 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the King's College London Philosophy Department and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about philosophy and medicine in the Renaissance with Guido Giuliani, who is professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Macerata. Hi, Guido. Hi. Thank you very much for having me today. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the podcast. I guess the first thing to ask is what the Renaissance philosophers were reading when they did medicine or what Renaissance doctors were reading. How does their reading material differ from what was available in the medieval period, and how does Renaissance medicine in general differ from medieval medicine? It's a very important question, the one related to the sources of medical knowledge in the Renaissance. The most important source of information were, of course, books and texts. The difference with the Middle Ages is that, first of all, Renaissance medical practitioners had access to many more books, many more sources. Of course, the great majority of medieval texts, translations from antiquity, were still read, but we need to consider a new wave of books that were translated, for instance, directly from Greek sources. Here is the important element created by the humanists, who were scholars interested in recovering the knowledge of antiquity with a much more sophisticated philological approach to reading and editing and translating texts. So whereas in the Middle Ages, the main activity of translation and reception of ancient medical sources happened through the mediation of the Arabic sources, who already, especially in the ninth century, translated a great amount of medical texts from Greek antiquity, especially Galen, who was considered the most important medical author, in the Renaissance scholars and medical scholars, because often physicians were trained as humanists in the university, they could have access to texts in Greek, original texts in Greeks, through the mediation of Byzantine culture and through the arrival of Greek refugees and emigres coming from Constantinople after the fall of Constantinople. Right, so is the expansion of sources more to do with having better access to these really important authors like Hippocrates and Galen, or Anna of Avicenna, I guess would be another example from Islamic works? Yes, it was a better, more precise, accurate reading of texts, but I would also say it was maybe a different approach than the medieval doctors and learned scholars read texts of antiquity. I would say in a different way. Here we need to consider a particular aspect of medieval, let's say, knowledge and science, the so-called scholastic approach to knowledge, which was very logical, very systematic, and not necessarily very attentive to the cultural element, historical element in the reception of knowledge. So the new element in the red recovery and the rediscovery of classical texts of antiquity was a more historical, cultural assessment of those texts. For instance, an important source of information for doctors were herbal remedies, botany, and many texts, for instance Dioscorides, who wrote in the first century AD an important collection of material medical, that is, of remedies and drugs based on botany, was translated and read through sort of maniac Christians developed by the Arabic reading who introduced information about botany and herbal remedy that belonged to their culture. So there was an effort by humanist doctors to assess what was the original, what was culturally added when previous scholars were reading the same texts. So that actually sounds a lot like the whole process of absorption and reflection on philosophical works in the Renaissance as well. There's a movement into humanist appropriation of philosophy away from the scholastic philosophy, although scholastic philosophy continues alongside it. And to some extent, of course, it's the same people who are doing it. So you have humanists who are interested in philosophy and medicine. And for me, that raises the question of what they thought was the relationship between philosophy and medicine. Did they even think that medicine was part of philosophy, the way that they thought of physics, for example, as part of philosophy? It is a very complex question. In a way, the two disciplines, medicine and philosophy, were connected from the very beginning. Aristotle himself says at a certain point in the Parva Natural, a book collection of small treatises about nature, that there is a very close relationship between the doctor, the physician, and the natural philosophers, because the doctor dealing with notion of health and disease inevitably have to have a proper training in the fundamental principle of physics and natural philosophy. And Galen himself, who can be considered as important as Aristotle for the transmission of learning from antiquity through the Middle Ages up to the early modern period, Galen himself saw his work as the work of a philosopher. He even wrote something. Sorry, you're going to say it. No, he wrote a treatise exactly dealing with this, saying that the best physician is also a philosopher. I wonder whether that goes the other way around, though. You could say, well, a doctor needs to have philosophical training because he needs to know about the four elements, say, to understand heat and cold in the body. But is the reverse also true? Does a good philosopher have to be a doctor? I would say yes. In this case, I would refer to Plato, who often referred to Hippocrates, this kind of almost mythical figure who represented a community of physicians between the late fifth and early fourth century before Christ. Plato looked at Hippocrates as a model of doing research, investigations. Not just about nature, but about human nature and human nature in a cultural and social context. I would say that in the time years especially, you can see how important it was for Plato to consider the medical aspects of the political and philosophical organization when he talks about the diseases of the soul and the diseases of the body. And how they were very connected and how they were an important condition for a future of political prosperity. Yeah, and of course that's what Galen commented on, the Timaeus as well. Exactly. And Galen himself, I think, especially in his work he wrote on the possible reconciliation between Hippocrates and Plato, which by the way is one of those works that is rediscovering the Renaissance, that was almost ignored before, not very considered. This text becomes very important. And the text where Galen talks about the relationship between the body and the soul, and where he says openly that the best philosophical approach is a combination of Hippocrates and Plato. So let me ask you a philosophical question about medicine, which I think is still