen's Tegni (ca. 1300-1400) (Naples, 1984), 127-194;
Michael R. McVaugh, Arnaldi de Villanova Opera Medica Omnia, II, Aphorismi de gradi-bus (Barcelona, 1975);
Lucian Petrescu, ed., “Special Issue: Theories of Mixture in the Early Modern Period,” Journal of Early modern Studies, 4 (Spring 2015);
Lynn Thorndike, “De complexionibus,” Isis, 49 (1958), 398-408.
Philip van der Eijk, “Galen on the Assessment of Bodily Mixtures,” in The Frontiers of Ancient Science, ed. Brooke Holmes and Klaus-Dietrich Fischer (Berlin - Boston, MA, 2015), 675-698;
this article is revised and used as the introduction to the translation of the text in Galen, Mixtures; see also Claudia Mirrione, “Theory and Terminology of Mixture in Galen: The Concepts of Krasis and Mixis in Galen's Thought” (PhD thesis, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2017);
Véronique Boudon-Millot, “La notion de mélange dans la pensée médicale de Galien: mixis ou crasis?” Revue des Études Grecques, 124 (2011), 261-279.
Luis García-Ballester, “The New Galen: A Challenge to Latin Galenism in Thirteenth-Century Montpellier,” in Text and Tradition: Studies in Ancient Medicine and its Transmission, ed. Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, Diethard Nickel and Paul Potter (Leiden - Boston, MA, 1998), 55-83;
idem, “Arnau de Vilanova (c. 1240-1311) y la reforma de los estudios médicos en Montpellier (1309): El Hipócrates latino y la introducción del nuevo Galeno,” Dynamis, 2 (1982), 97-158;
McVaugh, Arnaldi de Villanova.
On medical education in Renaissance Italy, see, among many other works, Kira Robison, Healers in the Making: Students, Physicians, and Medical Education in Medieval Bologna (1250-1550) (Leiden - Boston, MA, 2021);
Michael Stolberg, “Learning Anatomy in Late Sixteenth-century Padua,” History of Science, 30 (2018), 381-402;
David A. Lines, “Reorganizing the Curriculum: Teaching and Learning in the University of Bologna, c. 1560-c. 1590,” in History of Universities, 26, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Oxford, 2012), 1-59.
On the intersection between theory and practice, see Michael Stolberg, Gelehrte Medizin und ärztlicher Alltag in der Renaissance (Berlin - Boston, MA, 2021);
Danielle Jacquart, “La notion d'ingenium dans la médecine médiévale,” in Knowledge and the Sciences in Medieval Philosophy: Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Medieval Philosophy (S.I.E.P.M.), Helsinki, 24-29 August 1987, ed. Simo Knuuttila, Reijo Työrinoja and Sten Ebbesen (Helsinki, 1990), vol. 2, 62-70;
Ottosson, Scholastic Medicine, 65-126.
Galen, Mixtures.
For more details about the “Temperament of Drugs,” see the contribution by Elisabeth Moreau in this issue.
Galen, Mixtures, 86. On the notion of eukrasia, see Giouli Korobili's article in this issue.
This development is the object of Book I: Galen, Mixtures, 49-102.
Galen, Mixtures, 71-72.
Kaye, History of Balance, 135-136.
On the interaction between different complexions from various bodily members, see Joël Chandelier's contribution in this issue.
Philip van der Eijk, “Introduction,” in Galen, Mixtures, 6-7.
Galen, Mixtures, 103-153.
The close connection between the refinement of the hand and mind is inspired by Aristotle, De anima, II.9, 421a20-22.
Van der Eijk, “Introduction,” 17.
Galen, Mixtures, 88.
“To work carefully on the sense of taste on the juices,” it is best, Galen explains, to start with “those having any one very clear quality. Now, if you want to identify pungency clearly, then it is garlic and onion and plants similar to them that you should taste many times and chew at length and then with precise testing of what you have remembered compare the sense of the experience you have received.” Simples 11.632-3 K.
I am indebted to John Wilkins for this quote and I would like to thank him for sharing his work with me.
Galen, Mixtures, 124.
The remarkable composition of the palm of the hand, able to “respond to the smallest of stimuli” and “to notice the smallest of changes,” is also mentioned in De usu partium: see
Vivian Nutton, “Galen at the Bedside,” in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge, 2004 [1993]), 13.
