CLOCKWORK BODY
- andrewcmumm
- Aug 19, 2021
- 2 min read
A colleague of mine gave this book away for free - why would he do that?? This is a little gem!
It's a short history of medicine with chapters such as 1) Disease, 2) Doctors, 3) The Body, 4) The Laboratory, etc. What caught my attention as a physicist was how well he included the influence of the Newtonian Paradigm on the development of medicine:
"Influential too were radical conceptual innovations in natural philosophy [= Newtonian mechanics]. As promoted by Descartes, Boyle, Hooke and others, the new or mechanical philosophy proposed the machine as the model for the body. Such mechanists attacked the old scholastic theories, with their talk of virtues and spirits, as pure verbal flimflam, lacking the solid material basis revealed by observation and experiment, and they promoted in their place a hydraulic or hydrostatic understanding of the body's pipes, vessels and tubes, levers, cogs, and pulleys. They also prized measurement and quantification. In Padua, Galileo's colleague Sanctorius Sanctorius (1561 - 1636) developed a thermometer for gauging bodily temperature and the 'pulsilogium', a pulse-watch, and recommended regular weighing of the body to monitor health."
"... the physical sciences promised to reveal the secrets of life... 'A human body, as to its natural actions, is truly nothing else but a complex of chymico-mechanical [= chemical and physical] motions, depending upon such principles as are purely mathematical."
Newtonian mechanics truly had far-reaching consequences, and I think the 21st century will be the time when 'the secret's of life" are finally revealed by the scientific method of inquiry as envisioned by some people in the 1600s. It has taken longer than they expected because the body is mindboggingly complex and can only properly be investigated in detail with modern biochemical technologies.
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