really pressing for us today when we think about medicine, which is what the purpose of medical treatment is, or maybe a different way of putting it would be what health is. Because we might think that the goal of a doctor's treatment of the patient is just to make sure the patient doesn't die, or make sure the patient doesn't suffer from some kind of pain or suffering. But is it really right from the Renaissance doctor's point of view to say, for example, that the goal of medicine is to just prolong life? Or is it actually to somehow instill in the patient's body, and maybe even in the body and soul, some kind of more complex idea of flourishing? I mean, are they really going for the idea of flourishing human being, or are they just trying to sort of make you not sick? No, you're right. It's a view of health that was more complex than a pure medical understanding of health, or even using a sort of contemporary word, medicalizing view. For many reasons, intellectual and cultural and social, health was much more than just having a long life, healthy life, but included also component coming from ethics about happy life, civic commitments. For instance, it was very common for an individual living during the 15th, 16th century to consider his life or her life as something involved in society or in activity. There was this emphasis on the so-called primacies of contemplative life over purely theoretical life, which was instead a value that was much more considered in the past, during the Middle Ages or even before in antiquity. So I would say that in many discussions about health, one of the recurrent points was whether it's better to have a long life or a meaningful, intense, happy life, maybe shorter. And this is particularly evident in such authors as, I would say, for instance, Francis Bacon, who was also not just a philosopher, very interested in medicine, who contributed actually to medical knowledge, but also a politician, a political person. Or a doctor who was also a philosopher, there in Asa, like Girolamo Cardano, who lived in the first part of the 16th century and was not just a professor of medicine in Padua or in Bologna later, not just a practicing physician, but an author of philosophical treatises. And he often insisted that we shouldn't consider the length of life as the basic criterion to judge about the healthiness of one's existence, but also involvement with the reality and other aspects of one's life. One thing that Galen talks about a lot in his medical works is that the medical treatment you give someone also has to be tailored very carefully to the patient in question. And I wonder whether the Renaissance philosopher doctors like Cardano, for example, you just mentioned, whether they pick that up. And in particular, I think an interesting case here is what they say about women. You actually said just a minute ago that they think about the patient's his or her role in political life. Were you just being polite or did they actually talk about... No, actually not. And going back to the point about the relationship between philosophy and medicine and whether there was a specific philosophy that was medical. And this is another case in which we would say actually the physicians were different from the philosophers. We need to look at this also not purely intellectual terms, but also in an institutional sense. You have to imagine people that were trained as philosophers going for a particular profession in life that could be sometimes medicine or people that were instead more focused on the medical training of their studies. And so much so that there was this division of the path of the physicians and the path of the philosopher. And of course, one of the authoritative source of information for the philosophers was Aristotle and on the other side for the physicians was Galen. It's very interesting to see from the early Middle Ages on until the 17th, even 18th century, how doctors had their particular view of the world shaped by this genuinely medical philosophy and how philosophers less and less may be involved with Aristotle, but they also had their particular worldview about women. This is evident. It was very difficult to get rid, I think, for philosopher or a certain tacit, misogynist view of women because of Aristotle's philosophy. The use of certain images, especially the relationship between form, which is male, and the matter, which is usually attributed to the women. And also in natural philosophy was translated in such a way that the active principle was of a male origin. In theory of conception, for instance, in the Aristotelian view, the active principle comes from the male seed. And so on, the form is actually emitted in the organism through the male. And the intellect in a way is, it's supposed to be the full blossoming of this form. In the medical camp, that was different because Galen is very clear. Both the male and the female seeds and principle of reproduction contribute in a source of equal terms in the production of the new organism. And in some cases, in some development of the medical tradition, you will even see the womb as a very important organ, as a very important principle of generation. Some extreme cases can be, for instance, Paracelsus, as very important medical author of the Renaissance, for whom actually the parts of the female body, principle of generations, are in a way more important than the male counterpart. From the point of view of therapy, I would say that doctors were open to the observation and the cure of female patients. As much as male patients, we have famous important books of gynecology from antiquity. We have a specific field, which is actually the medicine for women, that became very important during the Renaissance, especially in the vernacular, when some of those treatises were either translated or written directly in the vernacular. When they did treat women, or men for that matter, so when they treat their patients, what kinds of things are they looking at? Do they administer drugs a lot? Do they do surgery? What are the standard tools with which a Renaissance doctor would actually treat you? I guess that probably everyone has in their head an image of leeches now. Yes, or phlebotomy. Yeah, phlebotomy, which is where they actually cut little cuts in your skin and bleed you out. And bleed you out. Presumably they offered more than that, let's hope. Well, probably the best remedy, the best therapy was still based on a particular manipulation of diet and food, and in a way some of the drugs, who were mainly of herbal origin, until Paracelsus and this kind of chemical revolution that Paracelsus introduced in the field of medicine. So before Paracelsus, I would say the remedies were mostly of an herbal nature. So first of all, diet was the most efficient approach, I would say. And then there was other form of keeping