Temperature was important to identify fevers, but sphymology was the most important diagnostic tool identified by Galen, who wrote sixteen books on the pulse. On practices of diagnosis in Ancient medicine, see
Nutton, “Galen at the Bedside”;
Luis García-Ballester, “Galen as a Medical Practitioner: Problems in Diagnosis,” in Galen: Problems and Prospects, ed. Vivian Nutton (London, 1981), 13-46.
Galen explains that if all dry bodies are hard, this does not entail that all hard bodies are necessarily dry, as evidenced in the case of ice, which is cold, hard, and humid; see
Galen, Mixtures, 122-123.
Burgundio's version of the De complexionibus, available in the twelfth century and preserved only in four manuscripts, is edited in Galenus Latinus I: Burgundio of Pisa's Translation of Galen's 'De complexionibus,' ed. Richard J. Durling (Berlin - New York, 1976).
Galen's treatise was also translated into Arabic and Syriac by Hunayn ibn Ishāq, into Syriac by Sergius of Resaina, and into Hebrew by Simson ben Salomo. For a brief overview of the reception of Galen's De complexionibus and a selected bibliography about the various translations of the text, see
Van der Eijk, “Introduction,” 43-46;
Ivan Garofalo, “La traduzione araba de de temperamentis, del de optima constitutione e del de bono habitu,” in Ecdotica e ricezione dei testi medici greci, ed. Véronique Boudon-Millot, Antonio Garzya, Jacques Jouanna and Amneris Roselli (Naples, 2006), 125-135.
For the reception of Mixtures in late Antiquity, see idem, “Il De temperamentis ad Alessandria,” Galenos, 7 (2014), 61-71.
For details about translations of Galen in the Renaissance, see
Richard J. Durling, “A chronological Census of Renaissance Editions and Translations of Galen,” in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 24 (1961), 230-305.
See Michael McVaugh, “Galen in the Medieval Universities, 1200-1400,” in Brill's Companion to the Reception of Galen, ed. Petros Bouras-Vallianatos and Barbara Zipser (Leiden - Boston, MA, 2019), 381-392;
García-Ballester, “The New Galen”;
idem, “Medical Ethics in Transition in the Latin Medicine of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: New Perspectives on the Physician-Patient Relationship and the Doctor's Fee,” in Doctors and Ethics: The Historical Setting of Professional Ethics, ed. Andrew Wear, Johanna Geyer-Kordesch and Roger French (Leiden, 1993), 38-71. This movement was not limited to the three cities mentioned above.
García-Ballester, “The New Galen”;
McVaugh, “Galen in the Medieval Universities.”
For a nuanced analysis of this group of texts, see Vivian Nutton, “The New Galen Revisited,” in Nicoletta Darlon-Palmieri and Brigitte Mondrain, eds., “Transmettre les textes médicaux grecs: traductions, recueils, images,” Galenos. Rivista di Filologia dei testi medici antichi, 11 (2017), 73-80.
See Nancy Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils: Two Generations of Italian Medical Learning (Princeton, NJ, 2019 [1981]);
García-Ballester, “Medical Ethics in Transition.”
According to the section lxxviij relating to “De lectura et ordine librorum legendorum,” the De complexionibus, De malicia complexionis, and the five first books of the Liber de simplici me[dici]na were on the programme for the second lecture (the first lecture being on Avicenna) for first-year medical students. The Tegni was read during the second year.
Carlo Malagola, Statuti delle Università e dei Collegi dello Studio Bolognese (Bologna, 1888), 274-277.
Regina Andres Rebollo studied the rotuli and puncti of the University of Padua that recorded the subjects and content (official curriculum) taught in medical schools between 1500 and 1600: see Regina Andrés Rebollo, “The Paduan School of Medicine: Medicine and Philosophy in the Modern Era,” in História, Ciências, SaúdeManguinhos, 17 (April-June 2010), , accessed 3 August 2023.
On teaching practices in Padua, see also Cynthia Klestinec, Theaters of Anatomy: Students, Teachers, and Traditions of Dissection in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore, MD, 2011);
Bartolo Bertolaso, “Ricerche d'archivio su alcuni aspetti dell'insegnamento medico presso la università di Padova nel Cinque e Seicento,” Acta Medicae Historiae Patavina, 6 (1959), 17-37 and (1960), 1-30.
Rebollo, “Paduan School of Medicine”;
Bertolaso, “Ricerche d'archivio su alcuni aspetti dell'insegnamento” (1959), 20.
