Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned Medicine: 62 (Ideas in Context, Series Number 62)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 11/8/2001
EAN 9780521806480, ISBN10: 0521806488
Hardcover, 430 pages, 23.4 x 15.7 x 3 cm
Language: English
How or what were doctors in the Renaissance trained to think, and how did they interpret the evidence at their disposal for making diagnoses and prognoses? This 2001 book addresses these questions in the broad context of the world of learning: its institutions, its means of conveying and disseminating information, and the relationship between university faculties. The uptake by doctors from the university arts course - the foundation for medical studies - is examined in detail, as are the theoretical and empirical bases for medical knowledge, including its concepts of nature, health, disease and normality. Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance ends with a detailed investigation of semiotic, which was one of the five parts of the discipline of medicine, in the context of the various versions of semiology available to scholars. From this survey, Maclean makes an interesting assessment of the relationship of Renaissance medicine to the new science of the seventeenth century.
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on the text and its modes of reference
Introduction
1. Learned medicine 1500–1630
2. The transmission of medical knowledge
3. The discipline of medicine
4. The arts course
grammar, logic and dialectics
5. The arts course
signs, induction, mathematics, experientia
6. Interpreting medical texts
7. The content of medical thought
8. The doctrine of signs
Postscript
Bibliography
Index of names and terms.