Throughout history there have been widespread views about the physiological differences between men and women. The following is an analysis and overview of the differentials observed between the second century and the twentieth.
In the second century Claudius Galenus, also known as Galen, a well-respected Greek physician, wrote extensively on medical albeit philosophical subjects. He believed men and women to be extremely similar, the only difference being women lacked the as he called it, vital heat, to force the reproductive organs to be external and visible. Even though his theory was that men and women’s bodies were physically equal other than the inversions of women’s organs, he never considered them equal. He viewed women’s bodies as inferior to men’s because of the retention, considering the male make up to be one of perfection. He was considered something of a medical authority and had a wide following from Greek and Roman medical writers.
Skip forward to sixteenth century France, author Michel de Montaigne’s story of pseudohermaphroditism concerning Marie / Germain is a prime example of how intersexed people were thought of as curiosities. The story says, Marie while running after her swine in a field, jumped over a ditch causing her internal heat to come out, thus anatomically now having a penis. She was renamed Germain and was one of many subjects in stories of the oddity of intersexed people found in Western Europe during that time. At that point in medical history it seemed an impossibility for a woman to become a man considering women were viewed as inferior and imperfect. Gaspard Bauhin, a Swiss botanist, explained that this oddity must have happened due to nature always trying to reach a state of perfection.
Due to the scientific revolution many new ideas concerning human anatomy completely discarded the popular doctrines of Ancient Greece and the Middle Ages. This time in history paved the way for beginnings of modern science. Many new findings and ideas came about due to the dissection of human bodies, instead of animal bodies, previously used in scientific observation. The scientific findings due to this change led to first hand observations contradicting Claudius Galenus’ theories. Andreas Vesalius, a surgeon from Brussels, compiled the most complete description of the human body to date, in 1543. De humani corporis fabrica (On The Fabric of the Human Body), was considered a masterpiece. His findings directly challenged the theories of Galen, which had been so well respected. History shows that Vesalius was just one of the many contemporaries moving forward and away from Galen’s findings, laying the groundwork for the study of modern anatomy.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries anatomical study began to flourish. The newfound availability of the printing press gave great minds the chance to exchange ideas on such subjects. European intellectuals and philosophers were coming to the conclusion that there was a separation between the mind and the body. The findings brought a change to the idea of what differentiates a woman from a man. No longer was it considered a lack of internal heat, but a biological difference. Not only did these findings show differences between men and women but differences that far surpassed just an internalization of the male reproductive system. Jacques Moreau de la Sarthe, an anthropologist, went as far as to say that not only were men and women different biologically, but were different in every conceivable respect, physically and morally. Thus, coming out of the eighteenth century, the idea of male perfection and vital heat gave way to the studies of biological differences.
With the nineteenth century came the theory of evolution. Charles Darwin, an English naturalist, believed women were inferiorly developed. He said feminine qualities such as compassion, sympathy, and the want to nurture belonged to an inferior stage of human development. Darwin believed that masculine qualities such as reason, aggression, and intellect proved men superior, and further evolved. He is famous for observing that “The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain - whether requiring thought, reason or imagination or merely the use of the senses and hands.” . Biological differences noted and aside at this point, it was still widely believed that women, no matter how different, were still inferior to men.
(Insert findings about the 20th Century and the changes in gender roles due to WWI and WWII here )
To this day, sexual dimorphism, the study of the differences between genders in the same species, is controversial. Depending on your location, personal belief system, and amount of regard for the scientific community women may or may not still be regarded as inferior to men.
Monday, November 30, 2009
CHAPTER 23 THE BEGINNING OF THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
Site maintained by Serge Noiret,as part of the WWW-VL History Central Catalogue at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy.
Original author and creator of the Carrie - A Full-Text Electronic Library, Lynn H. Nelson, Emeritus Professor of History, Kansas Unversity.
Carrie has been in operation since May of 1993 having begun as a Lynx text browser site: Carrie was the first World Wide Web full-text online history library..
(URI: [http://vlib.iue.it/carrie/index.html], last updated, 22nd of September 2009).
http://vlib.iue.it/carrie/texts/carrie_books/gilbert/23.html
CHAPTER 23
THE BEGINNING OF THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
The expression "the scientific revolution," a fairly recent term, is generally employed to describe the great outburst in activity in the investigation of physical nature that took place in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. At the beginning came the important books of Copernicus in astronomy and Vesalius in anatomy, both published in 1543. In 1687 the appearance of Newton's Principia provided a sort of climax for previous achievements in astronomy and physics and became the basis for future developments in those fields. Although there had been much work done in antiquity and in the Middle Ages to prepare the way for these achievements, the quality and impact of scientific discovery in Europe in this period exceeds anything ever done in any part of the world. Consequently, modern European and western civilization alone can, in fact, be called a scientific civilization. That is to say, in no other time or place outside of the modern western world has natural science had so profound and pervasive an impact on the way people live and think. We can even divide the history of western civilization into a prescientific and a scientific phase. If we accept this system of periodization, then the scientific revolution marks the point at which the change took place.
The effects of modern science have manifested themselves in various ways. In an obvious sense, the results of scientific knowledge applied in the form of technology are everywhere evident today. Over the years they have revolutionized communication and transportation and increased beyond calculation the power and wealth available to society and those who control and experience its benefits. In the present-day forms of atomic energy and computers, applied science promises or threatens further changes, which may be as far beyond our comprehension as the airplane and television would have been to the contemporaries of Luther, Erasmus, and Elizabeth I.
But these amazing developments do not encompass all the effects of science on the modern consciousness. More subtle, but probably no less important, has been the formation of a particular view of the nature of reality. We look at the world and our place in it in a different way than was possible in the prescientific period. This world view has superseded the one described in this book. It is no doubt more "correct" than the older one; that is, it can be shown to correspond more closely with observable and verifiable facts. For example, it is no longer possible to maintain that the sun revolves about a motionless earth, or that there are four terrestrial elements: earth, air, fire, and water.
On the other hand, two words of caution may be ventured here. First of all, the so-called scientific view of the nature of things is not a complete view. It can account for only those aspects of nature that are accessible to scientific methods of observation and explanation. It is of course possible and many have drawn this conclusion to maintain that nothing is "real" or "true" except what is scientifically verifiable, and that whatever else we seem to see, know, or experience is illusory or imaginary. A more balanced outlook might be that not all truths are "scientific" truths, in the usual sense, and that there are many roads to truth. In the words of Blaise Pascal (1623 62), who among other things made distinguished contributions to science, "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know."
In the second place, the so-called scientific view of things, widely accepted by today's lay public, may not be truly scientific after all. It may to some extent rest on unproved and unprovable assumptions, like the world view that it superseded. For this, some of the scientists themselves must share part of the responsibility. As E. A. Burtt, author of The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, has pointed out, these scientists were often better scientists than philosophers, but their scientific prestige gave their philosophical views an undeserved authority. These views have affected the course of modern thought, but they may also in the process have misled it somewhat. This chapter will endeavor to explain to some extent how this happened.
Modern science has tended to ask of nature the question how, where the scholars of the Middle Ages asked why. For medieval thinkers it was important to know the "final cause" of a thing, that is, the purpose for which it exists; for modern science, attention has been shifted to an attempt to observe and describe its behavior, and to seek not final causes but rather physical causes. Francis Bacon distinguished the two kinds of causes in his Advancement of Learning (Second Book, VII, 7) by declaring that both causes are true, but one declares an intention, the other a consequence. Medieval philosophers were more interested in intentions; modern scientists are interested in consequences.
In modern science, accordingly, there has been an insistence on exact observation. No explanation of a fact or event in nature has been acceptable unless it has taken into account all of the observed data. The explanation that has accounted most simply for all the observed facts has been accepted as true. Conceivably, some other type of explanation may be better from some points of view; in modern times, only the scientific type has been acceptable. "For a scientific type of explanation to be satisfying, for it to convince us with a sense of its necessary truth, we must be in the condition of needing and desiring that type of explanation and no other."19
This explanation has tended to be mathematical. Some of the great scientists of the sixteenth century looked to mathematics as the key to the secrets of nature. This meant that nature came to be interpreted in terms of quantities rather than qualities. What lay outside the field in which mathematics can operate came to seem, (in a word that was widely used) "secondary," irrelevant, even unreal. Thus we can see that the scientific revolution had important metaphysical implications that is, it came to influence man's conception of the nature and constitution of basic reality.
ASTRONOMY: COPERNICUS, TYCHO BRAHE, KEPLER
Among the first and most spectacular fruits of the new science was the gradual displacement of the geocentric world picture by the discoveries of a number of great astronomers. The basic outlines of this picture have already been referred to. It may be added that the known planets were Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, to which the sun and moon were added because they were both thought to revolve around the earth. All these planets moved around the earth once every twenty-four hours, and described an annual motion through the heavens, each then returning to its original place. Beyond the planets lay the stars, which because of their great distance from the earth, were not observed to make an annual motion, but only to circle the earth daily. They were, therefore, called the fixed stars.
These planetary motions were circular, as we have already observed. Each type of being had the kind of motion best suited to it. Thus, of the four earthly elements, fire and air tended to rise, while water and earth naturally fell. Each one was seeking its proper place in the order of the universe. The belief that there were several types of natural motion was an obstacle to scientific progress.
By the time of Copernicus (1473-1543), the prevailing conception of the nature of the universe had become a complex one. It had been clear from ancient times that the motions observable in the heavens could not be satisfactorily explained by the theory of the planets revolving around the earth in simple circular orbits. At some times the planets appeared to be closer to the earth than at others; they seemed to move at varying rates of speed, and even from time to time to be moving in a direction opposite to their normal one (retrograde motion). To meet these difficulties, the devices of the excentric and epicycle were called upon. The excentric meant that the center of a planet's orbit was located at some distance from the earth. Thus, although the planet still revolved around the earth, it was closer at some times than others and appeared to be moving faster.
