Abstract
Until recently, examinations of the ‘mind-body problem’ in historical context paid only cursory attention to its specifically medical dimension, if at all. At best, some ‘folk physiology’ was entertained, usually to laugh at it (the pineal gland, animal spirits). Conversely, historians of neuroscience or of artificial intelligence (Jeannerod M, The brain machine. The development of neurophysiological thought, trans. D. Urion, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1985; Dupuy J-P, The mechanization of the mind: on the origins of cognitive science, trans. M.B. DeBevoise, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000) often present figures like La Mettrie as heroic early cases of ‘naturalization’, giving an experimental basis to materialism: their symmetrically inverse mistake is to take professions of medical authority too literally (although there are genuine cases where all of the above does coalesce – where ‘actors’ categories mysteriously transcend historiographic projections –, such as Hieronymus Gaub’s reflections on the ‘regimen of the mind’ in the mid-eighteenth century, or, more theoretically, Guillaume Lamy’s Epicurean-inflected Anatomical Discourses on the Soul, eighty years earlier). Contrary to the denial of the relevance of medicine in early modern philosophy, as regards issues such as the body-soul (then body-mind) relation among others, it seems patently difficult to separate medical theory, medically nourished philosophical speculation, and metaphysics. This is the case, whether in Descartes, Gaub, the ‘animist’ Georg-Ernest Stahl, or materialists such as Guillaume Lamy and La Mettrie: medicine, or rather ‘a certain idea of medicine’, is everywhere.
Here I focus on the motif of a radical medicine – a medical precursor of the Radical Enlightenment (Israel J, Radical enlightenment. Philosophy and the making of modernity, 1650–1750, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001; Israel J, Enlightenment contested. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006, Israel J, Enlightenment, radical enlightenment and the “medical revolution” of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In: Grell OP, Cunningham A (ed) Medicine and religion in enlightenment Europe. Ashgate, Aldershot, pp 5–28, 2007), symbolized negatively by the slogan, tres medici, duo athei, or ‘where there are three doctors, there are two atheists’, i.e. medicine as a basis for atheism. This theme runs through various works of medical or medico-theological propaganda: Thomas Browne’s 1643 De religio medici begins with Browne regretting rumors of doctors being atheists as the “general scandal of my Profession”; Germain de Bezançon’s 1677 Les médecins à la censure works hard at rebutting the saying, “Bon Physicien, mauvais chrétien.” But these are examples of the fear of a radical medicine – a medicine that denies the existence of an immortal soul, or even defends materialism and atheism. Are there positive statements of this doctrine? Indeed, attacks on it are much more common than statements identifying with it, like medical versions of natural theology in general.
In fact, just as there were theologically motivated medical works, there were also medically motivated works of radical or heretical theology, like William Coward’s Second Thoughts on the Human Soul (Coward W, Second thoughts on the human soul. R. Basset, London, 1702, building on Overton 1644), which engaged in polemics concerning the nature of the soul – mortal or immortal? (Thomson A, Bodies of thought: science, religion, and the soul in the early enlightenment. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008). Parallel to the mortalist trend, but flowing into a common genre of radical, medico-materialist texts (sometimes anonymous, such as L’Âme Matérielle, from the 1720s) are at least two other strands of radical medicine: a post-Cartesian focus on medicina mentis and the nature of the mind (Henricus Regius, Hieronymus Gaub, Antoine Le Camus), and an Epicurean medicine, in which mind and body are organismically united, with an additional hedonistic component, notably in Lamy, Mandeville and La Mettrie (Wright JP, Locke, Willis, and the seventeenth-century epicurean soul. In: Osler MJ (ed) Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and stoic themes in European thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 239–258, 1991; Wolfe CT, van Esveld M, The material soul: strategies for naturalising the soul in an early modern epicurean context. In: Kambaskovic D (ed) Conjunctions: body, soul and mind from Plato to the enlightenment. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 371–421, 2014). The focus on a medicine of the mind (Corneanu, (ms. 2013), The care of the whole man: medicine and theology in the late renaissance, 2013) is obviously connected to a ‘medicalization of the soul’: there was a body-soul problem in and for medicine, a sort of medicalized ‘pneumatology’. Radical medicine is located somewhere in between the early forms of ‘naturalization’ or ‘medicalization’ of the soul and the pose of scientific neutrality that is characteristic of early nineteenth-century medicine (as in Cabanis, Bichat or Bernard): it is a short-lived episode. I seek to reconstruct this intellectual figure, in which mortalist, post-Cartesian and Epicurean strands intersect and sometimes come together. I suggest that medically influenced materialism in the Radical Enlightenment (e.g. in the later French cases, La Mettrie, Ménuret and Diderot), is different from later, more experimentally focused and more quantitatively oriented forms of medical materialism, precisely because of its radical dimension. This radical medicine often insists on vitality, as opposed to “anatomie cadavérique”: it is vital and hedonistic, a medicine concerned with maintaining bodily pleasure.