people healthy through a particular lifestyle, physical exercise, how to organize one life according to the rhythm of sleep and waking. An important element was how to control one's emotion. This particular aspect, control of passions and not to be overwhelmed, especially by the most dangerous passion from the point of your health, anger, fear and sadness, was a very important part of early modern Renaissance medicine. It sounds almost like... With a very long tradition, yes. It sounds almost like the Renaissance doctor is a kind of life coach, which makes me wonder whether part of the service they're offering could even go so far as trying to make you more virtuous, because we talked before about how they might be not just trying to prolong your life, but trying to make you more flourishing or even more capable of political engagement. And now you're saying, well, they're going to help your emotions be brought into check or made more appropriate. Would they go so far as to say something that Galen actually sometimes implied? If you want to be a virtuous person, then come talk to me and I'll tell you what to eat. It'll actually make you a better person. Would they go that far? Yes. There is an aspect of the rediscovery of Galenism in the Renaissance that is exactly related to this. There were form of very radical Galenism in the Renaissance. I just mentioned one treatise by a Spanish doctor, Huarte de San Juan, who wrote this book in which he wanted to show that mental dispositions, professions, abilities depended on the temperament, that is, the constitutions, the physical constitutions of one's body. And of course, he referred to Galen. Galen, we should remember, also wrote three or four treatises in which he wanted to show that following his ideas on medicine, you could become happier and to become more virtuous. So going back to the point about Renaissance doctors who were, let's say, meddling also with psychotherapy, to use modern terms, that was almost natural, given the specific tradition of medicine, but also the complexity of the new cultural panorama in the Renaissance. There were authors who were doctors, but also now they could read not just Aristotle, but Plato, who had been translated and commented upon by, for instance, Marsilio Ficino, who actually would suggest that the most important component in one's health was related to the mind. And so much so that I would say it wasn't just the use of the old proverb, mens sann and corpora sann, which means a sound mind in a sound body, but for someone like Ficino, it was the opposite, really, that the most important thing was the sound mind. On the other hand, some of what you were saying about the doctors, and I think, again, this is true of Galen himself, presupposes a very close relationship between what's going on in the soul and what's going on in the body, the idea apparently being, well, if you eat the right things, then your ethical dispositions will change, but we assume usually that the ethical dispositions are in the soul, in the body. So can we actually extract from this medical literature some kind of position on what we might think of as a question in philosophy of mind, so how the soul relates to the body, or are they resolutely unwilling to get into this area because it's too philosophical, so to speak? No, I think it was probably more common to do that kind of exercise at the time than now. For us now, it seems that it's kind of difficult to have a psychosomatic approach to our health. Of course, there are many attempts, there are books, but we feel that relationship between the body and the mind as difficult, complicated, something that needs to be argued over and over again. I think there was in the past, let's say before Descartes probably, let's say until the 16th century, there was an assumption that the body and the mind are however different, however belonging to maybe different realms or reality, the completely intellectual and the natural one. There was the idea that there was a certain porosity between the two worlds and the shift from one to the other was much easier. So for instance, going back to a fervent Platonic like Marsilio Ficino in 15th century Florence, he wrote three books actually on how to live properly in order to be a actually good scholar and maybe to be open to receive celestial influences from heaven. But the book is mainly about what to eat, what kind of drugs, if you're sick, what kind of wine, because those elements were supposed to be connected to the, let's say the life of the whole universe. And there couldn't be any disharmony between the body and the mind, and the mind needed a healthy body in order to perform properly. That's really interesting because I think people have this idea in their heads, and actually even I have this idea in my head that Platonism is really a philosophy where you have this radical contrast between immaterial souls and material bodies. And we tend to think of Aristotelianism as a philosophy that brings the soul much closer to the body, it's the form of the body, maybe it's nothing other than the dispositions or the capacities of the body. But what you just said makes it sound like the Platonists of the Renaissance also have this very holistic picture in which the immaterial soul, because they still think it's immaterial of course, but it's going to be integrated into this kind of organic unity, which is the physical cosmos as a whole. Yes, I agree. The mind and the soul, they find themselves for a source of circumstantial, more or less circumstantial reason, trapped within a body. And the best thing to do is trying to make the body a place where the mind can still perform as clearly as possible. Of course, at the end we know that there will be death and the mind will be freed from the constraints of the body, but Platonists in the Renaissance and maybe even later, I think at the 17th century, there are still Platonists, also in Cambridge Platonists, the important thing is to reach a point where the death is good, where you actually move to the other level of awareness and understanding, that is when you die, in a proper way. It strikes me that a lot of what you've said makes it sound like the Renaissance doctors were already doing a lot of what people wish doctors would do more today, paying attention to the whole patient and the patient's life, taking women seriously, just as seriously as men thinking about the patient's emotional state as part of their medical condition and everything. So I think that's a really interesting thing. I would say so, yes. Okay, well that seems like a good note to end on. So thank you, Grido Caglione, very much. Thank you very much. For coming on the podcast. And please join me next time when I'll be looking at other topics in Renaissance philosophy here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.