The epicycle was a circle which the planet, in its motion, described around the larger circle which in turn went around the earth. Thus the planet had two circular motions. The larger one, which went around the earth, was called the deferent. The smaller epicycle, like the excentric circle, helped to explain apparent planetary variations in speed and distance from the earth, as well as retrograde motion.
It was partly the complicated character of the received theory that made Copernicus dissatisfied with it. Furthermore, while studying in Italy, he became acquainted with Domenico Maria Novara (1454 1504), a distinguished Italian astronomer who rejected the Ptolemaic system. Copernicus also came under the influence of humanism and began the study of Greek while he was in Italy. He read the works of those ancient Greek astronomers who believed that the earth, not the sun, was in motion. He also came in contact with Platonic-Pythagorean thought, which conceived of the universe as basically mathematical and constituting a simple and harmonious system.
On his return to Poland, where he had been born and where he took up his career as a priest, Copernicus spent much time in astronomical study and observation. Working with the hypothesis that it is the earth that is actually in motion, he was able to introduce some simplifications into the scheme of the heavens. Since he retained the belief in circular orbits for the planets, however, it was necessary for him to retain some of the old complicating factors, such as epicycles. Throughout his life he worked on an account of his planetary system, and in 1543, the year of his death, he consented to its publication. It was given the title (Copernicus had not named it) of Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. It was written in Latin and is often referred to simply as the De revolutionibus.
Copernicus is not notable for the quantity and accuracy of his astronomical observations; in fact, all his data could have been fitted into the geocentric system. He proposed that the earth is one of the planets revolving around the sun, because this theory provided a simpler and more symmetrical mathematical way of explaining the observed facts. This criterion came to be accepted as the test of scientific theory, and had important consequences.
The theory of Copernicus did not win immediate and universal acceptance even among the learned. The greatest astronomer in the years following the publication of Copernicus's book was the Dane Tycho Brahe (1546 1601), who rejected the heliocentric system for a number of reasons. He thought the earth was too heavy to move and that the Copernican scheme of the heavens contradicted the Bible. His own theory was that the five planets revolved around the sun, with the sun and moon revolving about the earth.
Nevertheless, the work of Tycho Brahe helped to establish the Copernican theory. Unlike Copernicus, he was a great astronomical observer and compiled a vast amount of information about the heavens, including a catalog of 777 stars. His explanation of two phenomena helped to undermine the old system. One of these was the appearance of a new star in 1572. According to the accepted views, no change could take place in the region of the stars, where all was perfect and immutable. Tycho was among those who showed that the new star was a star indeed, and that changes must take place in the stellar regions. He also did work on comets showing that they were solid bodies moving in fixed courses through planetary space. This contradicted the older theory, which held that each planet is encased in a solid and impenetrable sphere.
When Tycho died in 1601, he left his observations to Johannes Kepler, a young astronomer who had worked with him in his last years at the court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. Of all the men alive at the time, Kepler was the one best qualified to use these observations for further advances in astronomy. Kepler (1571 1630) was a victim of the religious bigotry of the age. He was a German Lutheran whose unorthodox religious views prevented him from becoming a Lutheran clergyman or a professor at the Protestant University of T�bingen. Add to this that he suffered from Catholic intolerance while living in imperial territory, that his mother was accused of witchcraft, that he had constant financial difficulties, and that his work was not appreciated by his contemporaries, with the exception of Galileo.
Kepler became an adherent of the Copernican system while still a young man. His attitude toward it was not one of cold scientific detachment, but was almost religious. He was struck by its beauty and was especially attracted by the central position of the sun; in fact, Kepler was almost a sun worshipper. Thus impressed by the mathematical symmetry disclosed by the heliocentric universe, he devoted himself with passionate enthusiasm to the discovery of the many other mathematical harmonies that he was sure were there. He was given to all sorts of speculations in this connection, including some that were of a poetic, religious, and musical nature. Many of the harmonies that he found, or thought he found, were scientifically useless. Among them, however, were his three laws of planetary motion, which were of great value to astronomy.
Kepler's first law is that the planets, in their revolutions about the sun, describe ellipses rather than circles (although the planetary orbits are close to circular in form). The second law states that the radius vector drawn from the sun to a planet describes equal areas in equal periods of time. This was a mathematical description of the fact that a planet's speed increases as it approaches the sun and decreases as it gets farther from it. This was later to be important to Newton in working out his law of universal gravitation. The third law, which was especially inspiring to Kepler, is that the squares of the periodic times of the planets are proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from the sun. With this law, Kepler established a mathematical relationship, which he had long sought, between a planet's distance from the sun and the time of its revolution, and thus, as he thought, of the underlying harmony of the universe.
Among the qualities that contributed to Kepler's greatness and made him one of the founders of modern science were his insistence on exact observation and his refusal to accept any conclusion that did not square with all the observed data. He worked for several years on the motions of Mars and finally, assuming circular orbits, produced a description that came very close to the observations he had received from Brahe. Nevertheless, it did not coincide precisely with these observations, so Kepler scrapped his previous work and started over. It was in this investigation that he came to see that the path followed by a planet must be an ellipse. Previous astronomers, including Copernicus, had not insisted on such complete accuracy.
Kepler's discoveries gave support to the Copernican theory, and his thought and outlook mark a further step in the mathematical interpretation of nature. Kepler, like Copernicus, was affected by Pythagorean thought, which was enjoying a revival. For him, the real world is a mathematical harmony, and the real characteristics of things are mathematical, quantitative. Real knowledge must, therefore, be mathematical knowledge.
And so the universe came to be increasingly seen as a vast machine operating according to mathematical laws. These laws, and the aspects of nature that could be formulated in terms of these laws, were the truth. Whatever else seems to exist, but cannot be expressed in terms of mathematical laws, cannot claim to possess objective existence. To quote Galileo: "...tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and...they reside only in the consciousness."20
The continuing success of great scientists in discovering laws of nature helped to give greater prestige and wider currency to these ideas. The work of Galileo and Newton helped to make it clear that there were not different kinds of motion for different kinds of beings, but that one set of laws governed both celestial and terrestrial motion. And so the vast universe came more and more to be seen and felt as a collection of physical bodies moving through space according to immutable mathematical laws.
As this process continued, men's conceptions of divinity changed. None of the early scientists questioned the existence or providence of a personal God. More and more, however, the Almighty was cast in the role of the author of mathematical law or as a sort of celestial mechanic. He had created the machine, which could then be counted on to operate by itself. However, as long as all natural phenomena could not be explained by any known laws, there appeared to be irregularities in the mechanism, and God was needed to make the necessary adjustments. With the progress of scientific knowledge, the irregularities tended to disappear, as they were seen to be explainable in terms of newly discovered laws and, therefore, no longer irregular at all.
In the light of all these facts, there would eventually come a time when some of the more daring thinkers no longer saw the necessity of postulating the presence of a deity to explain the workings of the universe. God was rejected, and a universe that consisted of matter in motion was accepted as self-explanatory. These developments took centuries to unfold, and were far in the future from the period with which we are concerned.
As has been pointed out, the Copernican theory had a difficult time gaining acceptance. It met with either indifference or opposition. Luther opposed it. The Catholic church at first paid little attention to it. In England, in 1551, there appeared a book by Robert Recorde, The Castle of Knowledge, which expounded the Copernican system, but other Englishmen were opposed to it. It was not until the next century, when Galileo made observations with his telescope that tended to confirm the new system, that it made much impact on the imagination by Englishmen. In Spain, interestingly enough, the atmosphere was more hospitable to Copernican ideas than in other countries; from 1561, students at the University of Salamanca could be taught the heliocentric system if they wished.
In 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy in Rome. One of his numerous offenses was that he taught a philosophy inspired by the Copernican system, a philosophy that involved the idea of an infinite universe. In 1633 the great Galileo was interrogated by the Holy Office for his advocacy of the Copernican system, and forced under threat of torture to abjure it. By the end of the eighteenth century, the system had been widely accepted, though the works of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo remained on the official Roman Index of Prohibited Books until the nineteenth century.
ANATOMY: VESALIUS
In the Renaissance, as we have seen, art and science were not sharply distinguished as they are today. Some of the chief problems faced and solved by artists were what we would refer to as scientific problems, and the artists had scientific interests. This can be most clearly seen in artists like Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci who wrote on scientific subjects, but it is also true of artists in general. The problems of perspective and anatomy are the most obvious examples of scientific problems faced by the artists.
In order to represent the human body accurately, artists made careful anatomical studies, sometimes by means of the dissection of corpses. In the process, they were responsible for important scientific discoveries. Leonardo was the first to make accurate drawings of the human embryo. Professor Erwin Panofsky refers to Leonardo as "the founder of anatomy as a science." The mastery of perspective has an importance in the history of anatomy, because it made possible the production of accurate drawings indispensable to the progress of anatomical study. The invention of printing was also important in this connection, providing for the reproduction in large quantities of the accurate drawings that were becoming available.
Another service performed by printing was the production and widespread distribution of the correct texts of classical authorities that humanistic scholars were preparing. These texts were not an unmixed blessing, however; while on the one hand they made it possible to know more accurately than before what a Greek or Roman author had said, they also helped to perpetuate his errors.
In the fields of anatomy, physiology, and medicine, the greatest authorities were Aristotle and, above all, Galen (c.129 c.200). In spite of his undisputed greatness, some of Galen's ideas were erroneous and led students astray for centuries. He had never had the opportunity to dissect a human body, and, therefore drew conclusions about human anatomy from animals available to him. He was also too much affected by the idea of final cause or purpose, which came chiefly from Aristotle. In the case of Galen, this preoccupation meant that his research was directed toward finding the purpose of each part of the body and showing how well it was adapted to this purpose.
The uncritical acceptance of Galen's authority hindered anatomical advances. Yet the subject was not studied from a purely theoretical standpoint. In the medical faculties of universities, especially in northern Italy, bodies were dissected for students' instruction, and as early as the second decade of the fourteenth century, a work on anatomy was written based on human dissection. Yet even those who performed or witnessed dissections were under Galen's influence.