With us there was a doctor of Physic …
Well read was he in Esculapius, and … Hippocrates,
Galen … Serapion, Rhazes, and Avicen, Averrhoes,
Gilbert, and Constantine, Bernard and Gatisden, and John Damascene.
… It’s no libel/To say he read but little in the Bible.
(Chaucer 1933, Prologue, l. 411–438)
medicus est physicus sensualis(Bezançon 1677, 335)
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
It is thanks to Olivier Bloch that we are familiar with the work of the physician Abraham Gaultier, a Protestant turned atheist, and author of an ‘epigenetic materialist’ treatise (Gaultier 1714/1993) that derives some of its ideas from Lamy and Harvey (his materialist reading of epigenesis is not unlike Diderot’s later articulation of epigenesis and Spinozism (Wolfe 2014), although ironically, Gaultier denounces Spinoza as well as Descartes and Malebranche as metaphysicians, even though the subtitle of his work includes the statement that “Life and Death are … modifications of one Substance”). Gaultier’s original work was almost entirely unknown, but large portions of it were excerpted in a clandestine manuscript entitled Parité de la vie et de la mort, which did circulate.
- 4.
On Lamy see Thomson 1992 and Anna Minerbi Belgrado’s extensive and extremely informative introduction to her edition of Lamy’s Discours anatomiques & Explication méchanique et physique des fonctions de l’âme sensitive (Lamy 1996), as well as the section on Lamy in Wolfe and van Esveld 2014. On Ménuret see Rey 2000a and Wolfe and Terada 2008.
- 5.
For the former view, see generally Bernier 1678, vol. V, book VI, ch. iii: “What the animal soul is.” Laurentius (Du Laurens) in his 1597, argues vehemently against Galen for having a ‘deterministic’ vision of the functioning of body-soul interaction. Bezançon’s sentiment is that we should not follow Galen in everything: “that he was nourished in the darkness of paganism, and consequently was not enlightened by the heavenly rays of faith, is his own personal misfortune” (Bezançon 1677, 330). For the latter view, see Corneanu (ms., 2013).
- 6.
I thank Brooke Holmes for this point, in conversation.
- 7.
Of course, one should not confuse the interpenetration of medicine with metaphysics (something of an auberge espagnole, where many tendencies coexisted and evolved: see Edwards 2012 on how anatomical material was present even in the “scholastic philosophical mainstream” [44]; he speaks of the relation between anatomical studies and the soul as like “cross-border traffic,” 46), with the more specific case of an atheist medicine, that is, a type of argument and/or rhetorical figure in which a certain idea of medicine was made to (a) play a role traditionally devolved to metaphysics or (b) have a deflationary impact on traditional metaphysics, notably as regards the soul (Iliffe 1995). But both of these (the general and the specific forms) run counter to assertions in Henry 1989 and Garber 1998 regarding the distance between medicine and metaphysics.
- 8.
Mothu 2010, 317–318, 319. I am indebted to Mothu’s piece for its portrayal of several different ‘atheist medicine’ figures. My analysis differs from his in that I add the question of a medicine of the mind and its relation to materialism (both of which can be seen as giving rise to a ‘positive’ version of what the polemical figure of the doctor as atheist sketched out ‘negatively’).
- 9.
Maria Conforti observes that most histories of medicine written between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries make no mention of the Christian religion, not even to gesture towards the relation between illness and original sin (Conforti 2007, 77). One can add that histories of medicine written in the past two centuries never mention the atheist motif, perhaps also because they were usually written by physicians who did not desire to highlight the more controversial aspects of their profession.
- 10.
Ironically, Browne’s project backfired in various ways, both in England and on the Continent, where his book was at times equated, sadly for its author, with skepticism or even atheism , and ended up on the Index. Some commentators, including even Pierre Bayle, joked that rather than ‘religio medici’, the religion of the physician, the book was more of a ‘medicus religionis’ or ‘médecin de la religion’, the work of a physician thinking himself above religion (Bayle 1740, IV, 646; Mothu 2010, 324, 330). On the ‘religio medici’ theme more generally see Cunningham and Grell eds. 1996).
- 11.