García-Ballester, “The New Galen,” 66;
Michael R. McVaugh, “The Nature and Limits of Medical Certitude at Early Fourteenth-Century Montpellier,” Osiris, 6 (1990), 63.
García-Ballester, “The New Galen,” 66.
McVaugh, “Nature and Limits,” 63.
Johannes de Sancto Amando, Abbreviationes librorum Galieni or Revocativum memorie, written around 1274-1285
aimed to help students memorize important medical texts. The summary of De complexionibus was published in Georg Matern, “Aus dem Revocativum Memoriae des Johannes de Sancto Amando (XIII. Jahrhundert). Die drei Bücher des Galen über die Temperamente” (Inaugural diss., University of Berlin, 1894).
On Saint-Amand, see Danielle Jacquart, “L'œuvre de Jean de Saint-Amand et les méthodes d'enseignement à la Faculté de médecine de Paris à la fin du XIIIe siècle,” in Manuels, programmes de coursettechniquesd'enseignementdanslesuniversitésmédiévales, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1994), 257-275.
On Avicenna's Canon and its importance for medieval and early modern medicine in Italy, see Joël Chandelier, Avicenne et la médecine en Italie. Le Canon dans les universités (1200-1350) (Paris, 2017);
Nancy Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities after 1500 (Princeton, NJ, 1987).
Along with De naturalibus facultatibus and De usu partium.
Siraisi, Avicenna, 34-35.
I used a Venetian edition of the Latin translation provided by Gerard of Cremona, which would have been widely available: Liber Canonis Avicenne revisus & ab omni errore me[n]daq[ue] purgatus summaq[ue] cum diligentia Impressus (Venice, 1507), fol. 2v. I would like to thank Véronique Pitchon for pointing out this quotation to me.
Galen, Mixtures, 95.
Liber Canonis Avicenne, fol. 3r-v (“De complexionibus membrorum”).
Danielle Jacquart, “La question disputée dans les Facultés de médecine,” in Les questions disputées et les questions quodlibétiques dans les facultés de théologie, de droit et de médecine, ed. Bernardo C. Bazàn, John W. Wippel, Gérard Fransen and Danielle Jacquart (Turnhout, 1985), 280-315; Beneduce, “John Buridan on Complexion.”
Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils, 255.
On Bartolomeo da Varignana, see Armando Antonelli, “Varignana, Bartolomeo da,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 98 (2020) , accessed 3 August 2023;
Chandelier, Avicenne, 106-112;
Nancy G. Siraisi, “Taddeo Alderotti and Bartolomeo da Varignana on the Nature of Medical Learning,” Isis, 68 (1977), 27-39;
Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils, 45-49.
Lasislao Münster, “Alcuni episodi sconosciuti o poco noti sulla vita e sulla attività di Bartolomeo da Varignana,” Castalia: Rivista di storia della medicina, 10 (1954), 207-215.
For a list of quaestiones relating to complexional theories, see Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils, 319-325.
“Queritur utrum sensus tactus sit via competens in determinandi complexionem naturalem.” Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 4451, fol. 70r. (My translation.)
Georg Matern, Aus dem Revocativum Memoriae (1894), 17-18.
Liber Canonis Avicenne, fols. 3v-4v.
Galen, Mixtures, 109-111.
Ottosson, Scholastic Medicine and Philosophy, 209 n. 38.
For Galen's discussions about mixtures in relation to age, see Galen, Mixtures, 108-122.
Linacre was a British physician who founded the London College of Physicians in 1518 and was renowned for the quality of his translations from the Greek, notably of Galen. For a detailed comparison of Linacre's translation with that of Burgundio of Pisa, see
Richard J. Durling, “Linacre and Medical Humanism,” in Linacre Studies: Essays on the Life and Work of Thomas Linacre c. 1460-1524, ed. Francis Maddison, Margaret Pelling, and Charles Webster (Oxford, 1977), 76-106; further details about Linacre's life and work are also included in the other articles of the same volume.