There were signs of a more empirical attitude and a willingness to challenge ancient authority. Giovanni Manardo of the University of Ferrara insisted that the authority of reason and truth must be preferred to that of any man, alive or dead. Yet even those who had empirical evidence to guide them still regarded Galen with reverence. This was true of the man who dared to criticize Galen's errors and who did more than any other person to establish the science of anatomy, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (1514 64).
Vesalius came from a medical family; his father was personal apothecary to the emperor Charles V. Vesalius himself, after study in Louvain and Paris, went to Padua, where he received the doctorate in 1537 and became professor of anatomy and surgery before his twenty-third birthday. He was thoroughly trained in the tradition of Galen, whose works he later published.
Early in his career at Padua, he began work on his masterpiece, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), which was published in 1543, the same year as the De revolutionibus of Copernicus. It was not until he had become fairly well advanced in his work on this book that he was forced to realize that Galen's ideas would have to be opposed in many ways. The De Fabrica is a complete description of the human body, illustrated by woodcuts prepared under Versalius's direction and sometimes even better than the text. No other work on the subject had ever been so full and accurate. There are errors, based sometimes on inadequate observation, sometimes on a reluctance to disagree with Galen. It has been said that he followed Galen's errors much more often than he corrected them.
Vesalius was not alone in his aims and methods. Contemporaries were moving in the same direction, and some preceded him in the qualities that characterize his work: a willingness to contradict Galen on the basis of firsthand observation; the practice of dissection as a means of acquiring such observation; and the use of accurate illustrations to complement their texts. His book was outstanding; it was more complete and thorough than the others. It established, better than any other work, the proper method for the study of anatomy; it gave future researchers the tools to go further, and it provided the techniques to correct its errors. Modern anatomy had begun its career.
CONCLUSION
The men and movements discussed briefly in this chapter represent only a fraction of the scientific progress of the period, which sees the birth of our modern scientific civilization. It is instructive to draw parallels to the work of Copernicus and Vesalius, different as they are in many respects. Both men were dependent to some extent on the work and ideas of contemporaries and predecessors. Both worked in a climate of thought and feeling that was ready for their contributions. They were not isolated phenomena, bright stars flashing across a night of darkness. The way was prepared for them; even so, they did not entirely abandon older and erroneous patterns of thought.
This is not to minimize their contributions or the contributions of other workers at the time. The element of individual achievement of genius cannot be discounted. As in the case of the religious revolution started by Luther, we must be careful about the use of the word "inevitable." Genius is a difficult term to define or understand; but it exists, and it is not inevitable. The time must be ready for the great man, but he can do things in his time that other men cannot.
The scientific revolution, ushering in the modern scientific age, has profoundly influenced patterns of thought. By making possible ever increasing control of physical forces, it has helped to instill a confidence that people can master nature for their own purposes. By providing rational explanations for phenomena previously unexplained, the scientific revolution has helped to overcome superstitious fear of mysterious supernatural and occult forces. From this point of view, the present day interest in magic and various forms of the occult is a long step backwards. The scientific revolution was an important factor in promoting the trust in reason as the most reliable guide for human affairs. To some extent, this exaltation of science and reason has led to a downgrading of the claims of sentiment, emotion, art, music, and religion. Intentionally or not, the rise of a more scientific consciousness is partly responsible for the secularization of the modern world.
"The Beginning of the Scientific Revolution." The Beginning of the Scientific Revolution. Ed. Serge Noiret. CARRIE, 10 May 2006. Web. 28 Nov. 2009..
Original author and creator of the Carrie - A Full-Text Electronic Library, Lynn H. Nelson, Emeritus Professor of History, Kansas Unversity.
Carrie has been in operation since May of 1993 having begun as a Lynx text browser site: Carrie was the first World Wide Web full-text online history library..
(URI: [http://vlib.iue.it/carrie/index.html], last updated, 22nd of September 2009).
http://vlib.iue.it/carrie/texts/carrie_books/gilbert/23.html
CHAPTER 23
THE BEGINNING OF THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
The expression "the scientific revolution," a fairly recent term, is generally employed to describe the great outburst in activity in the investigation of physical nature that took place in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. At the beginning came the important books of Copernicus in astronomy and Vesalius in anatomy, both published in 1543. In 1687 the appearance of Newton's Principia provided a sort of climax for previous achievements in astronomy and physics and became the basis for future developments in those fields. Although there had been much work done in antiquity and in the Middle Ages to prepare the way for these achievements, the quality and impact of scientific discovery in Europe in this period exceeds anything ever done in any part of the world. Consequently, modern European and western civilization alone can, in fact, be called a scientific civilization. That is to say, in no other time or place outside of the modern western world has natural science had so profound and pervasive an impact on the way people live and think. We can even divide the history of western civilization into a prescientific and a scientific phase. If we accept this system of periodization, then the scientific revolution marks the point at which the change took place.
The effects of modern science have manifested themselves in various ways. In an obvious sense, the results of scientific knowledge applied in the form of technology are everywhere evident today. Over the years they have revolutionized communication and transportation and increased beyond calculation the power and wealth available to society and those who control and experience its benefits. In the present-day forms of atomic energy and computers, applied science promises or threatens further changes, which may be as far beyond our comprehension as the airplane and television would have been to the contemporaries of Luther, Erasmus, and Elizabeth I.
But these amazing developments do not encompass all the effects of science on the modern consciousness. More subtle, but probably no less important, has been the formation of a particular view of the nature of reality. We look at the world and our place in it in a different way than was possible in the prescientific period. This world view has superseded the one described in this book. It is no doubt more "correct" than the older one; that is, it can be shown to correspond more closely with observable and verifiable facts. For example, it is no longer possible to maintain that the sun revolves about a motionless earth, or that there are four terrestrial elements: earth, air, fire, and water.
On the other hand, two words of caution may be ventured here. First of all, the so-called scientific view of the nature of things is not a complete view. It can account for only those aspects of nature that are accessible to scientific methods of observation and explanation. It is of course possible and many have drawn this conclusion to maintain that nothing is "real" or "true" except what is scientifically verifiable, and that whatever else we seem to see, know, or experience is illusory or imaginary. A more balanced outlook might be that not all truths are "scientific" truths, in the usual sense, and that there are many roads to truth. In the words of Blaise Pascal (1623 62), who among other things made distinguished contributions to science, "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know."
In the second place, the so-called scientific view of things, widely accepted by today's lay public, may not be truly scientific after all. It may to some extent rest on unproved and unprovable assumptions, like the world view that it superseded. For this, some of the scientists themselves must share part of the responsibility. As E. A. Burtt, author of The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, has pointed out, these scientists were often better scientists than philosophers, but their scientific prestige gave their philosophical views an undeserved authority. These views have affected the course of modern thought, but they may also in the process have misled it somewhat. This chapter will endeavor to explain to some extent how this happened.
Modern science has tended to ask of nature the question how, where the scholars of the Middle Ages asked why. For medieval thinkers it was important to know the "final cause" of a thing, that is, the purpose for which it exists; for modern science, attention has been shifted to an attempt to observe and describe its behavior, and to seek not final causes but rather physical causes. Francis Bacon distinguished the two kinds of causes in his Advancement of Learning (Second Book, VII, 7) by declaring that both causes are true, but one declares an intention, the other a consequence. Medieval philosophers were more interested in intentions; modern scientists are interested in consequences.
In modern science, accordingly, there has been an insistence on exact observation. No explanation of a fact or event in nature has been acceptable unless it has taken into account all of the observed data. The explanation that has accounted most simply for all the observed facts has been accepted as true. Conceivably, some other type of explanation may be better from some points of view; in modern times, only the scientific type has been acceptable. "For a scientific type of explanation to be satisfying, for it to convince us with a sense of its necessary truth, we must be in the condition of needing and desiring that type of explanation and no other."19
This explanation has tended to be mathematical. Some of the great scientists of the sixteenth century looked to mathematics as the key to the secrets of nature. This meant that nature came to be interpreted in terms of quantities rather than qualities. What lay outside the field in which mathematics can operate came to seem, (in a word that was widely used) "secondary," irrelevant, even unreal. Thus we can see that the scientific revolution had important metaphysical implications that is, it came to influence man's conception of the nature and constitution of basic reality.
ASTRONOMY: COPERNICUS, TYCHO BRAHE, KEPLER
Among the first and most spectacular fruits of the new science was the gradual displacement of the geocentric world picture by the discoveries of a number of great astronomers. The basic outlines of this picture have already been referred to. It may be added that the known planets were Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, to which the sun and moon were added because they were both thought to revolve around the earth. All these planets moved around the earth once every twenty-four hours, and described an annual motion through the heavens, each then returning to its original place. Beyond the planets lay the stars, which because of their great distance from the earth, were not observed to make an annual motion, but only to circle the earth daily. They were, therefore, called the fixed stars.
These planetary motions were circular, as we have already observed. Each type of being had the kind of motion best suited to it. Thus, of the four earthly elements, fire and air tended to rise, while water and earth naturally fell. Each one was seeking its proper place in the order of the universe. The belief that there were several types of natural motion was an obstacle to scientific progress.
By the time of Copernicus (1473-1543), the prevailing conception of the nature of the universe had become a complex one. It had been clear from ancient times that the motions observable in the heavens could not be satisfactorily explained by the theory of the planets revolving around the earth in simple circular orbits. At some times the planets appeared to be closer to the earth than at others; they seemed to move at varying rates of speed, and even from time to time to be moving in a direction opposite to their normal one (retrograde motion). To meet these difficulties, the devices of the excentric and epicycle were called upon. The excentric meant that the center of a planet's orbit was located at some distance from the earth. Thus, although the planet still revolved around the earth, it was closer at some times than others and appeared to be moving faster.
