Abstract
This chapter analyses the various readings and reactions that Santorio’s Medicina Statica (Venice, 1614) awoke in the learned circles of European physicians and philosophers for more than a century. If the majority of these readings displayed a positive attitude towards Santorio and his methods, others raised criticisms and condemnation, both for the lack of tabulated data in his work and because the implications of his methods legitimised the introduction of instruments as an essential mediator between the subjective self-perception of the body and the physiological reality of it.
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- 1.
Giuseppe Ongaro, “Introduzione” in Santorio Santorio, La medicina statica, edited by Giuseppe Ongaro (Florence: Giunti 2001), 44–45. For a list of Santorio’s editions in the period 1614–1790 see Elisabetta Stella Ettari and Marco Procopio, Santorio Santorio. La Vita e le Opere (Rome: Istituto Nazionale della Nutrizione, 1968), 70–73.
- 2.
Lucia Dacome, “Balancing Acts: Picturing Perspiration in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 43 (2012), 379. See also Ongaro, “Introduzione”, 50.
- 3.
See n. 24.
- 4.
Simone Mammola, La ragione e l’incertezza, Filosofia e medicina nella prima età moderna, (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2012), 267–269.
- 5.
Ippolito Obizzi, Staticomastix sive Staticae medicinae demolitio (Ferrara: V. Baldino), Oppositio XXV, 35.
- 6.
Ibid., Oppositio 59 [sic].
- 7.
Ibid., Oppositio 67 [sic], 68–69.
- 8.
In the Iatrastronomicon Obizzi addressed an Epistola to Santorio listing all the mistakes contained in Santorio’s Methodi vitandorum errorum … libri XV: an incorrect quote of Ptolemy’s works due to scarce astronomical knowledge and incompetence in translating from the original Latin sources, including a misinterpretation of Galen’s text and the incorrect use of the Aristotelian syllogism. See Obizzi, Iatrastronomicon varios tractatos medicos et astronomico (Vicenza: Giacomo Violati, 1618), treatise n. 9, Responsa ad singula capita disputationis eiusdem Bernardini Gaij de vesicantibus ad eundem Bernardinum scripta, especially Epistola to Santorio, 26.
- 9.
Obizzi, Staticomastix, 9: ‘Quomodo noveris, quidquid deperitum, additum esse? Cum nescias, quantum eorum, quae secundum naturam sunt, defluxerit, cum una his, quae prater naturam sunt, mista perspirent?’
- 10.
Ibid. Oppositio IX, 30.
- 11.
Ibid. Oppositio I, 8.
- 12.
Ibid. 26; Oppositio XVI, 34; Oppositio 64 [sic], 65: ‘multa dicit, nihil probat Sanctorius, o <Medicina> Statica’.
- 13.
Ibid., Oppositio V, 28.
- 14.
Ibid., Oppositio LXIX, 71.
- 15.
See Santorio Santori, Commentaria in primam Fen primi libri Canonis Avicennae, (Venice: G. Sarzina, 1625), col. 81: ‘... veluti dum protulit nostram staticam a staticis experimentis Cardinalis Cusani fuisse desumptam, a quibus, ut omnes videre possunt, nec verbulum desumptum est: numquam enim Cusanis aegit de ponderatione insensibilis perspirationis humani corporis, de qua sunt omnes nostri aphorismi’.
- 16.
Santorio Santori, Ars Sanctorii Sanctorii olim in Patauino Gymnasio medicina theoricam ordinarium primo loco profitentis de statica medicina et de responsione ad staticomasticem, (Venice: M. A. Brogiollo, 1634).
- 17.
The circulation of Cusa’s works seems to be very limited and still unclear, especially in Italy between the second half of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth century. It is highly probable that Santorio had never actually read Cusa’s works; see Ongaro, “Introduzione”, 42.
- 18.
See the recent Samuel G. Burton, Joshua Hollman and Eric M. Parker (eds.), Nicholas of Cusa and the Making of the Early Modern World, (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 2–4.
- 19.
On this see Tamara Albertini, “Mathematics and Astronomy”, in Christopher M. Bellitto, Thomas M. Ibicki and Gerald Christianson (eds.), Introducing Nicholas of Cusa a Guide to a Renaissance Man, (Mahwah: New Jersey, Paulist Press, 2004), 374–375.
- 20.
Santorio, Medicina statica (1634), cc. 69r–71v.
