Testimonies: States of Mind and States of the Body in the Early Modern Period

by Gideon Manning

Overview

This book reconnects health and thought, as the two were treated together in the seventeenth century, and by reuniting them, it adds a significant dimension to our historical understanding. Indeed, there is hardly a single early modern figure who took a serious interest in one but not the other, with their attitudes toward body-mind interaction often revealed in acts of self-diagnosis and experimentation. The essays collected here specifically reveal the way experiment and especially self-experiment, combined with careful attention to the states of mind which accompany states of body, provide a new means of assessing attitudes to body-mind interactions just as they show the abiding interest and relevance of source material typically ignored by historians of science and historians of philosophy. In the surviving records of such experimenting on one’s own body, we can observe leading figures like Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, deliberately setting out to repeatpleasurable, or intellectually productive moods and states of mind, by applying the same medicine on successive occasions. In this way we can witness theories of the working of the human mind being developed by key members of an urban culture (London; interregnum Oxford) who based those theories in part on their own regular, long-term use of self-administered, mind-altering substances. It is hardly an overstatement to claim that there was a significant drug culture in the early modern period linked to self-experimentation, new medicines, and the new science. This is one of the many things this volume has to teach us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030393748
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Series:	Archimedes , #57
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	197
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gideon Manning is Research Associate Professor at Claremont Graduate University, having previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh and served on the faculties of the College of William and Mary and the California Institute of Technology. His recent publications include “Health in the Early Modern Philosophical Tradition” (2018), and “Descartes and Medicine” (2019), and he is one of the editors of Professors, Physicians, and Practices in the History of Medicine: Essays in Honor of Nancy Siraisi (2017). At present, he is engaged in a number of projects trying to productively bring together the history of medicine, science and philosophy.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Editor’s Introduction.- Chapter 2 Lisa Jardine: A Life in the Margins.- Chapter 3 Dosing the Ailing Subject: Reconnecting Early Modern Health and Thought.- Chapter 4 Francis Bacon’s Body and his Experiments on the Prolongation of Life.- Chapter 5 Material Thoughts: Robert Hooke’s Theory of Memory.- Chapter 6 Making Sense of Pain: Valentine Greatrakes, Henry Stubbe and Anne Conway.- Chapter 7 Animal Bodies and Human Minds: The Anatomy of the Brain and the Analogy of Nature.- Chapter 8 Lockean Self-Diagnosis.- Chapter 9 Joseph Glanvill on Imagination, Method and the Art of Thinking.- Chapter 10 Treating Yourself: Self-Diagnosis Amongst Natural Philosophers and Physicians and the Early Medical Case Study.

Editorial Reviews

Reviewer: Alain Touwaide, PhD (Ronin Institute)
Description: This is a high-profile collection of essays in memory of British historian Lisa Jardine (1944-2015) on the theme of voluntary mind alterations and their effect on the body.
Purpose: Fundamentally, this is a tribute to the memory of Lisa Jardine. These are the proceedings of a conference she organized at the California Institute of Technology. The idea of this conference was to reunite health and thought with a particular focus on the 17th century and the reports of self-experiments by notable scientists on modifying bodily condition through actions on the state of the mind. The goal was to capture the development of the working process of the human mind.
Audience: The very concept of the book, its high scholarly standard, and the status of the authors of the case studies that provide the starting point of the essays all contribute to the high profile of this book. It will be of interest to historians of the body, experimentation, England empiricism, drug analysis, and neuroscience. It is not a book for reading, but for study, research, and further developments—the kind of collection of essays for advanced students interested in identifying new topics for possible PhD theses.
Features: After an introductory chapter on Lisa Jardine, who was the source and the soul of this book by the historian of intellectual culture Anthony Grafton, eight chapters analyze the reports of self-experimentation with drugs and other means for generating conscious alterations by a group of 17th-century renowned and influential English scientists, such as Francis Bacon, Robert Hook, and John Locke, to mention some. In all chapters, the focus is on the observation of the interaction between body and mind and the formulation of theories on the way the brain functions based on these organized experiments. What the essays try to capture is the development of the making of theories on the interaction of body and brain.
Assessment: This is a high-profile and ambitious collection of essays that meets the expectations its objectives generate. We see the birth of what will become later the neurosciences in the making. It is extremely well documented (all essays rely on primary sources astutely interrogated, carefully read, and perfectly interpreted), and reaches convincing conclusions that illustrate not only the research on body and mind, but also on mind- and conscience-altering substances, and the foundation of the principles of experimental pharmacology that will develop much later.

Doody's Review Service

"It will be of interest to historians of the body, experimentation, England empiricism, drug analysis, and neuroscience. ... This is a high-profile and ambitious collection of essays that meets the expectations its objectives generate." (Alain Touwaide, Doody's Book Reviews, July 31, 2020)

From the Publisher