The epicycle was a circle which the planet, in its motion, described around the larger circle which in turn went around the earth. Thus the planet had two circular motions. The larger one, which went around the earth, was called the deferent. The smaller epicycle, like the excentric circle, helped to explain apparent planetary variations in speed and distance from the earth, as well as retrograde motion.
It was partly the complicated character of the received theory that made Copernicus dissatisfied with it. Furthermore, while studying in Italy, he became acquainted with Domenico Maria Novara (1454 1504), a distinguished Italian astronomer who rejected the Ptolemaic system. Copernicus also came under the influence of humanism and began the study of Greek while he was in Italy. He read the works of those ancient Greek astronomers who believed that the earth, not the sun, was in motion. He also came in contact with Platonic-Pythagorean thought, which conceived of the universe as basically mathematical and constituting a simple and harmonious system.
On his return to Poland, where he had been born and where he took up his career as a priest, Copernicus spent much time in astronomical study and observation. Working with the hypothesis that it is the earth that is actually in motion, he was able to introduce some simplifications into the scheme of the heavens. Since he retained the belief in circular orbits for the planets, however, it was necessary for him to retain some of the old complicating factors, such as epicycles. Throughout his life he worked on an account of his planetary system, and in 1543, the year of his death, he consented to its publication. It was given the title (Copernicus had not named it) of Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. It was written in Latin and is often referred to simply as the De revolutionibus.
Copernicus is not notable for the quantity and accuracy of his astronomical observations; in fact, all his data could have been fitted into the geocentric system. He proposed that the earth is one of the planets revolving around the sun, because this theory provided a simpler and more symmetrical mathematical way of explaining the observed facts. This criterion came to be accepted as the test of scientific theory, and had important consequences.
The theory of Copernicus did not win immediate and universal acceptance even among the learned. The greatest astronomer in the years following the publication of Copernicus's book was the Dane Tycho Brahe (1546 1601), who rejected the heliocentric system for a number of reasons. He thought the earth was too heavy to move and that the Copernican scheme of the heavens contradicted the Bible. His own theory was that the five planets revolved around the sun, with the sun and moon revolving about the earth.
Nevertheless, the work of Tycho Brahe helped to establish the Copernican theory. Unlike Copernicus, he was a great astronomical observer and compiled a vast amount of information about the heavens, including a catalog of 777 stars. His explanation of two phenomena helped to undermine the old system. One of these was the appearance of a new star in 1572. According to the accepted views, no change could take place in the region of the stars, where all was perfect and immutable. Tycho was among those who showed that the new star was a star indeed, and that changes must take place in the stellar regions. He also did work on comets showing that they were solid bodies moving in fixed courses through planetary space. This contradicted the older theory, which held that each planet is encased in a solid and impenetrable sphere.
When Tycho died in 1601, he left his observations to Johannes Kepler, a young astronomer who had worked with him in his last years at the court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. Of all the men alive at the time, Kepler was the one best qualified to use these observations for further advances in astronomy. Kepler (1571 1630) was a victim of the religious bigotry of the age. He was a German Lutheran whose unorthodox religious views prevented him from becoming a Lutheran clergyman or a professor at the Protestant University of T�bingen. Add to this that he suffered from Catholic intolerance while living in imperial territory, that his mother was accused of witchcraft, that he had constant financial difficulties, and that his work was not appreciated by his contemporaries, with the exception of Galileo.
Kepler became an adherent of the Copernican system while still a young man. His attitude toward it was not one of cold scientific detachment, but was almost religious. He was struck by its beauty and was especially attracted by the central position of the sun; in fact, Kepler was almost a sun worshipper. Thus impressed by the mathematical symmetry disclosed by the heliocentric universe, he devoted himself with passionate enthusiasm to the discovery of the many other mathematical harmonies that he was sure were there. He was given to all sorts of speculations in this connection, including some that were of a poetic, religious, and musical nature. Many of the harmonies that he found, or thought he found, were scientifically useless. Among them, however, were his three laws of planetary motion, which were of great value to astronomy.
Kepler's first law is that the planets, in their revolutions about the sun, describe ellipses rather than circles (although the planetary orbits are close to circular in form). The second law states that the radius vector drawn from the sun to a planet describes equal areas in equal periods of time. This was a mathematical description of the fact that a planet's speed increases as it approaches the sun and decreases as it gets farther from it. This was later to be important to Newton in working out his law of universal gravitation. The third law, which was especially inspiring to Kepler, is that the squares of the periodic times of the planets are proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from the sun. With this law, Kepler established a mathematical relationship, which he had long sought, between a planet's distance from the sun and the time of its revolution, and thus, as he thought, of the underlying harmony of the universe.
Among the qualities that contributed to Kepler's greatness and made him one of the founders of modern science were his insistence on exact observation and his refusal to accept any conclusion that did not square with all the observed data. He worked for several years on the motions of Mars and finally, assuming circular orbits, produced a description that came very close to the observations he had received from Brahe. Nevertheless, it did not coincide precisely with these observations, so Kepler scrapped his previous work and started over. It was in this investigation that he came to see that the path followed by a planet must be an ellipse. Previous astronomers, including Copernicus, had not insisted on such complete accuracy.
Kepler's discoveries gave support to the Copernican theory, and his thought and outlook mark a further step in the mathematical interpretation of nature. Kepler, like Copernicus, was affected by Pythagorean thought, which was enjoying a revival. For him, the real world is a mathematical harmony, and the real characteristics of things are mathematical, quantitative. Real knowledge must, therefore, be mathematical knowledge.
And so the universe came to be increasingly seen as a vast machine operating according to mathematical laws. These laws, and the aspects of nature that could be formulated in terms of these laws, were the truth. Whatever else seems to exist, but cannot be expressed in terms of mathematical laws, cannot claim to possess objective existence. To quote Galileo: "...tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and...they reside only in the consciousness."20
The continuing success of great scientists in discovering laws of nature helped to give greater prestige and wider currency to these ideas. The work of Galileo and Newton helped to make it clear that there were not different kinds of motion for different kinds of beings, but that one set of laws governed both celestial and terrestrial motion. And so the vast universe came more and more to be seen and felt as a collection of physical bodies moving through space according to immutable mathematical laws.
As this process continued, men's conceptions of divinity changed. None of the early scientists questioned the existence or providence of a personal God. More and more, however, the Almighty was cast in the role of the author of mathematical law or as a sort of celestial mechanic. He had created the machine, which could then be counted on to operate by itself. However, as long as all natural phenomena could not be explained by any known laws, there appeared to be irregularities in the mechanism, and God was needed to make the necessary adjustments. With the progress of scientific knowledge, the irregularities tended to disappear, as they were seen to be explainable in terms of newly discovered laws and, therefore, no longer irregular at all.
In the light of all these facts, there would eventually come a time when some of the more daring thinkers no longer saw the necessity of postulating the presence of a deity to explain the workings of the universe. God was rejected, and a universe that consisted of matter in motion was accepted as self-explanatory. These developments took centuries to unfold, and were far in the future from the period with which we are concerned.
As has been pointed out, the Copernican theory had a difficult time gaining acceptance. It met with either indifference or opposition. Luther opposed it. The Catholic church at first paid little attention to it. In England, in 1551, there appeared a book by Robert Recorde, The Castle of Knowledge, which expounded the Copernican system, but other Englishmen were opposed to it. It was not until the next century, when Galileo made observations with his telescope that tended to confirm the new system, that it made much impact on the imagination by Englishmen. In Spain, interestingly enough, the atmosphere was more hospitable to Copernican ideas than in other countries; from 1561, students at the University of Salamanca could be taught the heliocentric system if they wished.
In 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy in Rome. One of his numerous offenses was that he taught a philosophy inspired by the Copernican system, a philosophy that involved the idea of an infinite universe. In 1633 the great Galileo was interrogated by the Holy Office for his advocacy of the Copernican system, and forced under threat of torture to abjure it. By the end of the eighteenth century, the system had been widely accepted, though the works of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo remained on the official Roman Index of Prohibited Books until the nineteenth century.
ANATOMY: VESALIUS
In the Renaissance, as we have seen, art and science were not sharply distinguished as they are today. Some of the chief problems faced and solved by artists were what we would refer to as scientific problems, and the artists had scientific interests. This can be most clearly seen in artists like Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci who wrote on scientific subjects, but it is also true of artists in general. The problems of perspective and anatomy are the most obvious examples of scientific problems faced by the artists.
In order to represent the human body accurately, artists made careful anatomical studies, sometimes by means of the dissection of corpses. In the process, they were responsible for important scientific discoveries. Leonardo was the first to make accurate drawings of the human embryo. Professor Erwin Panofsky refers to Leonardo as "the founder of anatomy as a science." The mastery of perspective has an importance in the history of anatomy, because it made possible the production of accurate drawings indispensable to the progress of anatomical study. The invention of printing was also important in this connection, providing for the reproduction in large quantities of the accurate drawings that were becoming available.
Another service performed by printing was the production and widespread distribution of the correct texts of classical authorities that humanistic scholars were preparing. These texts were not an unmixed blessing, however; while on the one hand they made it possible to know more accurately than before what a Greek or Roman author had said, they also helped to perpetuate his errors.
In the fields of anatomy, physiology, and medicine, the greatest authorities were Aristotle and, above all, Galen (c.129 c.200). In spite of his undisputed greatness, some of Galen's ideas were erroneous and led students astray for centuries. He had never had the opportunity to dissect a human body, and, therefore drew conclusions about human anatomy from animals available to him. He was also too much affected by the idea of final cause or purpose, which came chiefly from Aristotle. In the case of Galen, this preoccupation meant that his research was directed toward finding the purpose of each part of the body and showing how well it was adapted to this purpose.
The uncritical acceptance of Galen's authority hindered anatomical advances. Yet the subject was not studied from a purely theoretical standpoint. In the medical faculties of universities, especially in northern Italy, bodies were dissected for students' instruction, and as early as the second decade of the fourteenth century, a work on anatomy was written based on human dissection. Yet even those who performed or witnessed dissections were under Galen's influence.