In the dedicatory preface, he writes: “In quo genere Galeni hic, se obtulit libell[us] brevis o[mn]ino, sed non minus philosophis qua[m] medicis necessarius.” (Galeni Pergamensis de Temperamentis, et de inaequali intemperie libri tres Thoma Linacro Anglo interprete [Cambridge, 1521], n.p.). The same claim is mentioned on the title page of the book. On the reception of Galen's works in the Renaissance, see
Vivian Nutton, “Renaissance Galenism, 1540-1640: Flexibility or an Increasing Irrelevance?” in Bouras-Vallianatos and Zipser, Brill's Companion to the Reception of Galen, 472-486;
idem, “The Fortunes of Galen,” in The Cambridge Companion to Galen, ed. Robert J. Hankinson (Cambridge, 2008), 355-390;
Durling, “Chronological Census”;
Stefania Fortuna, “Galeno Latino, 1490-1533,” Medicina nei Secoli, 17 (2005), 469-505.
Giles Barber, “Thomas Linacre: A Bibliographical Survey of his Works,” in Maddison, Pelling, and Webster, Linacre Studies, 290-336.
For the list and description of the Latin editions of Galen's Opera omnia, see Stefania Fortuna, “The Latin Editions of Galen's Opera omnia (1490-1625) and Their Prefaces,” Early Science and Medicine, 17 (2012), 391-412.
On the Giuntine editions, see eadem, “Editions and Translations of Galen from 1490 to 1540,” in Bouras-Vallianatos and Zipser, Brill's Companion to the Reception of Galen, 446-449.
Claudii Galeni Pergameni De Temperamentis Libri III. De inaequali intemperie liber I. Thomas Linacro Anglo interprete. Cum Isagoge in eosdem libros, & scholiis marginalibus longè doctossimis, per Jacobum Sylvium, Regium medicinae professorem (Paris, 1549).
Charles B. Schmitt, “Thomas Linacre and Italy,” in Maddison, Pelling, and Webster, Linacre Studies, 36-75.
On medical humanism, see Caroline Petit, ed., Revisiting Medical Humanism in Renaissance Europe, Arts et Savoirs, 15 (2021);
Hiro Hirai, ed., Medical Humanism and NaturalPhilosophy: Renaissance Debates on Matter, Life, andthe Soul(Leiden - Boston, MA, 2011);
Andrew Wear, Roger K. French and I.M. Lonie, eds., The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985).
The literature on Renaissance anatomy and dissections is extensive. Reference works include but are not limited to: Francesco P. De Ceglia, ed., The Body of Evidence: Corpses and Proofs in Early Modern European Medicine (Leiden, 2020);
Vivian Nutton, “Galenism and anti-Galenism in Renaissance Anatomy,” in Contre Galien: Critiques d'une autorité médicale de l'Antiquité à l'âge moderne, ed. Antoine Pietrobelli (Paris, 2020), 215-227;
Silvia De Renzi, Marco Bresadola and Maria Conforti, eds., Pathology in Practice: Diseases and Dissections in Early Modern Europe (London, 2018);
Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Mechanism, Experiment, Disease: Marcello Malpighi and SeventeenthCentury Anatomy (Baltimore, MD, 2011);
Klestinec, Theaters of Anatomy; Domenico Bertoloni Meli and Rebecca Wilkin, eds., Observation and Experiment in Mechanistic Anatomy, special issue of Early Science and Medicine, 13 (2008), 531-709;
Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York, 2006);
Rafael Mandressi, Le Regard de l'Anatomiste: Dissections et invention du corps en Occident (Paris, 2003);
Andrea Carlino, Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning (Chicago, IL, 1999);
Roger French, Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance (Aldershot, 1999).
R. Allen Shotwell, “Bones of Contention: Humanism, Translation, and Experience in Sixteenth-Century Translations of Galen's De ossibus,” Arts et Savoirs, 15 (2021), 13 pp., online: , accessed 3 August 2023.
On sensory forms of Renaissance anatomy, see Viktoria von Hoffmann, “Epistemologies of Touch in Early Modern Autopsies,” Renaissance Quarterly, 75 (2022), 542-582;
Klestinec, Theaters of Anatomy;
Park, Secrets of Women;
Mandressi, Regard de l'Anatomiste.
Siraisi, Avicenna, 304-310.
For example, by Schmitt, “Thomas Linacre and Italy,” 44.
There is no documentary evidence supporting the idea that Alessandro Benedetti ever taught in Padua - nor in Venice, for that matter, where he finally settled. He was experienced in dissections and surgery, had a remarkable knowledge of Greek, and owned a rich collection of Greek manuscripts. Unfortunately, no inventory of his collection of manuscripts was preserved;
see Giovanna Ferrari, L'esperienza del passato: Alessandro Benedetti filologo e medico umanista (Florence, 1996), 82-84.