- 21.
Ibid., Aphorism IX, c. 70r.
- 22.
Ivi, Aph. X, c. 70v: ‘Corporis pondus mensura dignoscimus, non imaginatione...’.
- 23.
Ivi, Aph. XII, c. 70v.
- 24.
Leonardo di Capua, Parere divisato in otto ragionamenti ne ‘quali … narrandosi l’origine, e il progresso della medicina … l’incertezza della medesima si fa manifesta, (Naples: per A. Bulifon, 1681).
- 25.
Di Capua collected in his work many of the matters discussed during the meetings of the Academy of Investigators which he founded in 1650 in Naples along with Tommaso Cornelio. Di Capua’s book became the most relevant scientific testimony to the controversy between the traditional culture and the Academy, which was mainly fought within printed books.
- 26.
Mammola, La ragione, (2012), 324–330. See also Salvatore Serrapica, Per una teoria dell’incertezza tra filosofia e medicina: studio su Leonardo di Capua (1617–1695), (Naples: Liguori, 2003).
- 27.
Di Capua, Parere, 64–65.
- 28.
Letter by Santorio Santori to Senatore Settala (27 December 1625), National Archive of Milan, Autografi Medici, folder 218, c. 1r.
- 29.
See Mammola, La ragione, 328.
- 30.
See Dacome, “Balancing Acts”, 380.
- 31.
The Spectator, 29th March 1711. See the online copy https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12030/12030-h/SV1/Spectator1.html#section24.
- 32.
Marcello Boldrini, “Spectator contro Santorio”, Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali, 8 (1945), fasc. 2., March 1937, 203–206.
- 33.
Thomas Secker, Disputatio medica inauguralis de medica statica, (Leiden: Henricum Mulhovium, 1721). The thesis was never published in English. The work was not included by Beilby Porteus in his A Review of the Life and the Character of the Rev. Thomas Secker, (London, 1797). See John Morgan Guy, “Thomas Secker M.D.: archbishop and man-midwife” Journal of Medical Biography, 26/2 (2018), 102–110.
- 34.
See Ongaro, “Introduzione”, 45. Another student of Boerhaave Johannes de Gorter published De perspiratione insensibili Sanctoriana-Batava, (Leiden: J. van Der Aa, 1725). De Gorter proclaimed the usefulness of the perspiratio insensibilis in medical practice — De usu insensibilis perspirationis in medicina, chapter 1.— to facilitate the knowledge and treatment of the diseases. On this see Ruben E. Verwaal, “Disputing Santorio: Johannes de Gorter’s Neurological Theory of Insensible Perspiration” in the present volume.
- 35.
Robert G. Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker and the Church of England, (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer ltd, 2007), 40–42. See also Lucia Dacome “Resurrecting by Numbers in Eighteenth-Century England”, Past & Present, 193, 1 (2006), 73–110.
- 36.
Anita Guerrini, “Newtonianism, Medicine and Religion”, in Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England edited by Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1996), 294.
- 37.
John Morgan Guy, “De Medicina Statica. Archbishop Thomas Secker, a Forgotten English Iatromechanist”, Histoire des sciences médicales, 17 (Spec 2) (1982), 134–137. Guy stated correctly that Secker was not the first critic of Santorio but I am inclined to think that he could rightly be named as the first reviewer of criticisms about Santorio.
- 38.
John Quincy, Medicina Statica: Being the Aphorisms of Sanctorius, Translated into English with Large Explanations, (London: William Newton, 1712). See also Dacome, “Balancing Acts”, 383.
- 39.
Secker, Disputatio, 25.
- 40.
Ibid., 25.
- 41.
In France Denis Dodart, in England James Keill, in Scotland Francis Home, George Rye in Ireland. See Dacome, “Balancing Acts”, 384–385.
- 42.
Secker, Disputatio, 14.
- 43.
James Keill, Tentamina medico-physica... quibus accessit Medicina statica Britannica (London: G. Strahan & W. & J. Innys, 1718).
- 44.
Secker, Disputatio, 27.
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Zurlini, F. (2022). The Uncertainty of Medicine: Readings and Reactions to Santorio Between Tradition and Reformation (1615–1721). In: Barry, J., Bigotti, F. (eds) Santorio Santori and the Emergence of Quantified Medicine, 1614-1790. Palgrave Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79587-0_3
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