There were signs of a more empirical attitude and a willingness to challenge ancient authority. Giovanni Manardo of the University of Ferrara insisted that the authority of reason and truth must be preferred to that of any man, alive or dead. Yet even those who had empirical evidence to guide them still regarded Galen with reverence. This was true of the man who dared to criticize Galen's errors and who did more than any other person to establish the science of anatomy, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (1514 64).
Vesalius came from a medical family; his father was personal apothecary to the emperor Charles V. Vesalius himself, after study in Louvain and Paris, went to Padua, where he received the doctorate in 1537 and became professor of anatomy and surgery before his twenty-third birthday. He was thoroughly trained in the tradition of Galen, whose works he later published.
Early in his career at Padua, he began work on his masterpiece, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), which was published in 1543, the same year as the De revolutionibus of Copernicus. It was not until he had become fairly well advanced in his work on this book that he was forced to realize that Galen's ideas would have to be opposed in many ways. The De Fabrica is a complete description of the human body, illustrated by woodcuts prepared under Versalius's direction and sometimes even better than the text. No other work on the subject had ever been so full and accurate. There are errors, based sometimes on inadequate observation, sometimes on a reluctance to disagree with Galen. It has been said that he followed Galen's errors much more often than he corrected them.
Vesalius was not alone in his aims and methods. Contemporaries were moving in the same direction, and some preceded him in the qualities that characterize his work: a willingness to contradict Galen on the basis of firsthand observation; the practice of dissection as a means of acquiring such observation; and the use of accurate illustrations to complement their texts. His book was outstanding; it was more complete and thorough than the others. It established, better than any other work, the proper method for the study of anatomy; it gave future researchers the tools to go further, and it provided the techniques to correct its errors. Modern anatomy had begun its career.
CONCLUSION
The men and movements discussed briefly in this chapter represent only a fraction of the scientific progress of the period, which sees the birth of our modern scientific civilization. It is instructive to draw parallels to the work of Copernicus and Vesalius, different as they are in many respects. Both men were dependent to some extent on the work and ideas of contemporaries and predecessors. Both worked in a climate of thought and feeling that was ready for their contributions. They were not isolated phenomena, bright stars flashing across a night of darkness. The way was prepared for them; even so, they did not entirely abandon older and erroneous patterns of thought.
This is not to minimize their contributions or the contributions of other workers at the time. The element of individual achievement of genius cannot be discounted. As in the case of the religious revolution started by Luther, we must be careful about the use of the word "inevitable." Genius is a difficult term to define or understand; but it exists, and it is not inevitable. The time must be ready for the great man, but he can do things in his time that other men cannot.
The scientific revolution, ushering in the modern scientific age, has profoundly influenced patterns of thought. By making possible ever increasing control of physical forces, it has helped to instill a confidence that people can master nature for their own purposes. By providing rational explanations for phenomena previously unexplained, the scientific revolution has helped to overcome superstitious fear of mysterious supernatural and occult forces. From this point of view, the present day interest in magic and various forms of the occult is a long step backwards. The scientific revolution was an important factor in promoting the trust in reason as the most reliable guide for human affairs. To some extent, this exaltation of science and reason has led to a downgrading of the claims of sentiment, emotion, art, music, and religion. Intentionally or not, the rise of a more scientific consciousness is partly responsible for the secularization of the modern world.
"The Beginning of the Scientific Revolution." The Beginning of the Scientific Revolution. Ed. Serge Noiret. CARRIE, 10 May 2006. Web. 28 Nov. 2009.
Woman, man or in between? Hermaphrodites' place in society
LastNORSTEDT, FirstGUDRUN. "Woman, man or in between? Hermaphrodites' place in society." Hermsplaceinsociety. 05 Jan 2000. Hermsplaceinsociety, Web. 30 Nov 2009. .
Woman, man or in between?
Hermaphrodites' place in society
By GUDRUN NORSTEDT
Västerbottens-Kuriren 5 January 2000
(Translated from the Swedish by Curtis E. Hinkle)
"As I was traveling through Vitry-le-François, I saw a man whom the Bishop of Soissons had given the name Germain at confirmation, but whom all the inhabitants had viewed and known as a girl with the name Marie until she was twenty-two years old. Now he went around with a full beard, was old and unmarried. He said that once he made such an effort to jump that it caused his male organs to appear; and the girls there still sing a song in which they warn each other against too powerful a jump because they could become boys just like Marie Germain."
The 16th century French author Michel de Montaigne's story about Marie Germain is only one of many examples of how hermaphrodites were depicted in Western European literature - as curiosities or freaks. During Montaigne's lifetime
it was not inconceivable that a girl could change into a boy, because women were viewed as a sort of incomplete man. The opposite transformation was not accepted as being something that could occur. Gaspard Bauhin, a contemporary of
Montaigne, explained this by nature's always striving toward perfection and never making the perfect imperfect.
Our contemporary worldviews are different. Girls can no longer change into boys. Women and men have become totally distinct categories, almost separate species, the one from Venus and the other from Mars, and in between there is only empty space. One very common belief is that our sex is determined once and for all the moment of conception when the sperm determines whether an X or a Y chromosome is present. According to this worldview there is no place for hermaphrodites. When a newborn's sex cannot easily be determined, the parents are often extremely confused while wondering how to treat a sexless child. All
our small announcements are either pink or blue. The child is therefore "corrected" early by means of surgical intervention which is not usually a medical necessity.
What really is a hermaphrodite? The terminology can be confusing. Some authors use the word hermaphroditism for all the different conditions in which the physical sex characteristics are ambiguous or atypical while others make a distinction between true hermaphroditism and pseudohermpahroditism. True hermaphroditism signifies that the individual has both ovarian and testicular tissue, which is very rare. Pseudo-hermaphroditism signifies that the individual has one type of gonads but that the external genitalia more or less differ from what would be expected. Often the word intersex is used instead of hermaphroditism mainly because it is felt to be more politically correct. In this article I will use the word hermaphroditism so as to maintain the link to its long medical and literary tradition.
There are many types of hermaphroditism in humans and even more factors which cause it. Often it is a question of how the fetus has been influenced by hormones in a way which varies from the norm. The biological differences between boys and girls are actually not as great as we usually think. Up until the eighth week male and female fetuses have the same genitalia. If they are
subsequently influenced by male hormones they develop a penis and scrotum, otherwise a clitoris and labia. This happens regardless of whether the chromosomes are male or female.
Marie-Germain in Montaigne's essay could never have become a boy as a result of too much effort at jumping. Most likely her transformation took more time and was caused by a lack of the enzyme 5-alphareductase. This condition is hereditary and therefore occurs with different frequency within certain ethnic groups. In some isolated mountainous villages in the Dominican Republic, it is quite common for those affected to be called "huevedoces" which means "those who get balls at 12". Despite the fact that these children have male chromosomes, the lack of 5-alphareductase causes the external genitalia to appear female, not male. Internally the child has testicles which at puberty start producing testosterone in large amounts. The voice deepens, the muscles grow and the clitoris enlarges to become a small penis. The girls become boys.
There have long been doubts that sex hormones not only influence genitalia but also the development of the brain. The few clear distinctions between men's and women's brain function that have been ascertained, such as men being better at spatial relationships and women being better at language skills are usually ascribed to the influence of sex hormones during the first stage of fetal development. Even boys' preference for rough games and girls' interest in dolls are explained this way. Sometimes one even feels that gender identity and sexual orientation are influenced by the hormone balance in the womb.
Animal experimentation has proved that hormones actually influence brain development during the first stage and even has an effect on the adult animal's behavior. If one, for example injects male hormones into a female fetus of a rhesus monkey, she will socialize directly with young males after birth and join them in their rough games. It is, however, difficult to transfer such results to human behavior who tend to behave in a less predictable manner. For this reason, hermaphrodites are like manna from heaven for the researchers. Special interest have been directed to children with an inheritable condition which is usually called CAH (congenital adrenal hyperplasia) and which is characterized by having adrenal glands which produce large amounts of male hormones during this first stage of fetal development. This has no significant effect for male fetuses but with female fetuses the labia can fuse together and resemble more or less a fully developed scrotum while the clitoris enlarges and can develop into a little penis. There is a whole range of intermediate stages. The girl has therefore two ovaries, uterus and a vagina which often comes
together at the urethra. Previously in history, it is almost certain that many such children were raised as boys without testicles but today CAH-girls are surgically "corrected" shortly after birth and receive medicine to reduce male hormone production. They then have a normal female puberty and can have children.
Here, researchers have access to a group of children with female chromosomes, female gonads and female genitalia (although they may have been altered) and a female social gender, whose brains have developed under the influence of high levels of male hormones. CAH-girls are therefore the perfect models for those who wish to study the influence of biology versus that of the environment on children's sex specific behavior and they are present in a large number of studies. The psychologists Anke Ehrhardt and John Money were pioneers in the field during the Sixties and they have many disciples, most recently the psychologist from Uppsala, Anna Servin. To a great extent, researchers' suspicions have been confirmed. CAH-girls are to a large extent "tomboys" with a preference for sports and rough games. The play less with dolls than other girls and the more often have boys as their best friends. They also perform better than other women on tests for spatial conceptualization and relationships in which men have an advantage over women. Anna Servin could even show that girls with severe CAH, those who had been most affected by male hormones during the first stage of fetal development, behaved more like boys than those with less pronounced forms of CAH.
Another group of hermaphrodites which have become the subject of researchers' interest is women with androgen insensitivity. These women have male chromosomes and internal testicles, but since the cells lack the ability to recognize testosterone the external body appears female. It seems natural to give these children a female gender. No one is surprised that they also behave like women, since this can just as well be explained by environment and social factors as by the absence of the influence of testosterone. The interesting aspect though is that androgen insensitive women test more poorly on tests for spatial conceptualization than other women. This supports the theory that the brains development is influenced by testosterone because this hormone is also found in females.