On Benedetti and his relation to the value of experience and erudition, see Gianna Pomata, “Praxis Historialis: The Uses of Historia in Early Modern Medicine,” in Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi (Cambridge - London, 2005), 105-146.
“Rursus corporis partes quaedam calidae, quaedam siccae, aliae frigidae, nonnullae humectae sunt”; see Alessandro Benedetti, Historia Corporis Humani Sive Anatomice (hereafter: Anatomice), ed. Giovanna Ferrari (Florence, 1998), 102.
Benedetti, Anatomice, 102: “Haec circa temperiem quam graeci crasiam vocant constituuntur (sic). Una dunntaxat pars est maxime sensilis (sic) in humano corpore, hoc est cutis, in palma praecipue aut summo indicis, cui temperata commixtio data est a natura inter qualitates siccum, humidum, frigidum, ac fervens […].”
The increase of new anatomical textbooks does not necessarily imply that the notion of 'complexion' became a topic solely or mostly addressed by physicians and not by natural philosophers. More research is needed to attest how extensively the notion of 'complexion' was used, respectively, in medicine and natural philosophy in the fifteenth and sixteenth century.
Niccolò Massa, Liber introductorius Anatomiae siue Dissectionis Corporis Humani (Venice, 1536), fol. 4r: “[Q]ui ipsam incisionem actualem agere curent”;
see also Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, Commentaria cum amplissimis additionibus super anatomia Mundini (Bologna, 1521);
and Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Basel, 1543).
Roger French, “A Note on the Anatomical Accessus of the Middle Ages,” Medical History, 23 (1979), 461-468, at 464.
This is the translation suggested by Ruben Eriksson, which I find appropriate because it corresponds to the anatomical feature considered here: the connections between organic structures (how and to which bones muscles are attached, for instance).
Baldasar Hesler, Andreas Vesalius' First Public Anatomy at Bologna 1540. An Eyewitness Report by Baldasar Heseler medicinae scolaris together with his Notes on Matthaeus Curtius' Lectures on anatomia Mundini, ed. Ruben Eriksson (Uppsala, 1959), 49.
For example, Matteo Corti explains that if the heart is usually held to have the hottest complexion, it is not the case for cowards, who have a cold heart because they have a large and warm liver due to their gluttony; see Andreas Vesalius' first public anatomy, 148. The complexion of organs had also been frequently debated in early scholastic quaestiones, for instance by Taddeo who asked if the brain - usually held to be cold - could be warm
(“Utrum cerebrum sit calidum,” Taddeo, Isagoge, fol. 352r-v, quoted by Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils, 321).
The attribution of this comment to John of Alexandria is uncertain; see Vivian Nutton, “John of Alexandria Again: Greek Medical Philosophy in Latin Translation,” The Classical Quarterly, 41 (1991), 509-519. The text was published among Galen's Opera omnia.
Mandressi, Regard de l'Anatomiste, 113-116.
Mondino lists six features in the beginning of his Anathomia (“positio […] subta[n]tia […] qua[n]titas […] nu[m]er[us] […] figura […] co[n]tinuitas”), but then a little further on in his work, he points to the complexio of dissected parts, such as the stomach, warm and wet, because its substance is “carnosus” and “pelliculosus.” (Anathomia Mu[n]dini, in Fasciculus Medicine [Venice, 1495], fol. eIIIr-v).
When listing anatomical occasiones, Berengario da Carpi mentions “substance and therefore complexion” (“substantia et per consequens complexio”), which reveals how interconnected these two features were considered to be; see Berengario da Carpi, Carpi Commentaria, fol. xxxxiiv.
Substance here can be defined as “the matter or tissue composing an animal body, part, or organ,” not as its “essential nature, essence” (see “substance,” in Oxford English Dictionary, 17 [Oxford, 1933], 64-65).
As far as I know there has been no scientific study specifically devoted to the anatomical sense of substance. Roger French “Note on the Anatomical Accessus,” 464, considered substance as a “largely inapplicable” category, which contrasts with the wide presence of substance in the anatomical textbooks and records of dissection discussed in this article. It is important to note, however, that there were great varieties in the meanings of substantia across the period considered here. The study of the uses and meanings of anatomical substances would require a greater development that is beyond the scope of this article, given its focus on the intersection between touch and complexion. I would like to thank Vivian Nutton for this useful reminder and kind suggestion to pursue this investigation further.
