Abstract
In this paper, I argue that G. W. Leibniz was a representative par excellence of a largely forgotten tradition, which I am calling ‘medical eudaimonism’, and which saw medicine as entirely integral to the project of philosophy to the extent that (i) it was the key to health and longevity, and thus to the realization of the good life; and (ii) it was conceived as including rules of diet, hygiene, and bodily comportment, and to this extent was seen as nothing less than the corporeal flip-side, so to speak, of ethics. I will argue, finally, that, as much recent scholarship attests, from an initial interest in the classical philosophical problem of the mind-body connection in early modern philosophy, one is invariably compelled to take up early modern theories of the passions (as the field in which this connection most aggressively demands recognition), and from here, in turn, scholars are willy-nilly compelled by the concerns of early modern philosophers themselves to take an interest in the history of medicine, and to acknowledge its central importance to the history of philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
Nietzsche 1967, 236.
- 2.
René Descartes , Oeuvres, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, Paris, Léopold Cerf (Descartes 1983), XI, 644 (hereafter ‘AT’). It is worth quoting this recipe in full here, if only because it has not been published in translation elsewhere. “Alvi egrestio difficillima post menses aliquot sic provocata. Fellis taurini recentis, butyri insulsi, hellebori nigri, extracti diacolocynthidis, diagridii & croci partes aequales, in unam massam redactae, & igni ad mellis consistentiam decoctae, italicae nucis testae inditae, umbilico impositae sunt. Ligataque fuit mox ne caderet, & binae testae, diebus singulis, potionibus intus assumtis, sic repleta impositae sunt. Primis diebus, nihil praeter fluctuationes & murmura a patiente sentiebantur; tertia die, cum immensis doloribus supervenit egerendi desiderium; at induratis excrementis non successit excretio, donec vituli abdomen recens, cum oleo antiquo ad ignem cribratum & calens, ventriculo induceretur, digitis que felle & butyro inunctis anus sollicitaretur.”
- 3.
Descartes 1985–91.
- 4.
AT IV, 329. “La conservation de la santé a esté de tout temps le principal but de mes études.”
- 5.
Aucante 2006.
- 6.
Jones 2006.
- 7.
- 8.
Leibniz 1996, 55.
- 9.
See Hippocrates 1745.
- 10.
Leibniz in Smith 2011, Appendix 4, 299–300.
- 11.
Leibniz in Smith 2011, Appendix 4, 300.
- 12.
See Robinet 1986.
- 13.
See Garber 2009.
- 14.
Nachtomy 2011, 61–80.
- 15.
Leibniz in Smith 2011 , Appendix 1.
- 16.
Leibniz 1768, vol. II, 110–119.
- 17.
Wallis 1700–1701, 769–773.
- 18.
Wallis 1700–1701, 770.
- 19.
Wallis 1700–1701, 771.
- 20.
Wallis 1700–1701, 771.
- 21.
Wallis 1700–1701, 771–72.
- 22.
Wallis 1700–1701, 772.
- 23.
Wallis 1700–1701, 772.
- 24.
Wallis 1700–1701, 772–73.
- 25.
Leibniz 1768, II 2, 171.
- 26.
I discuss this treatise at length in Smith 2012a, 377–401. Portions of that text overlap with the discussion of the De novo antidysenterico in the present section, though the argument here is entirely distinct.
- 27.
See Leibniz 1768, 113. “Cortex Peruvianus jam ante annos quadraginta quinque propemodum celebratus pene conciderat, donec per Talbotium restitutus dignitati plausum in aula invenit. Jam viginti, & amplius anni sunt, quod mire praedicari audivi herbam Paraguay a natali Provincia Paraguaria dictam, quae (rarum) ita emetica est, ut stomacho vis non fiat, magnaeque praeterea ob salutares effectus in India Hispanica famae, nec tamen, quod sciam, hactenus in nostras officinas recepta. Itaque etiam medicamenta ipsa sua fata pro captu hominum habent, ut saepe non minus restauratori, arque propalatori, quam inventori debeamus.”
- 28.
de la Condamine 1740, 226–243; 232–33.
- 29.
de la Condamine 1740, 81–82.
- 30.
Jacob Bontius cited in Cook 2007, 203.
- 31.
Leibniz 1768, II 2, 111.
- 32.
Leibniz 1768, II 2, 111.
- 33.
Leibniz 1873, 96.
- 34.
Leibniz 1873, 38.
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Smith, J.E.H. (2016). Early Modern Medical Eudaimonism. In: Distelzweig, P., Goldberg, B., Ragland, E. (eds) Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7353-9_14
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