Hermaphrodites have changed from literary curiosities to valuable scientific research subjects. But who is interested in them? Do they have any possibility at having their own distinct differences recognized outside psychological laboratories? In the USA hermaphrodites have formed an organization, the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) and have attacked the prevailing medical doctrines which are used to surgically "correct" children to make them normal boys or girls. For them, these interventions are nothing less than genital mutilation. The hermaphrodites in ISNA are in part demanding their right to be different and also that parents should not be able to make the decision for such interventions which are more cosmetic than medically motivated. It happens often that later in life the child does not feel right within this corrected body.
Whereas homosexuals and transsexuals have long fought for their rights, hermaphrodites have just started their fight for recognition. In Sweden, they are still invisible except in this or that research project. This could be because all Swedish hermaphrodites are content with the crucial decisions which were made at a very early period by doctors and parents. Otherwise, it is likely that it is just a question of time before they come out and take up the struggle for their right to be - different.
Norstedt, Gudrun. "Herms Place In Society." Herms Place In Society. N.p., 5 Jan. 2000. Web. 28 Nov. 2009..
Woman, man or in between?
Hermaphrodites' place in society
By GUDRUN NORSTEDT
Västerbottens-Kuriren 5 January 2000
(Translated from the Swedish by Curtis E. Hinkle)
"As I was traveling through Vitry-le-François, I saw a man whom the Bishop of Soissons had given the name Germain at confirmation, but whom all the inhabitants had viewed and known as a girl with the name Marie until she was twenty-two years old. Now he went around with a full beard, was old and unmarried. He said that once he made such an effort to jump that it caused his male organs to appear; and the girls there still sing a song in which they warn each other against too powerful a jump because they could become boys just like Marie Germain."
The 16th century French author Michel de Montaigne's story about Marie Germain is only one of many examples of how hermaphrodites were depicted in Western European literature - as curiosities or freaks. During Montaigne's lifetime
it was not inconceivable that a girl could change into a boy, because women were viewed as a sort of incomplete man. The opposite transformation was not accepted as being something that could occur. Gaspard Bauhin, a contemporary of
Montaigne, explained this by nature's always striving toward perfection and never making the perfect imperfect.
Our contemporary worldviews are different. Girls can no longer change into boys. Women and men have become totally distinct categories, almost separate species, the one from Venus and the other from Mars, and in between there is only empty space. One very common belief is that our sex is determined once and for all the moment of conception when the sperm determines whether an X or a Y chromosome is present. According to this worldview there is no place for hermaphrodites. When a newborn's sex cannot easily be determined, the parents are often extremely confused while wondering how to treat a sexless child. All
our small announcements are either pink or blue. The child is therefore "corrected" early by means of surgical intervention which is not usually a medical necessity.
What really is a hermaphrodite? The terminology can be confusing. Some authors use the word hermaphroditism for all the different conditions in which the physical sex characteristics are ambiguous or atypical while others make a distinction between true hermaphroditism and pseudohermpahroditism. True hermaphroditism signifies that the individual has both ovarian and testicular tissue, which is very rare. Pseudo-hermaphroditism signifies that the individual has one type of gonads but that the external genitalia more or less differ from what would be expected. Often the word intersex is used instead of hermaphroditism mainly because it is felt to be more politically correct. In this article I will use the word hermaphroditism so as to maintain the link to its long medical and literary tradition.
There are many types of hermaphroditism in humans and even more factors which cause it. Often it is a question of how the fetus has been influenced by hormones in a way which varies from the norm. The biological differences between boys and girls are actually not as great as we usually think. Up until the eighth week male and female fetuses have the same genitalia. If they are
subsequently influenced by male hormones they develop a penis and scrotum, otherwise a clitoris and labia. This happens regardless of whether the chromosomes are male or female.
Marie-Germain in Montaigne's essay could never have become a boy as a result of too much effort at jumping. Most likely her transformation took more time and was caused by a lack of the enzyme 5-alphareductase. This condition is hereditary and therefore occurs with different frequency within certain ethnic groups. In some isolated mountainous villages in the Dominican Republic, it is quite common for those affected to be called "huevedoces" which means "those who get balls at 12". Despite the fact that these children have male chromosomes, the lack of 5-alphareductase causes the external genitalia to appear female, not male. Internally the child has testicles which at puberty start producing testosterone in large amounts. The voice deepens, the muscles grow and the clitoris enlarges to become a small penis. The girls become boys.
There have long been doubts that sex hormones not only influence genitalia but also the development of the brain. The few clear distinctions between men's and women's brain function that have been ascertained, such as men being better at spatial relationships and women being better at language skills are usually ascribed to the influence of sex hormones during the first stage of fetal development. Even boys' preference for rough games and girls' interest in dolls are explained this way. Sometimes one even feels that gender identity and sexual orientation are influenced by the hormone balance in the womb.
Animal experimentation has proved that hormones actually influence brain development during the first stage and even has an effect on the adult animal's behavior. If one, for example injects male hormones into a female fetus of a rhesus monkey, she will socialize directly with young males after birth and join them in their rough games. It is, however, difficult to transfer such results to human behavior who tend to behave in a less predictable manner. For this reason, hermaphrodites are like manna from heaven for the researchers. Special interest have been directed to children with an inheritable condition which is usually called CAH (congenital adrenal hyperplasia) and which is characterized by having adrenal glands which produce large amounts of male hormones during this first stage of fetal development. This has no significant effect for male fetuses but with female fetuses the labia can fuse together and resemble more or less a fully developed scrotum while the clitoris enlarges and can develop into a little penis. There is a whole range of intermediate stages. The girl has therefore two ovaries, uterus and a vagina which often comes
together at the urethra. Previously in history, it is almost certain that many such children were raised as boys without testicles but today CAH-girls are surgically "corrected" shortly after birth and receive medicine to reduce male hormone production. They then have a normal female puberty and can have children.
Here, researchers have access to a group of children with female chromosomes, female gonads and female genitalia (although they may have been altered) and a female social gender, whose brains have developed under the influence of high levels of male hormones. CAH-girls are therefore the perfect models for those who wish to study the influence of biology versus that of the environment on children's sex specific behavior and they are present in a large number of studies. The psychologists Anke Ehrhardt and John Money were pioneers in the field during the Sixties and they have many disciples, most recently the psychologist from Uppsala, Anna Servin. To a great extent, researchers' suspicions have been confirmed. CAH-girls are to a large extent "tomboys" with a preference for sports and rough games. The play less with dolls than other girls and the more often have boys as their best friends. They also perform better than other women on tests for spatial conceptualization and relationships in which men have an advantage over women. Anna Servin could even show that girls with severe CAH, those who had been most affected by male hormones during the first stage of fetal development, behaved more like boys than those with less pronounced forms of CAH.
Another group of hermaphrodites which have become the subject of researchers' interest is women with androgen insensitivity. These women have male chromosomes and internal testicles, but since the cells lack the ability to recognize testosterone the external body appears female. It seems natural to give these children a female gender. No one is surprised that they also behave like women, since this can just as well be explained by environment and social factors as by the absence of the influence of testosterone. The interesting aspect though is that androgen insensitive women test more poorly on tests for spatial conceptualization than other women. This supports the theory that the brains development is influenced by testosterone because this hormone is also found in females.
Hermaphrodites have changed from literary curiosities to valuable scientific research subjects. But who is interested in them? Do they have any possibility at having their own distinct differences recognized outside psychological laboratories? In the USA hermaphrodites have formed an organization, the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) and have attacked the prevailing medical doctrines which are used to surgically "correct" children to make them normal boys or girls. For them, these interventions are nothing less than genital mutilation. The hermaphrodites in ISNA are in part demanding their right to be different and also that parents should not be able to make the decision for such interventions which are more cosmetic than medically motivated. It happens often that later in life the child does not feel right within this corrected body.
Whereas homosexuals and transsexuals have long fought for their rights, hermaphrodites have just started their fight for recognition. In Sweden, they are still invisible except in this or that research project. This could be because all Swedish hermaphrodites are content with the crucial decisions which were made at a very early period by doctors and parents. Otherwise, it is likely that it is just a question of time before they come out and take up the struggle for their right to be - different.
Norstedt, Gudrun. "Herms Place In Society." Herms Place In Society. N.p., 5 Jan. 2000. Web. 28 Nov. 2009.
Galen
Galen (or Claudius Galenus, 2nd century ad) Biography - (or Claudius Galenus, rete mirabile, (Published 1987), Opera omnia, Claudius Galenus
Galen (or Claudius Galenus, 2nd century ad) Biography
(or Claudius Galenus, rete mirabile, (Published 1987), Opera omnia, Claudius Galenus
Greek physician, born at Pergamum in Mysia. He studied medicine there, and also at Smyrna, Corinth, and Alexandria, and became physician to Marcus Aurelius. He probably died in Sicily.
Galen wrote extensively on medical and on philosophical subjects and his extant works consist of 83 treatises on medicine and 15 commentaries on Hippocrates. He dissected animals and developed, to our minds, somewhat fanciful physiological theories. His clinical discoveries include diagnosing by the pulse. He was the authority from whom all later Greek and Roman medical writers quoted, with more or less accuracy.
Galen considered that the body worked by three types of spirit: natural spirit (located in the liver), vital spirit (located in the left ventricle of the heart), and animal spirit (located in the brain). He postulated several anatomical features, such as the rete mirabile (wonderful network) on the undersurface of the brain, which is found in some animals (especially those with hooves) but not in man, although on Galen's authority it was accepted as present in the human brain for over thirteen centuries. It was also believed on his authority that the septum of the heart contained minute pores—these were essential for Galen's physiological system as he believed that blood passes from the heart to the body from both the arteries and the veins, new blood being manufactured in the liver and supposedly burnt up in the tissues. The exhalation of breath, when concentrated, was known to be asphyxiating, and was compared to the smoke of fire. Galen made considerable discoveries in neurology and especially the kinds of paralysis associated with damage at various places to the spinal cord (see Greek investigations of the mind and senses).