“Sub substantia intelligit subtile &c. sed & carnosum pa[n]niculate osseum &c.” Annotationes anatomiae magni Alexandri Achillini Bononiensis (Bologna, 1520), fol. IIr. transl. Levi Robert Lind, Studies in PreVesalian Anatomy: Biography, Translations, Documents (Philadelphia, PA, 1975), 43.
Berengario da Carpi, Commentaria, fol. 443r.
“Hui[us] me[m]bri sub[st]a[ntia] natural[iter] Rara, fungosa; ac mollis est. Est et[iam] accide[n]tal[ite]r mollis: p[ro]p[ter] humiditates a capite: & a ve[n]triculo ap ipsam desce[n]de[n]tes. Caro et[iam] gla[n]dosa in ipsius radice in qua sunt fontes salivales humectat ipsam; media[n]te saliva; est et[iam] ipsi multitudo nervor[um]: tu[m] p[ro]pter sensu[m] tactus & gustus; tu[m] p[ro]pter motu[m]que. […] lingua in sua radice est ampla, grossa & fortis. In anteriori vero est subtilis, & acuta[m]; ut promp-tior sit ad motus. […] Co[m]plexio lingu[a]e est calida; & humida.”
Berengario da Carpi, Anatomia Carpi. Isagogae Breves. Perlucide ac uberime, in Anatomiam humani corporis, a, com[m]uni Medicorum Academia, usitatam, a, Carpo in Almo Bononiensi Gymnasio Ordinariam Chirurgiae publicae Docente, ad suorum Scholasticorum preces in luce[m] date (Venice, 1535), fol. 39v; 40v.
Heseler, Vesalius, 62-63: “Hence it suffices to know the substance [substantiam], by which we then shall know both the complexion [temperaturam] and the operations [operationes] that depend on the former.”
Galen, Mixtures, 95.
Heseler, Vesalius, 70-73: “Ita quod ex illo tendine membranoso extensor illa cutis vole manus habeat perfectissimum sensum tactus.”
Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem: The Fabric of the Human Body. An annotated translation of the 1543 and 1555 editions by Daniel H. Garrison, Malcolm H. Hast (Basel, 2014), 1131. The literature on Vesalius is too vast to be comprehensively cited here. Useful recent references include Dániel Margócsy, Mark Somos
and Stephen N. Joffe, The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Leiden, 2018)
and Sachiko Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text and Argument in SixteenthCentury Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago, IL, 2012).
Heseler, Vesalius, 44-46: “Ex visu et tactu cognoscimus substantiam, positum, connexum et formam ipsarum partium corporis.”
For more details about haptic epistemologies and languages in Italian Renaissance anatomy, see von Hoffmann, “Epistemologies of Touch.”
Mandressi, Regard de l'Anatomiste, 50-51;
Carlino, Books of the Body, 9-20.
Heseler, Vesalius, 56-57, 74-75, 100-101, 158-159, and 234-235. Three of these references support discussions on the qualities of fat.
On Heseler and Corti, see Robison, Healers in the Making, 98-103.
Heseler, Vesalius, 252.
I have already written elsewhere (“Epistemologies of Touch”) about the staging of touch presented in this episode, building on the works by Park, Klestinec, and Maurette.
See Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL, 2004);
Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences 1400-1600 (Corvallis, OR, 2011).
On practical experience and experiment, see Cynthia Klestinec, “Practical Experience in Anatomy,” in The Body as ObjectandInstrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, ed. Charles T. Wolfe and Ofer Gal (London, 2010), 33-57;
William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ, 1994);
Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, “Per una ricerca su experimentumexperimenta: riflessione epistemologica e tradizione medica (secoli XIII-XV),” in Presenza del lessico greco e latino nelle lingue contemporanee, ed. Pietro Janni and Innocenzo Mazzini (Macerata, 1990), 9-49.
John of Paris, Liber complexionum (BNN 7121, fourteenth century, fol. 73r-80r);
Thorndike, “De complexionibus,” 401.
Stolberg, Gelehrte Medizin, 145-150;
idem., “Examining the Body, c. 1500-1750,” in The Routledge History of Sex and the Body: 1500 to the Present, ed. Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher (London - New York, 2013), 91-105.
On complexion as one of the signs of health and disease, see Brian K. Nance, “Determining the Patient's Temperament: An Excursion into Seventeenth-Century Medical Semeiology,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 67 (1993), 417-438.