As I mentioned it above, Ficino’s doctrine of spiritual medicine was influential for the development of vitalist medicine during the Renaissance. For instance, Paracelsus, who establishes the importance of chemical analysis in the study of diseases and their cures, also believed on importance of the role of spirits in medicine. According to Paracelsus, God creates things in prime matter and not in its ultimate matter, which is the actual constitution of sensible things. This prime matter is highly ‘general’ and it does not contain the individual elements of objects. Then, Paracelsus claims that the process of individualization of the objects begins with the action of ‘Vulcan’, which is the principle whose action allows to the prime matter becoming
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According to van Helmont, chemical reactions, and not heat, are the causes of digestion. It implies a rejection of Galen’s elementary qualities, which explains the reasons why van Helmont, as Henry points out, ‘bitterly regretted his university training as a waste of time’ (2002: 48). By contrast, for van Helmont, digestion was the result of the acting of certain kind of acid in the stomach producing fermentation. Yet, though the process of nutrition begins with the fermentation of the food in the stomach, it does not end there, and similar processes are carried out in the different parts of the body when the nourishment get there. Thus, van Helmont argues that nutrition is a process of six different stages. As Clericuzio describes it: ‘van Helmont divided the process of digestion into six steps (sextuples digestion), each one requiring a specific ferment directing the chemical reactions occurring in different organs’ (2012: 332). Particularly interesting for our actual purposes are the second and fifth stages of the process because there we can perceive the influence of the spiritual explanation of physiological …show more content…
The problem of digestion and nutrition had a particularly important influence because the medical thinkers and physicians found in alchemy, iatrochemistry, and spirits, viable explanations to the unsolved problems of Galen’s medical theories. Though, it is difficult to subsume vitalism as a single movement during the Renaissance, we can find some elements which are regularly visible in a vitalist explanation of physiological phenomena. First of all, the possibility of explaining physiological processes as the result of some occult qualities of the bodies which are manifest when they are in contact with another body. This characteristic, as Henry has suggested, had a considerable influence for the development of experimentalism in the context of the early modern science. Second, in a vitalist explanation of nutrition we find the possibility of explaining physiological phenomena through some active powers of the objects which are produced for the nutritional process. But, if we compare the vitalistic positions to Descartes’ one, the most suggestive characteristic of the former explanation of nutrition is the rejection of reducing the transformation of food into nourishment to the mechanical properties of the bodies –size, shape, and motion. By contrast, vitalism makes possible to explain physiological phenomena as the result of certain qualities of the matter
According to van Helmont, chemical reactions, and not heat, are the causes of digestion. It implies a rejection of Galen’s elementary qualities, which explains the reasons why van Helmont, as Henry points out, ‘bitterly regretted his university training as a waste of time’ (2002: 48). By contrast, for van Helmont, digestion was the result of the acting of certain kind of acid in the stomach producing fermentation. Yet, though the process of nutrition begins with the fermentation of the food in the stomach, it does not end there, and similar processes are carried out in the different parts of the body when the nourishment get there. Thus, van Helmont argues that nutrition is a process of six different stages. As Clericuzio describes it: ‘van Helmont divided the process of digestion into six steps (sextuples digestion), each one requiring a specific ferment directing the chemical reactions occurring in different organs’ (2012: 332). Particularly interesting for our actual purposes are the second and fifth stages of the process because there we can perceive the influence of the spiritual explanation of physiological …show more content…
The problem of digestion and nutrition had a particularly important influence because the medical thinkers and physicians found in alchemy, iatrochemistry, and spirits, viable explanations to the unsolved problems of Galen’s medical theories. Though, it is difficult to subsume vitalism as a single movement during the Renaissance, we can find some elements which are regularly visible in a vitalist explanation of physiological phenomena. First of all, the possibility of explaining physiological processes as the result of some occult qualities of the bodies which are manifest when they are in contact with another body. This characteristic, as Henry has suggested, had a considerable influence for the development of experimentalism in the context of the early modern science. Second, in a vitalist explanation of nutrition we find the possibility of explaining physiological phenomena through some active powers of the objects which are produced for the nutritional process. But, if we compare the vitalistic positions to Descartes’ one, the most suggestive characteristic of the former explanation of nutrition is the rejection of reducing the transformation of food into nourishment to the mechanical properties of the bodies –size, shape, and motion. By contrast, vitalism makes possible to explain physiological phenomena as the result of certain qualities of the matter