(Published 1987)
"Galen Biography." Galen Biography. Ed. Richard L. Gregory. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2009..
Galen (or Claudius Galenus, 2nd century ad) Biography
(or Claudius Galenus, rete mirabile, (Published 1987), Opera omnia, Claudius Galenus
Greek physician, born at Pergamum in Mysia. He studied medicine there, and also at Smyrna, Corinth, and Alexandria, and became physician to Marcus Aurelius. He probably died in Sicily.
Galen wrote extensively on medical and on philosophical subjects and his extant works consist of 83 treatises on medicine and 15 commentaries on Hippocrates. He dissected animals and developed, to our minds, somewhat fanciful physiological theories. His clinical discoveries include diagnosing by the pulse. He was the authority from whom all later Greek and Roman medical writers quoted, with more or less accuracy.
Galen considered that the body worked by three types of spirit: natural spirit (located in the liver), vital spirit (located in the left ventricle of the heart), and animal spirit (located in the brain). He postulated several anatomical features, such as the rete mirabile (wonderful network) on the undersurface of the brain, which is found in some animals (especially those with hooves) but not in man, although on Galen's authority it was accepted as present in the human brain for over thirteen centuries. It was also believed on his authority that the septum of the heart contained minute pores—these were essential for Galen's physiological system as he believed that blood passes from the heart to the body from both the arteries and the veins, new blood being manufactured in the liver and supposedly burnt up in the tissues. The exhalation of breath, when concentrated, was known to be asphyxiating, and was compared to the smoke of fire. Galen made considerable discoveries in neurology and especially the kinds of paralysis associated with damage at various places to the spinal cord (see Greek investigations of the mind and senses).
(Published 1987)
"Galen Biography." Galen Biography. Ed. Richard L. Gregory. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2009.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Annual Review of Anthropology
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 33: 297-317 (Volume publication date October 2004)
(doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143754)
First published online as a Review in Advance on June 10, 2004
Kathryn S. Koo
Vol. 33: 297-317 (Volume publication date October 2004)
(doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143754)
First published online as a Review in Advance on June 10, 2004
The Body Beautiful: Symbolism and Agency in the Social World
Erica ReischerIndependent Scholar, Oakland, California; email: ericar@alumni.princeton.edu
Kathryn S. Koo
Department of English, Saint Mary's College of California, Moraga, California 94575; email: kkoo@stmarys-ca.edu
If the body is, as Douglas argues, a “text” upon which social meanings are inscribed, then a common vocabulary, a common symbol set, is needed to decipher those meanings. Our bodies transmit a dizzying array of complex information about ourselves, with or without our intention, and we and other members of our culture tend to be expert at reading those culturally specific meanings almost instantaneously. But, whereas Americans would understand a ring worn on the third finger of a woman's left hand as a signifier of her status as a married woman, they are likely far less adept at deciphering the significance of a woman's white robes in India, which indicate widowhood. Even within a single culture, the message of the body is subject to change over time. Whereas in many Western cultures a large, plump body once connoted prosperity, health, and high social ranking, this same body now signifies quite the opposite: poverty, ill health, and low socioeconomic status.
If the body is, as Douglas argues, a “text” upon which social meanings are inscribed, then a common vocabulary, a common symbol set, is needed to decipher those meanings. Our bodies transmit a dizzying array of complex information about ourselves, with or without our intention, and we and other members of our culture tend to be expert at reading those culturally specific meanings almost instantaneously. But, whereas Americans would understand a ring worn on the third finger of a woman's left hand as a signifier of her status as a married woman, they are likely far less adept at deciphering the significance of a woman's white robes in India, which indicate widowhood. Even within a single culture, the message of the body is subject to change over time. Whereas in many Western cultures a large, plump body once connoted prosperity, health, and high social ranking, this same body now signifies quite the opposite: poverty, ill health, and low socioeconomic status.
Galen
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 33: 297-317 (Volume publication date October 2004)
(doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143754)
First published online as a Review in Advance on June 10, 2004
The Body Beautiful: Symbolism and Agency in the Social World
Erica Reischer
Independent Scholar, Oakland, California; email: ericar@alumni.princeton.edu
Kathryn S. Koo
Department of English, Saint Mary's College of California, Moraga, California 94575; email: kkoo@stmarys-ca.edu
If the body is, as Douglas argues, a “text” upon which social meanings are inscribed, then a common vocabulary, a common symbol set, is needed to decipher those meanings. Our bodies transmit a dizzying array of complex information about ourselves, with or without our intention, and we and other members of our culture tend to be expert at reading those culturally specific meanings almost instantaneously. But, whereas Americans would understand a ring worn on the third finger of a woman's left hand as a signifier of her status as a married woman, they are likely far less adept at deciphering the significance of a woman's white robes in India, which indicate widowhood. Even within a single culture, the message of the body is subject to change over time. Whereas in many Western cultures a large, plump body once connoted prosperity, health, and high social ranking, this same body now signifies quite the opposite: poverty, ill health, and low socioeconomic status.
Posted by Teambody09 at 7:47 PM 0 comments
Marie/germaine
Marie leaped and the warmth fell out of her and she realized a penis had fallen out, she is now a he named Germaine.
Posted by Teambody09 at 7:44 PM 0 comments
Labels: sex change
galen
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/223895/Galen-of-Pergamum#
Greek physician, writer, and philosopher who exercised a dominant influence on medical theory and practice in Europe from the Middle Ages until the mid-17th century. His authority in the Byzantine world and the Muslim Middle East was similarly long-lived.
Early life and training
The son of a wealthy architect, Galen was educated as a philosopher and man of letters. His hometown, Pergamum, was the site of a magnificent shrine of the healing god, Asclepius, that was visited by many distinguished figures of the Roman Empire for cures. When Galen was 16, he changed his career to that of medicine, which he studied at Pergamum, at Smyrna (modern İzmir, Tur.), and finally at Alexandria in Egypt, which was the greatest medical centre of the ancient world. After more than a decade of study, he returned in 157 ce to Pergamum, where he served as chief physician to the troop of gladiators maintained by the high priest of Asia.
In 162 the ambitious Galen moved to Rome. There he quickly rose in the medical profession owing to his public demonstrations of anatomy, his successes with rich and influential patients whom other doctors had pronounced incurable, his enormous learning, and the rhetorical skills he displayed in public debates. Galen’s wealthy background, social contacts, and a friendship with his old philosophy teacher Eudemus further enhanced his reputation as a philosopher and physician.
Galen abruptly ended his sojourn in the capital in 166. Although he claimed that the intolerable envy of his colleagues prompted his return to Pergamum, an impending plague in Rome was probably a more compelling reason. In 168–169, however, he was called by the joint emperors Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius to accompany them on a military campaign in northern Italy. After Verus’ sudden death in 169, Galen returned to Rome, where he served Marcus Aurelius and the later emperors Commodus and Septimius Severus as a physician. Galen’s final works were written after 207, which suggests that his Arab biographers were correct in their claim that he died at age 87, in 216/217.
Anatomical and medical studies
Galen regarded anatomy as the foundation of medical knowledge, and he frequently dissected and experimented on such lower animals as the Barbary ape (or African monkey), pigs, sheep, and goats. Galen’s advocacy of dissection, both to improve surgical skills and for research purposes, formed part of his self-promotion, but there is no doubt thathe was an accurate observer. He distinguished seven pairs of cranial nerves, described the valves of the heart, and observed the structural differences between arteries and veins. One of his most important demonstrations was that the arteries carry blood, not air, as had been taught for 400 years. Notable also were his vivisection experiments, such as tying off the recurrent laryngeal nerve to show that the brain controls the voice, performing a series of transections of the spinal cord to establish the functions of the spinal nerves, and tying off the ureters to demonstrate kidney and bladder functions. Galen was seriously hampered by the prevailing social taboo against dissecting human corpses, however, and the inferences he made about human anatomy based on his dissections of animals often led him into errors. His anatomy of the uterus, for example, is largely that of the dog’s.
Galen’s physiology was a mixture of ideas taken from the philosophers Plato and Aristotle as well as from the physician Hippocrates, whom Galen revered as the fount of all medical learning. Galen viewed the body as consisting of three connected systems: the brain and nerves, which are responsible for sensation and thought; the heart and arteries, responsible for life-giving energy; and the liver and veins, responsible for nutrition and growth. According to Galen, blood is formed in the liver and is then carried by the veins to all parts of the body, where it is used up as nutriment or is transformed into flesh and other substances. A small amount of blood seeps through the lungs between the pulmonary artery and pulmonary veins, thereby becoming mixed with air, and then seeps from the right to the left ventricle of the heart through minute pores in the wall separating the two chambers. A small proportion of this blood is further refined in a network of nerves at the base of the skull (in reality found only in ungulates) and the brain to make psychic pneuma, a subtle material that is the vehicle of sensation. Galen’s physiological theory proved extremely seductive, and few possessed the skills needed to challenge it in succeeding centuries.
Building on earlier Hippocratic conceptions, Galen believed that human health requires an equilibrium between the four main bodily fluids, or humours—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Each of the humours is built up from the four elements and displays two of the four primary qualities: hot, cold, wet, and dry. Unlike Hippocrates, Galen argued that humoral imbalances can be located in specific organs, as well as in the body as a whole. This modification of the theory allowed doctors to make more precise diagnoses and to prescribe specific remedies to restore the body’s balance. As a continuation of earlier Hippocratic conceptions, Galenic physiology became a powerful influence in medicine for the next 1,400 years.
Galen was both a universal genius and a prolific writer: about 300 titles of works by him are known, of which about 150 survive wholly or in part. He was perpetually inquisitive, even in areas remote from medicine, such as linguistics, and he was an important logician who wrote major studies of scientific method. Galen was also a skilled polemicist and an incorrigible publicist of his own genius, and these traits, combined with the enormous range of his writings, help to explain his subsequent fame and influence.