- 12.
White 1898, II, ch. vii, citing the bull of Pius V (Bullarium Romanum, ed. Gaude, Naples, 1882, VII, 430, 431); Nutton 2001, 32. Sometimes it was presented as a positive claim, e.g. ‘radicals’ like Vanini were said to claim happily that philosophers and physicians were generally atheists: in his influential attack on free-thinkers, the 1623 Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps, the Jesuit François Garasse took Vanini as a target for this reason : “the miserable Vanini, a charlatan by profession and … an atheist in religion, tried to show both by example and in his wicked doctrine, that philosophers and physicians are ordinarily atheists”; Garasse retorted that we know many “able physicians who are even better Catholics,” “wholeheartedly so” (Garasse 1623, III, § 9, 255–256). Among other notorious examples, Rabelais himself, something of a father figure for libertines, free-thinkers and other defenders of heterodoxy , was a practicing physician, including at the Hôtel-Dieu between 1532 and 1534. For more on these accusations of atheism specifically in the English context, see Kocher 1947.
- 13.
As was observed by several reviewers of this chapter, this story could also be told as a tale of post-Galenic medicine of the mind. I emphasize ‘post-Cartesian’ here because of the emergence of works specifically entitled Medicina mentis, La médecine de l’esprit, etc., in early modern Europe, which, however critically or eclectically, actively engaged with a Cartesian picture – of medicine, of an anthropology of the passions, of a mechanistic project in which health was also a paramount value.
- 14.
- 15.
There is of course earlier discussion (often based on Cicero) of the relation between animus and anima, where the former becomes interchangeable with mens and the latter with the notion of the organic soul (I thank an anonymous reviewer for this observation.) I simply mean that in texts of the period I am discussing, there is an increasing insistence that ‘soul’ just means ‘mind’, as Charles Bonnet often puts it.
- 16.
Gaub has in mind the passage from Part VI of Descartes ’ Discourse on Method where Descartes notes the interpenetration of mind and the organs of the body, so that medicine is the best way to render people wiser than they have hitherto been (AT VI, 62). In La Mettrie, this becomes: “medicine alone can change mind and behavior [les esprits et les mœurs] along with the body” (La Mettrie 1987, I, 67), and “the best philosophy is that of the doctors” (La Mettrie 1987, II, 36).
- 17.
Discours anatomiques, in Lamy 1996, 102, 105.
- 18.
Explication, in Lamy 1996, 142–143, 160–161.
- 19.
Its modern editor, Alain Niderst, considers various possible candidates for authorship, which have evolved since his first edition of the work in the 1970s.
- 20.
- 21.
La Mettrie has a satirical medical work entitled The Politics of Machiavelli’s Physician [La Mettrie 1746], which presents itself as the translation of a Chinese original, and in other related writings such as La Mettrie 1749–1750 he exploits at length the figure of the corrupt or deceitful physician as a ‘Machiavellian’; as early as 1588, the surgeon John Read associates atheist physicians with Machiavellians: in his “Complaint of the abuse of the noble Arte of Chirurgerie,” he deplores that some in his profession are “papists, nulli fidians, atheists temporizers, and some machiavells” (cit. Kocher 1947, 230).
- 22.
To be clear (and for more discussion see Corneanu, ms. 2013), treatises of the passions could be entirely non-medical, like Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, III and IV (Cicero 1927); or strongly medically oriented, like Juan Huarte’s Examen de ingenios para las sciencias (Huarte 1575/1989 – again a case of the influence of Galen’s text on body and soul ) but also late Renaissance humoral anthropologies such as Timothy Bright’s 1586 Treatise of Melancholie (see Henry 1989 and Wright 2000), or – somewhere in between, like Descartes ’ Passions de l’âme (1649). I thank Sorana Corneanu for her help and many fruitful discussions on these topics.
- 23.
On the idea of a ‘naturalisation of the mind’ in the early radical Enlightenment which is not quite an elimination of mental or animate properties in favour of the basic properties of matter, but rather a bracketing-off of ontological considerations in order to treat mental faculties through their empirical manifestations, see Hatfield 1995 (e.g. 188).
- 24.
Mothu 2010 cites a variety of texts which criticize physicians for relying on ‘secondary’ rather than ‘primary’ causes.
- 25.
I wish to thank Sorana Corneanu for her valuable input – both critical and constructive. I benefited additionally from comments from the anonymous reviewers, and the editors of the volume.
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Wolfe, C.T. (2016). Tres medici, duo athei? The Physician as Atheist and the Medicalization of the Soul. 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_15
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