Influence
Galen’s writings achieved wide circulation during his lifetime, and copies of some of his works survive that were written within a generation of his death. By 500 ce his works were being taught and summarized at Alexandria, and his theories were already crowding out those of others in the medical handbooks of the Byzantine world. Greek manuscripts began to be collected and translated by enlightened Arabs in the 9th century, and about 850 Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, an Arab physician at the court of Baghdad, prepared an annotated list of 129 works of Galen that he and his followers had translated from Greek into Arabic or Syriac. Learned medicine in the Arabic world thus became heavily based upon the commentary, exposition, and understanding of Galen.
Galen’s influence was initially almost negligible in western Europe except for drug recipes, but from the late 11th century Ḥunayn’s translations, commentaries on them by Arab physicians, and sometimes the original Greek writings themselves were translated into Latin. These Latin versions came to form the basis of medical education in the new medieval universities. From about 1490, Italian humanists felt the need to prepare new Latin versions of Galen directly from Greek manuscripts in order to free his texts from medieval preconceptions and misunderstandings. Galen’s works were first printed in Greek in their entirety in 1525, and printings in Latin swiftly followed. These texts offered a different picture from that of the Middle Ages, one that emphasized Galen as a clinician, a diagnostician, and above all, an anatomist. His new followers stressed his methodical techniques of identifying and curing illness, his independent judgment, and his cautious empiricism. Galen’s injunctions to investigate the body were eagerly followed, since physicians wished to repeat the experiments and observations that he had recorded. Paradoxically, this soon led to the overthrow of Galen’s authority as an anatomist. In 1543 the Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius showed that Galen’s anatomy of the body was more animal than human in some of its aspects, and it became clear that Galen and his medieval followers had made many errors. Galen’s notions of physiology, by contrast, lasted for a further century, until the English physician William Harvey correctly explained the circulation of the blood. The renewal and then the overthrow of the Galenic tradition in the Renaissance had been an important element in the rise of modern science, however.
Vol. 33: 297-317 (Volume publication date October 2004)
(doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143754)
First published online as a Review in Advance on June 10, 2004
The Body Beautiful: Symbolism and Agency in the Social World
Erica Reischer
Independent Scholar, Oakland, California; email: ericar@alumni.princeton.edu
Kathryn S. Koo
Department of English, Saint Mary's College of California, Moraga, California 94575; email: kkoo@stmarys-ca.edu
If the body is, as Douglas argues, a “text” upon which social meanings are inscribed, then a common vocabulary, a common symbol set, is needed to decipher those meanings. Our bodies transmit a dizzying array of complex information about ourselves, with or without our intention, and we and other members of our culture tend to be expert at reading those culturally specific meanings almost instantaneously. But, whereas Americans would understand a ring worn on the third finger of a woman's left hand as a signifier of her status as a married woman, they are likely far less adept at deciphering the significance of a woman's white robes in India, which indicate widowhood. Even within a single culture, the message of the body is subject to change over time. Whereas in many Western cultures a large, plump body once connoted prosperity, health, and high social ranking, this same body now signifies quite the opposite: poverty, ill health, and low socioeconomic status.
Posted by Teambody09 at 7:47 PM 0 comments
Marie/germaine
Marie leaped and the warmth fell out of her and she realized a penis had fallen out, she is now a he named Germaine.
Posted by Teambody09 at 7:44 PM 0 comments
Labels: sex change
galen
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/223895/Galen-of-Pergamum#
Greek physician, writer, and philosopher who exercised a dominant influence on medical theory and practice in Europe from the Middle Ages until the mid-17th century. His authority in the Byzantine world and the Muslim Middle East was similarly long-lived.
Early life and training
The son of a wealthy architect, Galen was educated as a philosopher and man of letters. His hometown, Pergamum, was the site of a magnificent shrine of the healing god, Asclepius, that was visited by many distinguished figures of the Roman Empire for cures. When Galen was 16, he changed his career to that of medicine, which he studied at Pergamum, at Smyrna (modern İzmir, Tur.), and finally at Alexandria in Egypt, which was the greatest medical centre of the ancient world. After more than a decade of study, he returned in 157 ce to Pergamum, where he served as chief physician to the troop of gladiators maintained by the high priest of Asia.
In 162 the ambitious Galen moved to Rome. There he quickly rose in the medical profession owing to his public demonstrations of anatomy, his successes with rich and influential patients whom other doctors had pronounced incurable, his enormous learning, and the rhetorical skills he displayed in public debates. Galen’s wealthy background, social contacts, and a friendship with his old philosophy teacher Eudemus further enhanced his reputation as a philosopher and physician.
Galen abruptly ended his sojourn in the capital in 166. Although he claimed that the intolerable envy of his colleagues prompted his return to Pergamum, an impending plague in Rome was probably a more compelling reason. In 168–169, however, he was called by the joint emperors Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius to accompany them on a military campaign in northern Italy. After Verus’ sudden death in 169, Galen returned to Rome, where he served Marcus Aurelius and the later emperors Commodus and Septimius Severus as a physician. Galen’s final works were written after 207, which suggests that his Arab biographers were correct in their claim that he died at age 87, in 216/217.
Anatomical and medical studies
Galen regarded anatomy as the foundation of medical knowledge, and he frequently dissected and experimented on such lower animals as the Barbary ape (or African monkey), pigs, sheep, and goats. Galen’s advocacy of dissection, both to improve surgical skills and for research purposes, formed part of his self-promotion, but there is no doubt thathe was an accurate observer. He distinguished seven pairs of cranial nerves, described the valves of the heart, and observed the structural differences between arteries and veins. One of his most important demonstrations was that the arteries carry blood, not air, as had been taught for 400 years. Notable also were his vivisection experiments, such as tying off the recurrent laryngeal nerve to show that the brain controls the voice, performing a series of transections of the spinal cord to establish the functions of the spinal nerves, and tying off the ureters to demonstrate kidney and bladder functions. Galen was seriously hampered by the prevailing social taboo against dissecting human corpses, however, and the inferences he made about human anatomy based on his dissections of animals often led him into errors. His anatomy of the uterus, for example, is largely that of the dog’s.
Galen’s physiology was a mixture of ideas taken from the philosophers Plato and Aristotle as well as from the physician Hippocrates, whom Galen revered as the fount of all medical learning. Galen viewed the body as consisting of three connected systems: the brain and nerves, which are responsible for sensation and thought; the heart and arteries, responsible for life-giving energy; and the liver and veins, responsible for nutrition and growth. According to Galen, blood is formed in the liver and is then carried by the veins to all parts of the body, where it is used up as nutriment or is transformed into flesh and other substances. A small amount of blood seeps through the lungs between the pulmonary artery and pulmonary veins, thereby becoming mixed with air, and then seeps from the right to the left ventricle of the heart through minute pores in the wall separating the two chambers. A small proportion of this blood is further refined in a network of nerves at the base of the skull (in reality found only in ungulates) and the brain to make psychic pneuma, a subtle material that is the vehicle of sensation. Galen’s physiological theory proved extremely seductive, and few possessed the skills needed to challenge it in succeeding centuries.
Building on earlier Hippocratic conceptions, Galen believed that human health requires an equilibrium between the four main bodily fluids, or humours—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Each of the humours is built up from the four elements and displays two of the four primary qualities: hot, cold, wet, and dry. Unlike Hippocrates, Galen argued that humoral imbalances can be located in specific organs, as well as in the body as a whole. This modification of the theory allowed doctors to make more precise diagnoses and to prescribe specific remedies to restore the body’s balance. As a continuation of earlier Hippocratic conceptions, Galenic physiology became a powerful influence in medicine for the next 1,400 years.
Galen was both a universal genius and a prolific writer: about 300 titles of works by him are known, of which about 150 survive wholly or in part. He was perpetually inquisitive, even in areas remote from medicine, such as linguistics, and he was an important logician who wrote major studies of scientific method. Galen was also a skilled polemicist and an incorrigible publicist of his own genius, and these traits, combined with the enormous range of his writings, help to explain his subsequent fame and influence.
Influence
Galen’s writings achieved wide circulation during his lifetime, and copies of some of his works survive that were written within a generation of his death. By 500 ce his works were being taught and summarized at Alexandria, and his theories were already crowding out those of others in the medical handbooks of the Byzantine world. Greek manuscripts began to be collected and translated by enlightened Arabs in the 9th century, and about 850 Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, an Arab physician at the court of Baghdad, prepared an annotated list of 129 works of Galen that he and his followers had translated from Greek into Arabic or Syriac. Learned medicine in the Arabic world thus became heavily based upon the commentary, exposition, and understanding of Galen.
Galen’s influence was initially almost negligible in western Europe except for drug recipes, but from the late 11th century Ḥunayn’s translations, commentaries on them by Arab physicians, and sometimes the original Greek writings themselves were translated into Latin. These Latin versions came to form the basis of medical education in the new medieval universities. From about 1490, Italian humanists felt the need to prepare new Latin versions of Galen directly from Greek manuscripts in order to free his texts from medieval preconceptions and misunderstandings. Galen’s works were first printed in Greek in their entirety in 1525, and printings in Latin swiftly followed. These texts offered a different picture from that of the Middle Ages, one that emphasized Galen as a clinician, a diagnostician, and above all, an anatomist. His new followers stressed his methodical techniques of identifying and curing illness, his independent judgment, and his cautious empiricism. Galen’s injunctions to investigate the body were eagerly followed, since physicians wished to repeat the experiments and observations that he had recorded. Paradoxically, this soon led to the overthrow of Galen’s authority as an anatomist. In 1543 the Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius showed that Galen’s anatomy of the body was more animal than human in some of its aspects, and it became clear that Galen and his medieval followers had made many errors. Galen’s notions of physiology, by contrast, lasted for a further century, until the English physician William Harvey correctly explained the circulation of the blood. The renewal and then the overthrow of the Galenic tradition in the Renaissance had been an important element in the rise of modern science, however.
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